Started a monthly coffee meetup for newer hams and seven people showed up

I went through almost the same thing a few years back. My club meetings were mostly business talk and raffle tickets, and I'd leave having said maybe two words. What worked for me was picking a specific activity instead of a general meetup. I started showing up at the park near me with a little QRP rig and a wire thrown over a branch, doing park activations on Saturday mornings. I posted about it in the local group chat and just told people to come watch or grab a paddle and try it. The first few weekends it was just me. Then a dad brought his kid who was studying for the tech exam, and the kid made his first contact on my setup. After that it snowballed a bit. We've got five or six regulars now, and two of them got licensed last year because they saw it was actualy fun and not just guys arguing about antennas in a church basement.

I think the activity gives shy people somthing to do with their hands and a reason to talk. Standing around at a meeting with nothing to do is rough if you don't already know people. Give folks a radio, a log sheet, and a task, and conversation happens on its own.

Keep the coffee thing going. It takes a few sessions before people stop feeling like they're intruding, so don't get discouraged if the third meetup is smaller than the first two.

My club never really warmed up either, but I ended up staying and grabbing a job instead of starting something new. After a few months of lurking I asked if I could take a turn running our Tuesday evening check-in net. Reading the roster and calling for check-ins every week meant half the club heard my voice regularly before they ever had a real conversation with me in person. The first couple weeks were rough. I stumbled over the script, talked too fast, and once mangled a guy's name so badly he corrected me on air, though he was kind about it. Still, people warm up fast to whoever shows up every week and does the unglamorous work. By winter I'd been invited to see three different members' shacks, which a year of sitting thru meeting agendas never got me. Turns out the quiet guys in the back row just needed a reason to talk to me.

Next month I hand the net over to one of the folks licensed this spring, and she's already nervous about it, which I keep telling her is exactly how I felt. Not saying that fixes a cold club, it doesn't, but volunteering for the boring stuff opened more doors for me than showing up early with donuts ever did.

Stealing this idea for my area, honestly. We've got a decent handful of new folks on the local group chat but they never show up to anything official, and I bet a low pressure coffee thing is exactly why. One thing I'd add, if any of the regulars start studying for upgrades, see if a couple of the older guys would do a quick VE session right there at the table. Nothing bonds a group like watching somebody pass their general on a Saturday morning. Also curious if you've thought about a weekly time slot vs monthly, I've heard monthly dies off faster.