Power BI 12 Days of Dashboards – Day 6 – Meetup.com Dashboard

Power BI Dashboard Meetup

Day #6 - Meetup.com Dashboard

As part of my Power BI 12 Days of Dashboards series, the 6th day of dashboards introduces a Meetup.com dashboard that you can use as a Meetup Group owner to display the number and location of members, next meetup date, and more.

Today's dashboard is brought to you by Dominik Petri (fb li tw xing), founder of Petri Software and leader of the Frankfurt Power BI User Group. Dominik leverages Meetup to organize and coordinate the 100+ participants in the Frankfurt Power BI User Group and has created a nice dashboard for the group.

Here is a English translated screenshot of the dashboard, followed by the live/interactive dashboard in German below. The template is available in English in the link to the TechNet Gallery hosting site.

pbix_meetup_en

 

 

In Dominik's own words:

Meetup.com is a platform for scheduling in-person events. As leader of the Power BI User Group Frankfurt (Germany) I use Meetup to announce upcoming meetings and assist with the member registration. The Meetup website provides some useful information to organizers that can be accessed using the Meetup API. For each service, the necessary input parameters and the output results are well documented.

To use Meetup’s API you need a API key which you can get here:

gettinganapikey

In addition to the API key you need the Meetup group’s name as used in the URL:

meetupgroupnameurl

In the dashboard for my Power BI User Group I connect to two different services:
One gives me details about my group’s members (names, where they come from etc.).
The second returns previous and upcoming meetings.

Both services return the results in JSON format that can easily read and transformed by Power BI Desktop. I’ve added a few DAX Measures to enhance the data and get the necessary figures for the dashboard.

To use the dashboard for your Meetup group, download the Power BI Template from here and continue with the following steps:

  1. After downloading the Power BI Template, open it in Power BI Desktop
  2. A popup box appears asking for your API key and your Meetup group’s name as used in the URL
  3. Click the “Load” button in the bottom right.

The dashboard is completely maintenance-free: It automatically shows the next meeting’s details and once the meeting is over, the next meeting’s stats will be shown.

Feel free to use this template as a starting point to explore the various possibilities of the Meetup API and to create your own personal Meetup dashboard.
The template can be used for any meetup. It is NOT restricted to Power BI User Groups!

Thanks Dominik for the great contribution and for all of the work you do for the Power BI and Excel technical communities.
Sam Lester (MSFT)