Prepping communities: PREPPERS groups | Meetup

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PREPPERS groups | Meetup

Largest PREPPERS groups

  • 1

    Wild Foodies of Philly

    6,620 Wild Foodies | Philadelphia, USA

    Lynn Landes

    Organized by Lynn Landes

    Lynn Landes

    Organized by Lynn Landes

  • 2

    PrepperNet – Lehigh Valley & Beyond

    5,341 Members | Easton, USA

    PrepperNet

    Organized by PrepperNet

    PrepperNet

    Organized by PrepperNet

  • 3

    PrepperNet – Triangle – Wilderness Survival Skills

    2,479 Bushcrafters | Raleigh, USA

    Cody

    Organized by Cody

    Cody

    Organized by Cody

  • 4

    Survive and Thrive

    2,253 Members | Denver, USA

    Jessie Krebs

    Organized by Jessie Krebs

    Jessie Krebs

    Organized by Jessie Krebs

  • 5

    Sustainable & Self-Reliant Living Network – Florida Region 4

    2,082 Members | Orlando, USA

    Manuel

    Organized by Manuel

    Manuel

    Organized by Manuel

  • 6

    Ontario Prepper Survival Network

    1,808 Preppers | Toronto, Canada

    C. Bodhi

    Organized by C. Bodhi

    C. Bodhi

    Organized by C. Bodhi

  • 7

    PrepperNet – Charleston Wilderness Survival/Preppers

    1,723 Survival Warriors | Charleston, USA

    Garvin

    Organized by Garvin

    Garvin

    Organized by Garvin

  • 8

    PrepperNet – Colorado

    1,723 Members | Denver, USA

    Garvin

    Organized by Garvin

    Garvin

    Organized by Garvin

  • 9

    Marietta Preppers Networking Group

    1,707 Preppers | Marietta, USA

    TruPrep

    Organized by TruPrep

    TruPrep

    Organized by TruPrep

  • 10

    PrepperNet – Triad – Wilderness Survival Skills

    1,705 Bushcrafters | Greensboro, USA

    PrepperNet

    Organized by PrepperNet

    PrepperNet

    Organized by PrepperNet

Newest PREPPERS groups

  • Midwest Agorism Society

    9 Agorists

    Started Jun 16 in Kansas City, USA

  • Northern Peak Prosperity and Friends (NPPF) Meetup Group

    21 Members

    Started May 7 in Center Harbor, USA

  • Collapse Awareness, Prepping, and Community Resilience

    10 Members

    Started Apr 30 in Irvine, USA

  • PrepperNet – Kansas City Metro Area

    34 Members

    Started Apr 13 in Kansas City, USA

  • Nontraditional Preppers of the Triad

    2 Members

    Started Apr 5 in Whitsett, USA

  • South Australian Survivalist Group

    18 Members

    Started Mar 25 in Adelaide, Australia

How to Find Preppers in Your Area

Rusty Collins Communications, find preppers, prepping groups

This post has been updated from our original How to Find Preppers post that was first published in 2017. We keep our content updated as the world around us changes, as we learn new skills and techniques, and (of course) when new ways of finding like-minded preppers show up.

Whether you are looking to join a prepping group, or simply want to know who is out there: finding preppers in your area can help you be more prepared. There are a few schools of thought on prepping and the strengths and vulnerabilities of joining a group.

Rather than get into a long debate on which school of thought is right or wrong, we are just looking at the impact of finding preppers in your area and not necessarily joining them. The methods that you use to find preppers in your area are pretty straightforward and easy, and the internet makes it even easier.

Contents (Jump to a Section)

  • The Prepper Group Mentality
  • The Lone Wolf Mentality
  • Where to Find Other Preppers
  • Find Preppers Around Town
  • Find Preppers Online
  • Find Preppers by Volunteering

The Prepper Group Mentality

Finding other preppers in your local area is obviously beneficial for those that embrace prepping as a group. If you are planning to stay in a small family group, or would shack up with strangers during a disaster, you are embracing a group mentality. Strength in numbers and shared resources are all huge benefits when SHTF, so groups tend to win out the majority of preppers.

Those unprepared for disasters may not realize it, but they will need to rely on groups for survival. The groups may be different than prepping groups, however, since they will likely be relying on regional and national aid (State and Local Emergency Management and FEMA).

Finding preppers in your area is especially important for groups prepping in advance to increase their numbers and boost their resources. Being active in a group can make you much more prepared as an individual and less of a liability to the group.

The Lone Wolf Mentality

The lone wolf prepper is less common and sort of glorified by the survival community. The idea of an individual making it on their own is admittedly badass. TV shows and movies have contributed to this idea by demonstrating how difficult it can be- such as the Discovery show Alone. Make no mistake; being 100% self-reliant is one of the most powerful skills a prepper or survivalist can possess.

You cannot argue that the road is much more difficult alone than with a group, though. One of the biggest benefits of being a lone wolf is the ability to blend in easily and avoid confrontations- a luxury large groups do not have.

Finding preppers in your area is important for lone wolf survivalists so they can monitor group statuses. Think of lone wolfs as satellites orbiting the planet that is the large group in their area. If the group meets a catastrophic situation, it probably does not bode well for lone wolf preppers in the area.

Another benefit for lone wolves is to keep learning from these communities before SHTF.  Just because they don’t plan on joining them in an emergency doesn’t mean they can’t continue to stay up to date on the latest survival techniques, equipment, and tactics. They won’t be sharing much in order to protect themselves, but they can still glean information from a group discretely.

Where to Find Other Preppers

You can find preppers in your area easily and through almost any situation. Stumble into someone at the hardware store, or at church and realize you have the same views when it comes to preparedness. You can find a group online or on a forum to join or just listen in and learn. We don’t think it’s ideal to broadcast your prepper intentions to the entire world (for OPSEC reasons) but that doesn’t mean you have to hide.

Even here at TruePrepper, where we are attempting to make prepping more mainstream and accessible to everyone, we don’t tell every single one of our friends how much food, ammo, and survival gear we have and where. OPSEC sometimes outweighs the need to share, so keep that in mind when you are looking for new prepping friends and start talking specifics.

Find Preppers Around Town

We touched on it earlier, but finding people with the same interests as you locally can sometimes be just as easy as getting out there and meeting people. Churches, clubs, and many other hobbyist groups can all tie into prepping and may have groups already sorted out that you can join. Neighborhood watches sometimes even have disaster groups that establish communication trees and responsibilities at the very least.

Get out there, shake a few hands, and make some new friends. You may find someone that you can share prepping ideas with, or an entire group.

Find Preppers Online

The internet has made it possible to meet anyone with almost any interest instantly. Sites such as MeetUp can give you an opportunity to meet those with the same interests. Social media groups can work as well, but you lose some anonymity when you use those to interact with others.

When approaching large groups, be sure you learn more about them before you give too much information about yourself. You want to vet the group and make sure they ‘have their act together’ and will not be a mess when disaster strikes. Unfortunately, there are also scammers and ‘groups’ just looking to sell timeshares in survival properties as well- so be ready to recognize those as you see them.

Find Preppers By Volunteering

Volunteering has always been a great way to learn skills, share skills, and meet other people. We won’t beat a dead horse here- we’ve already covered this topic, so go check out 7 Ways to Volunteer as a Prepper.

The Final Word

Finding other preppers is not that hard of a task. Some have taken to using the comment section below, but remember OPSEC if you plan to join in.

Whether you stumble on other preppers by accident or go actively looking for them, prepping friends are an asset no matter your TEOTWAWKI plans.

Here are a few other articles our readers find useful:

  • How to Get a Free Survival Map of Your Local Area
  • The Basic Emergency Plan – The Foundation of Preparedness
  • Bug Out Bag Guide, Tips, and Checklist

Keep exploring, stay prepared, and be safe.

You’ve Been Missing Out

Join the 2+ million preppers that rely on our prepping advice by subscribing to TruePrepper.

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How to prepare the VKontakte community for promotion – Marketing on vc.ru

In this article we will share tips on how to pack the community beautifully and prepare it for advertising.

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Why is this needed?

Imagine that your community is an urban coffee shop. Before you opened it, you made repairs, purchased equipment, designed a window display, developed a menu, hired employees, and arranged for the supply of ingredients. Until this work is done, there is no point in opening a coffee shop. A client can come in once, be disappointed in the interior and the quality of service, and never come again.

Also with your community in VKontakte. Before launching an ad, conduct a community audit according to our checklist. And if necessary, fix it. Otherwise, you will blow your advertising budget down the drain – the user will click on your ad, but will not remain in the group.

Why it’s time to engage in community during a pandemic:

  • Online orders. If it is possible to take orders online, work for delivery, the community can become the most important channel for communication with customers.
  • reputation. While there is no opportunity to work on a product or service, you can work on the reputation of the company, create a news background. After the end of quarantine, you will get a warm audience.
  • People’s attention. The coverage of publications will increase, because now the attention of most people is riveted to social networks. Unless, of course, the posts are of high quality.
  • Analysis of the market, demand and consumers. Now is the best time to learn something new about your customers and your product. After the quarantine is lifted, new knowledge can be used to the benefit of business.

The success of your advertising campaign directly depends on:

  • community settings;
  • appearance;
  • content.

Let’s go over these points.

Community setting

It is the accuracy of the choice of functionality that determines how user-friendly your community will be. We press the “Management” button on the right and let’s go.

“Settings” item

Community name. It should reflect the essence of your business and match the search query. If you’re a window installer, don’t call the group by the company’s name: Olympus. Vologda. Need to be named: Installation of windows in Vologda| Olympus. This is how they look for this service in the search.

Description of the community. It should be clear and concise. A person, after reading it, should understand what you are doing. You don’t need to write a price list here. Just who are you, what do you do and what is your advantage. The blog of the creator of the Glavred service, Maxim Ilyakhov, will help here. Read from him how to write a text about a company.

Here is an example of a good company text:

Group type. Select “open”. In a closed group, everything will be hidden, and you can join it only with the consent of the admin, and advertising will not be available to such a group. You cannot join a private group in any way, except for an administrator invitation. Comments are not available in a restricted group.

Short address for your group. Replace the automatic numbers that VKontakte assigns when creating a group with the name of the group in Latin. The address should be easy to remember.

Action button. It needs to be configured. You can choose to call or open. Specify a phone number or a link to a website.

Additional information. We fill in all the contact details of the company, indicate the link to the site and turn on the map so that you can be easily found.

Item “Sections”

This is where you customize. For example, in the event area, you can include events. If you post a lot of articles, include the articles.

Recommendation: Make blocks as limited as possible so that no one spams the community wall and creates new albums. Like this:

Item “Comments”

Here you can set up moderation, turn on the filter for obscene words, manually set up filtering for certain words and see what comments are already in the community. You can also disable comments from other communities here.

Item “Links”

Here it is important to provide links to all social networks where there is a company page, as well as to the company’s website and partner projects. Important: write the name of the links, for example, “we are on Instagram”, so that the person understands where it will lead him.

Item “Addresses”

Specify the office address, turn on the “show map” button. It will be displayed on the main page of the community under the description of the group. If you have several offices, you can add more addresses. We also recommend that you write down the hours of operation. They will also be visible to users on the main page.

Menu item

This is one of the most difficult items. Here you can create sections “reviews”, “products”, “photos” and much more. Paste the link and write the title. The difficulty lies in the fact that you need to design the menu in the same style. You can do without Photoshop, the free service Canva will help.

Item “Participants”

Editors, administrators and moderators of the community are assigned here, the list of group members, the list of invited people is visible. You can blacklist users if necessary. You can also hide community members from the page. This is done so that competitors cannot advertise to your audience. One caveat: you will not be displayed in the list of groups of your subscribers.

Item “Messages”

Messages can be enabled. This is useful when you have several admins in your group. They will be able to respond to users on behalf of the community. You can also connect a newsletter to this tool and inform your subscribers about something important.

You can set up a personal greeting in messages for all writers.

Item “Conversations”

It is possible to create a conversation of interest for subscribers in your community. Conversations are not for everyone. First, you must have a moderator who would monitor all messages and control the situation. Secondly, your subscribers can be lured away by competitors by entering into a dialogue with them. Weigh the pros and cons of whether you need to use this tool.

Item “Appendices”

We connect and set up. With the help of them, you can put reviews on the main page, make a personal greeting, set up a mailing list, and much more. Nuance: the community can connect no more than 5 applications and display only 1 widget on the main page. Widget is just a block of data from the application, which is displayed on the main page of the community, for example, reviews.

Important!

Items with widget settings should be visible only to administrators, and the widget itself should be available to all users. After installation, be sure to ask your friends who are not community administrators to check the visibility.

Widget Reviews

Item “Money transfers”

In this section, you can set up VKPAY and receive payments directly in the community. To do this, you just need to enable money transfers and select their recipient.

Action log item

In this item, you can see who worked with the content, what was changed: for example, who deleted which record. This also includes strikes – complaints about non-original content published in your group. The originality of the content is monitored by a special Nemesis algorithm, it looks for non-unique materials. You can appeal a strike within 48 hours. If you get more than 5 strikes, your posts will be removed from recommendations. This reduces their visibility. Read more about strikes and Nemesis in the article.

Community design

So we’ve set up the community. Now you need to put it in order visually.

Cover

The cover is your calling card of the community, just like the description. It sets the tone of communication and significantly affects whether a person stays with you or not.

  • Image size must be 1590×400. If you do not plan to make a separate cover for your phone, then all important elements and pictures should be approximately in the center. The photo below shows the area in which you need to place all the most important elements.

Avatar

Choose simple images that look good in thumbnails. Ideally, this should be your logo. The picture should be bright and noticeable. Do not try to cram an advertising offer into the avatar, no one will read the words.

Discussions

Don’t forget to create discussions: be sure to make feedback and questions from subscribers. Work with them. It is these two points that inspire trust among users.

Photo albums

Add photos all the time: let them be photos of the office, workflow, your product, certificates and letters of thanks. Some people are visuals, the picture is very important to them. Take high-quality photos and upload them immediately. Do not pull so that they do not lose their relevance.

Video album

If possible, shoot a video. Show your product, work process, employees. Build trust in the company.

Items

If you have a commercial group, you can connect this section.

Design the goods in one style, indicate the real price, describe each product in detail in a language understandable to ordinary users, select a high-quality image.

Content

This is the most important part. It depends on the content whether the user stays with you or not. For high-quality content, you will be forgiven for most mistakes in setting up a group, design, and inaccurate descriptions.

Wall

  • Remember that the wall should be limited, only you can post content.
  • Post regularly. Determine for yourself their number per week and stick to this figure.
  • Do not advertise directly, create useful content.

Publications

  • The text should be simple and understandable for users. Before writing, ask yourself: how will it be useful to your reader? Here again, Ilyakhov’s blog and his Glavred service will help.
  • The text must be free of spelling errors. If there are problems with this, check in special services.
  • Text must be unique. So the smart feed will show it to more users. Again, check in special services.
  • Avoid a lot of emoticons in the text so that the post does not look like a Christmas tree. If you suddenly decide to advertise a post with more than 6 emoticons in the text, it will not pass VKontakte moderation.
  • Links and hashtags in posts reduce reach. Views will be less. So avoid them if possible. If you still need to provide a link, include it in the source.
  • Do not use stop words in the text: buy, write, call, leave a comment, like and any other calls to action. They also reduce coverage. The same goes for reposts. Do not make them in your community. If you still want to publish information, copy the text and indicate the source.

Content plan

Ideally, you should have one. It will make it much easier to create quality content with it. Publications should be varied and serve different purposes. Try to create a content plan by defining the goals of the publication and selecting topics for them. Distribute by day and control their output.

You can make a content plan by category:

  • interesting facts
  • humor and entertainment
  • articles reviews
  • life hacks on your topic
  • surveys
  • questions
  • cases
  • educational articles
  • About us publications
  • video reviews of product
  • product manuals
  • world news
  • company news
  • contests
  • reviews
  • professional business articles
  • provocative articles
  • events, holidays, important dates

Output

Before running ads, go over these points and get the community in order. Until this work is done, your advertising budgets will most likely be wasted, you will not get the desired results. A community, like a website, is the face of your company. Remember this.

preparing the community for an advertising campaign

There are no trifles in an advertising campaign: one inaccuracy can nullify all efforts. In addition to developing the target audience, segmenting it, writing ad texts, preparing teasers and banners, etc., you need a high-quality landing page. It can be a website, landing page, VKontakte community.

Today we have prepared a checklist for you to prepare the community for the advertising campaign. Check on it whether you take everything into account when you advertise in a group, public or event.

1. Is it clear in the first 3–5 seconds, , what the community is about, are there any repulsive elements in it, do you want to scroll the page further?

2. In the community, a single appeal to subscribers: either to you or to you.

3. It is clear, which geo group is oriented to: country, city are indicated.

4. The group stands out qualitatively from its competitors.

5. Easily all the information you need is available about the product, how to order and receive the goods, it is clear who or where to contact with questions.

6. The name corresponds to the group and reflects the essence of the services provided. Contains keywords that can be used to find the community on VKontakte, or is optimized for search engines using WordStat or GoogleTrends.

7. Current status contains important information for potential customers. It is best to indicate your USP in the status.

8. Clear avatar , a high-quality picture that makes it clear what the community is doing, there are no small details in the photo, the text is easy to read.

9. By the thumbnail of the avatar and the name of the community in the reposts and news feed, it is easy to understand what the community is about and what benefits a potential client will receive if he goes to the community and subscribes to it.

10. Information about the group is unique , without “water”, clearly reflects the activities of the company, the USP is spelled out, the text is structured, easily perceived, divided into paragraphs, the lists are arranged in a column, but the amount of text is not very large, you want to read the text.

11. Lock (menu). If there is a permanent fix, then it should display all the necessary information: USP, how to find a product catalog, reviews, etc. A temporary fix is ​​possible, in which case the post should be relevant, well-formed. If a menu hangs in the group header, it should contain relevant and necessary information, all pages that are linked from the menu should work.

12. Discussions are not spammed . There are all the necessary topics: reviews, delivery, payment, how to order, how to pay, questions, consultations, etc. (depending on subject). Discussion topics “Ask questions”, “Your feedback”, etc. – relevant. If the last post in these topics was created more than 1 month ago, then you need to update the topics to the beginning of the advertisement or re-create.

13. Photos are updated periodically, albums contain high-quality photos of products, your managers quickly answer questions under the photo, contain an up-to-date description of albums and photos (if necessary).

14. Actual video corresponds to the theme of group.

15. Link block does not contain links to third-party sites , taking the audience away from the community instead of performing a targeted action. Therefore, in this block, you can specify links to the main sections of the menu, wiki pages or topics with useful information.

16. Managers are indicated in the contacts, who can be contacted with all questions. The contact description indicates how this manager (administrator, consultant) can be useful. There are no banned, frankly fake or spamming accounts in the community contacts, which can turn into a “dog” in the midst of an advertising campaign.

17. Administrators in the community are ready to answer questions from potential customers within a day, preferably within an hour.

18. The community does not work on cheating .

19. On the wall current posts correspond to the theme of the group. The top 3 posts on the wall and fixed correspond to the target audience segment, which is advertised. There is no spam, the negative is worked out, all questions are answered, the posts are written correctly, preferably in the same style. Posts have been prepared for the advertising campaign, answering the main questions of the audience, reflecting the processing of its main objections, emphasizing your competitive advantages. You need to post new posts to the community during an advertising campaign at least 2-3 times a week, while you need to alternate selling posts (not advertising, but selling, that is, handling objections or stimulating a purchase, and not just “Fly, buy!”) And informative posts on the topic of the community.