Implied narrative is that we don’t hear about successful groups, which is obviously false.
I wasn’t meaning to equate “low retention” with “not successful”. I’ve also heard organizers of groups I’d deem “successful” complain about retention being lower than they’d like. Of course there’s a strong correlation here (and “failing” groups are much more likely to be affected by and complain about low retention), but still, I’ve never heard a group explicitly claim that they’re happy with their retention rate (although I’m sure such groups exist). The topic just asymmetrically comes up for groups who are unhappy about it.
What makes you think there’s typically a way to keep the failing group the same on the important traits while improving retention? And if such strategies exist in theory, why do you think that any given group founder should expect they can put them into practice?
Basically the two criteria I mentioned: retention clearly is not fixed, as you can easily think of strategies to make it worse. So, is there any reason to assume that what a random group is doing is close to optimal wrt retention, particularly if they have not invested much effort into the question before? It may indeed involve trade-offs, some of which may be more acceptable to the group than others. But there are so many degrees of freedom, from what types of events you run, to what crowd you attract with your public communication, to what venue you meet in, to how you treat new (and old) people, to how much jargon you use, to how you’re ending your events. To me, it would be very surprising if on all these dimensions the group is acting optimally by default, and there are not some valuable trade-offs lying around that would increase retention without compromising other traits significantly.
I wasn’t meaning to equate “low retention” with “not successful”. I’ve also heard organizers of groups I’d deem “successful” complain about retention being lower than they’d like. Of course there’s a strong correlation here (and “failing” groups are much more likely to be affected by and complain about low retention), but still, I’ve never heard a group explicitly claim that they’re happy with their retention rate (although I’m sure such groups exist). The topic just asymmetrically comes up for groups who are unhappy about it.
Basically the two criteria I mentioned: retention clearly is not fixed, as you can easily think of strategies to make it worse. So, is there any reason to assume that what a random group is doing is close to optimal wrt retention, particularly if they have not invested much effort into the question before? It may indeed involve trade-offs, some of which may be more acceptable to the group than others. But there are so many degrees of freedom, from what types of events you run, to what crowd you attract with your public communication, to what venue you meet in, to how you treat new (and old) people, to how much jargon you use, to how you’re ending your events. To me, it would be very surprising if on all these dimensions the group is acting optimally by default, and there are not some valuable trade-offs lying around that would increase retention without compromising other traits significantly.