This article forms part of the Stitch Community Guidelines. If you haven’t read the overview of the Community Guidelines yet, please do so before reading this article. In particular, please make sure you are familiar with the community definitions of what constitutes encouraged, discouraged, and prohibited behavior in the community, as well as how Stitch’s member feedback system works to promote constructive behavior across the community.
An overview of the guidelines can be found here.
This article consists of:
Guidelines for event organizers & attendees
Stitch members don’t generally need much guidance about how to behave in the real world (they’ve usually had plenty of practice!), and that includes behavior for both organizers and attendees at Stitch events and activities. As long as everyone sticks to the golden rule of treating others with respect at all times, things tend to run pretty well.
The community naturally doesn’t tolerate anything on our list of prohibited behaviors, but in practice, it’s extremely rare for these rules to be broken at a Stitch activity.
Experience has taught us, however, that a community like Stitch – where members are very often meeting each other for the very first time – is sometimes a little bit different from other communities our members may be familiar with, and a few issues seem to pop up over and again.
With that in mind, here are a few simple guidelines to keep in mind when organizing or attending Stitch activities:
Local health regulations & laws apply at all times
This one should be pretty self-explanatory: events need to comply with whatever local regulations apply to group activities in your area (not to mention the law in general) at all times. If the local regulations prohibit groups any larger than 10 people, for example, you should set a limit of 10 people for your activity.
Event organizers are permitted to require attendees to be vaccinated
Regular Stitch members who host events and activities on Stitch are allowed to stipulate requirements for who can attend their activities, if those requirements concern the health and safety of other attendees. This means it is permissible for organizers to elect to make their activity only open to vaccinated attendees, for example. Unvaccinated members are of course able to suggest activities of their own, provided they comply with the local health regulations in their area.
There are no “reserved” days of the month or week for events & activities, or "reserved" venues
One of the techniques we recommend Stitch members use to get a community going in their area is to have a regular event on the same day once per month. We’ve had “Thirsty Thursdays”, “Mix & Mingles”, “New Member Get-Togethers”, “Monthly Brunch” and more, all falling on a pre-determined day of the month, such as the fourth Thursday, second Tuesday, and so on.
If you are the organizer or a regular attendee at one of these events, please remember that your event won’t always be the only one held that day. As the community grows in your area, you can expect (in fact, you should hope) there will be more and more activities posted by other members. Sooner or later, someone is going to post an event on the same day as your regular monthly event, and that’s actually a good thing.
Sometimes this happens because the other member wants to attend an activity whose time or date cannot be changed, sometimes they simply don’t realize that your regular event has been happening on that night for months. No matter what the reason, you must remember that this is not a problem and in fact is something Stitch encourages. Stitch is a broad community full of a wide variety of members, and as the community grows there needs to be space in the community for multiple events every single night, to cater to all those interests.
Once your local community calendar becomes so full that there are multiple events on each night, instead of being concerned that there is competition for attendees at your activities, you should be jumping for joy about having such a wonderfully diverse community in your area!
Similarly, no venue can be "reserved" by a single member for their exclusive use. Multiple parties of Stitch members are able to organise events at the same location, even on the same night. This is particularly important in areas where there are restrictions on the size of bookings because of COVID-19 restrictions, but applies more generally. Please remember that these venues typically serve many other customers, so it is not a big deal if some of those members happen to be other Stitch members.
There are no “reserved” titles for events & activities
Along the same lines as the above point, there are no “reserved” titles for events & activities in the Stitch community. The very first “Mix & Mingle” happened in Stitch’s Sydney Community several years ago, and since then we’ve been recommending that title as a great one for monthly events in communities around the world, along with other events like “Thirsty Thursday”, “Happy Hour”, “New Member Get-Together” and more. Just because you have been calling your events a particular name should not prevent anyone else from doing so, and in fact is something we actively encourage as the community grows into more and more areas.
The only exceptions to this are events posted to a Stitch Group that you own or organize. As the owner of a Group, you have complete say over what events get posted to the Group, what the membership in the Group is, and event to some extent what its expected behaviors are (provided they don’t conflict with the Stitch Community Guidelines). So if your Group is called “Timbuktu Stitchers”, for example, and you host a regular “Monthly Timbuktu Happy Hour”, then you are entitled to prevent another member from posting an event of the same name to your Stitch Group. They are within their rights, however, to post an event called “West Timbuktu Happy Hour” to the general Stitch community.
Do not publish multiple instances of recurring events or activities
Recurring events play a crucial role in helping a community grow and flourish, especially a community that’s just getting started. We have seen time and time again that members who attend recurring events such as monthly ‘Mix and Mingles’ begin to feel connected to everyone else and learn how safe and welcoming the Stitch community is. That’s why they are such an important aspect of Stitch.
When creating a recurring activity, please do not publish multiple instances of the activity at one time, even if they are over multiple weeks or months. For example, if you want to host a monthly Mix and Mingle, do not post it for August, September, October, November, etc. at the same time. If you do, members of your local community will receive an email for every month you post it for, which will clutter their email inbox and lead to complaints. It will also mean you get fewer attendees overall.
The way to publish a recurring event on Stitch is like this:
Only create an event for the nearest upcoming instance for your recurring activity
Once the event has occurred, visit its activity page and in the section titled “Want to do this activity again?”, select the button titled DO THIS AGAIN.
Stitch will then lead you through some prompts to help you create the next upcoming instance of your recurring activity.
You can learn more about this process here.
Event organizer ratings
As outlined above, the Stitch Community experiences very few problems with organizers at events and activities. In fact, over 99% of activity organizers have an “Excellent” overall rating for their events and activities.
Despite this, Stitch’s feedback system is in place to help us detect occasions when an organizer may do something that is a breach of the guidelines. They may run an event for commercial purposes, for example, without making that clear in the description. Or they may simply conduct their activity in a way that is not consistent with Stitch’s community values.
We found that very few members were willing to make an official complaint to Stitch about activities like this, but they were willing to give us feedback after an event about how they found it. Stitch then aggregates that feedback in order to determine if the attendees are indicating the event has breached the community guidelines. Event organizers also receive an overall rating which aggregates all the feedback from attendees about the events they organize.
You can learn more about how feedback at events and activities works here.
To check your organizer rating, along with your other Stitch achievements & recognition, go to Profiles & Settings from the More menu on the home page, then select Achievements:
You will see your member rating listed near the top of the page, as shown in the image below:
Your organizer rating will show one of the following values:
Excellent
Great
Good
OK
Just OK
Not enough data
Warning
Unsatisfactory
How the rules work
The rules are pretty simple. All members of Stitch need to ensure they maintain an acceptable organizer rating if they want to continue to host activities & events for other members of the Stitch community. If their rating drops too low, they will first receive a warning, and then be either temporarily or permanently removed from the community.
If your rating is “Excellent” or “Great”, it means the overwhelming majority of members who have given feedback about your activities have rated them as being consistent with the Stitch Community values & guidelines. Good on you — keep up the good work!
If your rating is “Good” or “OK”, it means most members have given a positive rating about your activities, but we might not yet have enough positive ratings for you to receive a “Great” rating. In this case, just keep on being mindful of sticking to the encouraged behaviors with every event you organize, and you should get to a higher rating in no time.
If your rating drops to “Warning”, it means enough members have given negative ratings for it to be a concern. Anyone who reaches Warning status will be contacted by the Stitch team, who will give you more information and guidance on how to address the issue.
If your rating drops to “Unsatisfactory”, you can expect to be either suspended or permanently removed from the community.
Once again, it’s important to note that very few members ever receive an “Unsatisfactory” rating, and for most members, the feedback system is simply a way of knowing that other members appreciate your amazing contributions to the community. So don’t stress about it too much! But please know that the feedback system plays an important role in helping protect the community against abuse, and that every time you provide feedback about an event, you are playing a role in helping keep the community safe.