Speaker 2 (00:00.462)
Hi, I'm Maria, host of the My Local Marketer podcast. In this episode, I'm speaking with Simon Morris, who organizes the Reading Geek and Science in Reading groups. I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with Simon, who has some great advice on how to find out what works and double down on it. These strategies can, of course, be applied to businesses too. Please do share this episode with someone who may be interested. Now, without further ado, let's jump in. Hello, Simon, and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast. Thank you for coming on. How are you?

Hi Maria, thanks for inviting me. I'm great, thank you. How are you?

Excellent. Yeah, good. Well, it's Friday today, isn't it, when we're recording? So got to love a Friday.

Yes, and upwards.

So for our audience who don't know you, I know you'll be sort well known in the science community, but could you please introduce yourself?

Speaker 1 (00:48.834)
Yeah, I'm Simon Morris. I've been living in Reading for about 20 plus years. I run a couple of local events, Reading Geek Night and Science in Reading.

Now you said that you've been in Reading for over 20 years, so you're well placed to say what do you like about Reading or is there somewhere you recommend people go?

Yeah, mean the town centre is great, the oracles are great gathering point and things normally culminate for right or wrong reasons into the purple tail.

You were actually telling me something fascinating about the turtle before we started. Do you want to say that again?

Yeah, yeah. mean, the amazing thing I learned after watching various Viking related programs on Netflix and various other channels over lockdown was that Reading started out about 800 AD. I might be subject to some correction there, plus or minus 50 years or something. And it was called Readingham, hence the breweries over a thousand years old. And it's always been a drinking hole or drinking spot for those periods of time. Commonly was used

Speaker 1 (01:50.146)
by transitory people between London and Winchester as a stopover halfway point to fill the stomachs and quench the thirst.

So it's been a drinking spot for many centuries. I quite like that angle.

Yeah, I had a very, very much a transitionary type town. So like today, a lot of people come and go through Reading and then you get the whole core like us who stay here.

Yeah, it's a social centre.

Yes, very much so and international.

Speaker 2 (02:14.19)
International Social Centre, I like that. As you said at the start, you lead a couple of different groups. One of them is Reading Geeks, which I love, and the other one is Science in Reading. So could you just give a bit of intro to the two groups and what makes them different? Because you'd think they would be pretty similar.

Okay, so I got involved with Reading Geek Night, inadvertently actually via the BCS social tech group, who I knew very well. They introduced me to the group and I kind of fell into it about 2012 and ended up getting more involved and with hosting the event from 2014 onwards. In terms of the other event, Science in Reading, I got involved on that organically because of my work in Reading Geek Night. We got involved with or

started to work fairly closely with the group when Science in Reading was part of the British Science Association. Basically, I operated as a backend host to them as a fullback if they couldn't, if they ran out of resources or something like that. Over the pandemic, the event kind of died off. So I decided to pick it up in 2023 and run with it as it was left pretty much idle.

What's the difference between the two groups then?

Okay, the difference between the two groups, reading Geek Night is to talk about anything you're geeky with. It's a 20 minute talk plus Q &A, very informal, just get up in front of an audience and they're very gentle and talk about anything. So we've had people from the LandSpeed Record, we've Quantum Computing, we've had Kate Baking, someone who's a fantastic artist has come in and started with a blank canvas and tells us how she gets to the final product and exhibiting in London the product.

Speaker 1 (03:59.074)
really good stuff. we've had someone beer brewing, going through that whole process. So literally anything you can think about, if you can, if you're passionate about hobby or an interest, talk for 20 minutes, come to geek. The way you separate them is the science in reading event is, is a deeper hardcore science oriented event. It's about 45 minutes plus Q and a sort of general guideline of timings. And it will be generally a person with a science background from

academia or industry, something like that. And they were talking more in depth. So that's the way I tend to separate the two.

Most people having one group is enough, but you have two groups to manage, not just attend, but to manage. How do you do it and balance managing these two groups? What do need to do? So I imagine there's the website and then organizing speakers, and I'm not too sure what else you do. How do you manage them and what do you do?

Yeah, I try and leverage, having a technology background, try and leverage technology to assist with the whole process to make it as easy as possible. With Geek, it was a fairly easy formula. You hit all the social channels. The community are highly supportive with the event and help as well. So it's not just down to one individual. Science in Reading was a bit more of a tall order because that was run by a team of about eight people through Science in Reading and under the umbrella of British Science Association.

And when that sort of went quiet, I decided to pick it up rather than let it drift. I thought, how am I going to fill those spots effectively? You've got one person into eight. Doesn't necessarily make sense. So my idea was to keep it fairly simple in terms of the timings, keep it timing venue in sync with kind of like what Redding Geek does, offset by a week because the events, the first Tuesday out of the month, whereas Geek's the second Tuesday out of month.

Speaker 1 (05:50.444)
and then use technology to try and fill the blanks and also try not to too much. So my initial thought was let's focus on getting talks and speakers and see how that goes for a few years. And if we get to a point where we can get more head count or people involved from the community with the event, then we can look expanding because historically what science in Reading did and that was started around the early 2000s, I believe, and it grew organically.

So that used to get involved with things like pint of science, which is a national event in May and also British science week, which is a national event in March. can be a lot to do certainly with things like partner science, which can involve 20 to 25 people to manage a reading wide locally based series of demonstrations, events and so forth far too much one individual. So yeah, just try and buy off sensible pieces to run with initially.

Getting speakers lined up is actually taxing and tedious enough with the conversations going between them and then trying to get the diary dates aligned. I know that is a lot of work as it is. So could you go into a bit more with how you find the speakers? Which organisations do you reach out to? I know you do quite a lot with Red University and Oxford as well, don't you?

Yes, for Geek it's simpler because the community tend to proactively come forward and volunteer their time or I knock on people's doors and rattle them and try and get them involved that way. So it's an easier thing. The science in Reading was a harder call to start with because the people that were previously involved were tightly hooked into the university. They actually worked there and then there were also individuals in the group that were based at Harwell. So they were right in a

position to go on people's doors and call of them effectively, where I'm a bit more desperate from them. So effectively with with something ready, it was a tool or order. I literally had to go over historical emails lists, look at contacts, contacts, tap on doors, that sort of thing, and actively seek people out, hit tap on the uni doors, see if I can get any comms from there. And they've been fantastic. Once you've worked out the way of getting getting through the doors and communicating with the right people, they're highly supportive and

Speaker 1 (08:05.858)
Jenny connect me with the right people to help things move forward. That's worked quite well. It's just momentum. You've got to keep a pipeline of speakers going, which I learned at one point I need to do after beasting salespeople for years about maintaining a pipeline. Then I realized I'm not doing it myself. You know, going from month to month with speakers. So building a pipeline is super important. That works. So now we're in a position where speakers will actually, because our event is more known about.

of both the events more known about speakers will actively come to us. And the brand is easier to recognize as well when we're pushing it. And often with Science in Reading, I'll lead with that brand. What I've started to do is tap people up for Science in Reading and they get it immediately. And then, you know, a year later, once that relationship is built up, I can then tap the person up again and say, look, you know, do you want to come and give a talk at Reading Geek Night instead of looking at me and laughing and saying, what the hell is that?

They know because they've been involved with the community and they understand the separation of the two brands and how they fall into context.

fascinating. So you've got that authority going with them. They've got that trust established already. As a marketer, always find challenges and opportunities really interesting. And you've said there a couple of nice examples, which I think are generic, I think across many groups, that you said with having to reach out initially and at the start, it's really hard until you get those connections and then you need to maintain a pipeline. You can't just let it slide. What else have you learned or found as you've grown the group over the last 10 plus years?

Yeah, I've kind of learned that momentum is important and also sweet spots of when you're publicizing things. Now I tend to push out social media updates at sweet spots. For instance, when are people most bored on the train during commute times? Probably around 8 a.m. So I always push social media stuff at 8 a.m. rather than 11 in the morning when everybody's busy in meetings and so forth. So you try and hit sweet spots. 8 a.m. if I look at the stats of Isocross page,

Speaker 1 (10:13.282)
That is definitely a sweet spot. Any earlier, not and so forth. There's that, there's momentum on the events as well, keeping little things going. It's often difficult to quantify the effects of marketing. It's a bit like when you're hard to stand in a big exhibition and you plow 50 grand into it and you're constantly asking yourself, how are we seeing a return on investment for that? You don't, it's not very tangible, but you get the absolute win where it suddenly connects and you

make that connection. So it's all feeding these little bits into the mix. So what I make sure I do after the events is push out media pictures, so pictures of the events so people can see that there's fun stuff happening in town. So it draws eyes in. having that done timely, there's no point doing it a week or two weeks later at an unsociable time when people aren't going to do it. So there's a lot of little things you draw in from and I've drawn in from my lessons in business.

on how to connect those dots. You can't necessarily quantify them. They just got to be timed. And you just go look at the stats of what you're getting on top of that.

really like your audience focus there. I think that's so crucial to actually getting your message in front of them. So looking at audiences a little more, obviously there is a connection between Reading Geeks and Science and Reading. There's a definite connection between the two groups, but they are at the same time distinct. They may be different platforms, different ways you approach them, different things that they're interested in. How do you promote to these different groups or where are you for these different groups?

We use kind of similar promotional mechanisms. So all the socials, X, threads, Facebook, meetup, meetup, amazingly, we still get the most traction from. That's where people tend to find us. And we're nearly up to 2000 members on, on meetup for Science in Reading. Although how many of those alive is obviously open to debate, probably 10, 20 % maybe. But we've seen since, since I took over in 2023, that's growing by about

Speaker 1 (12:21.102)
or 500 members which is good. We see a lot of our events now are about 30 to 50 percent new faces that obviously varies but that's we're seeing high growth on new faces which is pretty good. So yeah the the socials are our main connector with the community there's a lot of word of mouth that tends to happen now and that happens obviously over time as people know the event. I guess we connected through obviously Richard the word of mouth

proving itself there because I was chatting to Richard about the event and how they're doing their event with the poets group, trying to get an idea of how they reach out. So a lot of it's about conversing with other groups. So one of the things we do also is there was a thing that was hanging in the air for a while, specifically with Reading Geek Night, where we used to get speakers in January and being the second Tuesday of every month, it can fall quite early in January when everybody's in dry January and

dying off to too much food and also August, which is a holiday month. So we used to get speakers in and I noticed a couple of times I had a speaker in from Oxford who's fantastic web designer and there were eight people that attended the event. And I thought, this is just a waste of speaker. And the same with August because it's a holiday month. It's so difficult to work out who's going to attend. So I was chatting with one of the other groups, PHP, Barcher, Chris Holt, fantastic guy. And he said,

maybe it'd be a good idea to do a social event because we have the same problem with putting bums on seats effectively for a speaker and it's a waste of a good resource. So he postulated that let's have a social event. So we don't use a speaker, but it's still a reason for everybody to connect. So we started doing that and we expanded it to all the tech meetup, the STEM sort of community in Reading got them involved because we thought, you know, let's try and get everybody under one roof to network.

and get to know each other. And then recently we expanded it even further than that, because I figured that the arts is a foundational element to engineering and science more often than not. And STEAM, although it's a fairly new concept, is taking off in the academic community. So we changed it from the Reading STEM social to the Reading STEAM social. And then I gave Richard a shout at the poetry group to get him involved more. And we're trying to expand it to more artsy type groups.

Speaker 1 (14:46.894)
because I think they're just a mutually inclusive part of the whole community. So that's where we're sort of going with that.

I love this idea of connecting between different groups because like you said, if groups are already established, that's a source right there for word of mouth if you can connect with them. That's a nice organic, easy way I think to expand your reach. Yeah, well done. I really like that approach. Going into the speakers a little more, I just find how you saw speakers fascinating. There is something that you've been in talks with Reading University, haven't you? What have you been doing with Reading University?

Yeah, so I was thinking about how we could potentially expand things and as an individual, only so much you can do. So I thought, let's have a chat with the comms people up at Reading University to see how amiable they would be to get involved in some small steps initially, like just co-branding events like British Science Week. So there's not a lot of effort needed, but you're just co-branding things to just give them bigger exposure and give the illusion that

there's something happening under a slightly different umbrella. So that was the first intention. The other one was probably a more tangible one was Pine of Science, which had died in the Berkshire region over the pandemic. The person that was managing that for the Pine of Science organization had stepped aside, but there was some interest in them rejuvenating that position. But that for the May event at Pine of Science needs quite a lot of headcount to run. So I was mindful, let's go and chat with an organization that could probably make it happen.

Obviously the university is in a brilliant position to do that. So I organized a meeting, went in to see them and there were three people that fantastic. And I was expecting a half hour meeting, bang, bang, bang, and come out with some actions of some kind. And we had a really good hour and a half meeting catching up about pretty much everything. And I was leading with Science in Reading because that's the bit obviously that's very tangible to them and they're interested in. But out of it,

Speaker 1 (16:46.35)
For the last half an hour, there was a massive interest in Reading Geek Night, which took me quite back because I thought I won't mention that at the meeting because they'll probably take it out of context like most scientists and think what the hell's that? So that came about and they grabbed hold of that. Really interesting Reading Geek Night, which I'd never thought about, was for their PhDs. So a lot of their PhDs aren't used to public speaking and the science in Reading format

is probably a bit too formal for them and a bit too long, 45 minutes plus Q &A. For someone who hasn't given a public speaking session before, that's quite a tall order. And they like the fact that there was a shorter 20 minute thing they could grab hold of and use. And I said, well, yeah, that would work as a fantastic canvas for you guys and treat it like a blank canvas. You can do anything you like in that 20 minute framework. So that's proved very fruitful. So they've taken us up on that.

This PhD is coming through. Some of them go through to the science in reading stream for a full on 45 minute talk. And they come on mass with all their supporters and so forth, which is fantastic. And then reading geek night has proved a format for them to maybe get a bite into public speaking. And I think the uni were talking about whether they put it in place or not. So don't quote me. They were talking about there was going to be some kind of credit system for public speaking.

to incentivise the students from getting away from being great behind the books and the academic work, but to connect and gain that public experience.

Hopefully there is because it's such an important skill. There's one thing knowing something, but your work does not speak for itself. You really do. You know, the better the communicator you are, the easier it is for people to pick up your material, what you've done, your research. So you have to be a good communicator if you want people to embrace your research.

Speaker 1 (18:35.458)
and it will help them with business because they've got to present their research to a team, that's the same thing.

One thing I've noticed about groups in Reading is that there seems to be a change in pattern between before lockdown, say, where groups were sort of at the height, they were doing well, then you had lockdown and everyone went more introverted or realised, actually, it's quite nice to be at home on an evening, we don't want to go out. Have you noticed something similar with a drop in attendance or how have you combated that? Or have you noticed that there was a drop but now it's sort of on the rise again? What are your thoughts on?

on that and how to keep people interested and encourage them to come out.

Well, we found actually the opposite. Maybe it's just that a lot of our members are fellow reprobates and they just wanted to get out to a real pub instead of the bar at home. We started out after lockdown. I think it was September, October 21 with a social at the Walkabout in town. And we said, let's meet up. Let's just chat about what we're going to do. Now this is the first real in real life back session. So we had probably

25, 30 people turn up. Our numbers we read in Geek Night were always about 25, 30. So they all turned up, which was fantastic. And we talked about what we wanted to do and plan for the next year. Obviously listening to each other and swapping ideas. So what we've noticed was we geek, if anything, it's picked up our numbers now are about 30, 35. They were lower pre-pandemic. So there was definitely this and people were actively saying to me, they're just super keen to get out.

Speaker 1 (20:12.024)
Tuesday night has always worked really well for that because there's not that many other things on during that early part of the week. If we were to position ourselves on a Thursday, then I think we'd be screwed because people would be out down the turtle till 4 a.m. And the same with Science in Reading that used to be on a Wednesday night. So I thought let's move that to Tuesday. Again, it's quiet. It's easier to get venues buy in for using their spaces at that time of the week because they want footfall and

people buy beer and food when they come to our events and we put bums on seats. Science in Reading was harder after the pandemic because that was kind of starting from almost zero again. It died or gone into hibernation, it's probably a better word, decided to mothball any sort of public events. We maintain Reading Geek with online stuff, which is basically drinking, quizzes and the talk. So we were able to get speakers in globally.

and give us talks, which was quite cool. But science in reading was dormant until April 23. And then that was kind of like just starting from fresh. So our first head count was probably around, I think it was teacher around 20. And I thought, you know, are we doing something wrong? Because I always remembered it being a lot better attended in my head. So I thought, let's go and check the data out because humans aren't very good at

perceiving stuff sometimes we perceive stuff in different ways. Our memories probably remember old stuff as being better than actually what it was. So I went back and looked to all the smoking billies, historical pictures of the events over 10 years for the science in Reading event, the cafe science. And occasionally you had big numbers like 70 people and we used to have the same at geek. If you have to talk on an absolute sweet spot, the numbers would just boom.

but for a regular event, they sort of normalize around a point. So I was trying to work out what are the normalization numbers for science in Reading. And they turned out to be about 20, 25. But the reason in my head, I thought they're a lot bigger is because smoking Billy's format is quite a long room and quite narrow. So when people are sat sort of in rows over that period, it looks a lot bigger than it is. But I was looking over the pictures, historical pictures over about 10 years and counting their heads. And it was always around.

Speaker 1 (22:32.686)
20 to 25. So I thought, okay, we're not doing something wrong. So we'll carry on with what we're doing. And now it's grown and now we're hitting sort of on average around 30 people. It'll change if there's snow, if there's a football match, you know, if something bad happens or something good on TV, then people will not come out as much. So we'll maybe get a lowering head count to 15, one event and another event we could get 40, 45. So it's, it's highly variable, but normally

About 30 seems to be the number.

love speaking to technical people because you saw something you thought, surely it was more before. I'm going to check the data to find out if that was the case. And they think, no, actually I've proved myself wrong. It is the same. It just felt different. Why did it feel different? It must've been the different format. So thank you. That was a really interesting insight. And what I think more groups should apply to their own groups, actually, you can't question the data that can always put you, I think, on the straight and narrow again. What I thought was interesting about what you said as well is

how you said the numbers, especially for Reading Geek, they're the same if not increased slightly. Now I do wonder, me if you think I'm wrong, but when I've been to the Reading Geek sessions, there is a mix of ages. It's not just old people, it's not just young people. There is a mix of older people, younger people. And I do wonder if that's because what you have are these interesting sort of current topics that are always changing. So even if it's not always the same people, you'll always be dragging new people in.

because you're always doing something different. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 1 (24:05.678)
Yeah, I think it's all driven by a lot of the topics. You know, if I give a talk next month about VR, I guarantee there'll be 50 people in that room. If I give it about something really obscure, the numbers will drop. It is driven by the topic. But yeah, the demographic has it changed. It varies. Again, I'm casting my mind back to 2012 when I first started and there was right across the age range. We've had spots where a couple of months you get us all fuddy-duddies there.

We have seen more a younger demographics now maybe, but it varies over time so dramatically. The new faces is the key thing. I think we've got more ladies as well attending the event. used to be because it's tech, it could be quite male dominated controversial subjects, but yeah, we get more ladies now come into the event, which is fantastic. I think we've had some events where the demographics been a 50 50 breakdown right across the age spectrum. And this is one of the areas we talking about.

with the uni getting younger members in and they were acutely aware that they've got lots of students beavering away at work in the halls and they want to push them out into the community to go into these events in town and that seems to be slowly happening. I I'm amazed that we get people come in they take the train especially from Basingstoke to come in and attend our events so that shows effort as far as I'm concerned which is fantastic. People come in from London and

I think we've had people come in from Swindon. So it's quite humbling to see people make an effort to that extent to come to the events.

You know you're onto something good when people are travelling quite a distance to get to the meetings in the first place.

Speaker 1 (25:48.654)
And the quiz seems to be popular as well.

Yes, so if you say the formats, you've got the talk and then the quiz after, it?

Yeah, so Reading Geek used to be before the pandemic, two talks. Sometimes we had three. I thought about this over the pandemic because it chews through a lot of speaker resource very quickly. And that is, you know, it's a rare commodity really. So I decided, well, certainly during the pandemic, people were going crazy after watching Netflix for the second time. And they wanted a bit more of a mix up. So we get a speaker in usual format.

And then I thought, you know, we're all doing these drinking quizzes and so forth. Let's do a quiz as part of the evening for the community and that increased the numbers. So after the pandemic, I thought let's carry on with that sort of format, carry on with the quiz because people enjoy it. One of the things I'm always mindful of, especially at the social events is when you get individuals feeling awkward on their phones in the corner and they're not mixing with people. And I know what it's like because when I first came to the event,

You're sitting in there thinking, no, who are all these people? And there's lots of little cliques of people that know each other and it's trying to get those people involved. So I'll actively heard those people into groups and introduce them. But someone at the quiz event made an absolute genius statement and said, let's set bigger groups up. Cause we were doing groups of one or two and all these little tiny groups and a penny dropped in my head thought that's just a natural way of networking rather than

Speaker 1 (27:21.954)
you're meeting someone new and, how are you doing? What's your name? What's your job? And then we run out of something to say. If you're meeting them through a quiz, you've got 20, 30 minutes to chat about a common subject and then get to know them more organically. And that's worked fantastically. So now we get groups of five or six people or so, and that naturally mixes them up and it helps build relationships.

That is another brilliant tip. I'm loving that. I'm just writing all these down feverishly. Another thing that you mentioned before was the topics, which I'm actually quite interested in. So before we wrap up in a minute or two, could you give an overview with what topics are doing well at the moment? What is getting people's interests?

With Geek, very hard to call. In my head, I've sort of said, oh, I'll get these numbers. And I made that mistake the other month where, you know, we had the fantastic speaker come in from the Reading Green Park wind turbine, Ian Goff, who's supported us in the past as well. He's a great speaker. And I figured in my head, we'll get about 25 people, because that's what we got, I think, when he came in 2017 and gave a talk. And I was frantically running up and down the stairs getting new chairs.

because we had 52 people turn up. So it was getting a bit of a problem with where to fit everybody in the room. So that's a great problem to have. So it's really hard to call the type of events. For instance, when we started Science in Reading 2023, we had a professor of virology come in for the uni. He's a noted author, a world-class circuit speaker, and we had eight people turn up for the virology event. And I think it was two things. Because it was the day after bank holiday in May,

which now I've avoided. So I bring the event a week forward, knowing that bank holidays just don't mix. And probably because we were quite new as well, but I think the bank holiday, because I've seen it before with the data, it's absolutely nukes your attendance because people have the kids at home. There are other things in the mix. So we had eight people for that event. So we had a, I think, couple of recent talks on virology or immunology related subjects. And I thought, okay, we'll probably get 20, 25.

Speaker 1 (29:32.238)
And we didn't, we got a significant amount more than that figure. So it's very hard because the venues always say to me, Simon, what sort of numbers do you expect? I sort of sit there and go, I don't know. So it's really hard to call. If you get a super cool subject like AI now, that will get bums on seats. VR puts bums on seats. Quantum computing gets more people than I thought it would, because that's another topic that feeds into the

cool subjects, but immunology and virology work well. We had a lot of people come in for one of the talks last year that was given by the PhDs on how diet affects cognition. And then one of the other PhDs gave it on how diet affects chest ation, so pregnancy and various factors associated with that. So that gained a lot of interest. So it's very hard to cool, very hard to cool.

Just so I was there for Ian Goff's talk and it was absolutely fascinating. So yeah, I think that topic can go either way, but when you've got someone as we said before, who is a good communicator, it really sort of grips everyone. So yeah, I know you need to get bums on seats first, but then also the delivery of it is so important.

Yeah, I think we'll give more exposure to that sort of subject area as well. I'm thinking of organizing this year to get in a local organization that knows the whole solar tech industry really well and getting them to give a technical talk about the subject. Cause I think that'll expand on what Ian was saying, but it will be more as individuals, you know, we're looking at how we can diversify our own micro generation needs in our homes like solar and batteries and all that sort of thing. Maybe we'll.

fill those blanks, whereas putting a windmill more locally is not something we could achieve.

Speaker 2 (31:20.012)
Is there anything that you'd like to leave our listeners with?

Yeah, really simple. Get involved. Come out, meet us, get involved with the community and be the change you want to see. If you want to see something change, make it happen with us.

Very well done, Simon. Thank you so much for joining the podcast today. I will leave everyone with a thought. Check your data, gather data and then check it because I think that really makes a difference. So thank you for that lesson and yeah, look forward to seeing you at the next Reading Geek and Science and Reading Night.

Thanks Maria, I'll get you a t-shirt.