amanda

We’ve had a slew of questions from other WordCamp organizers (and various tweetups, meetups, etc) asking us about how we made WordCamp Boston happen. We’re happy to share this information, in hopes of enriching the community and helping other camps get off the ground. We’ve already covered sponsorships and space, and today we thought we’d cover communications. We’ve been commended a number of times about our website, the frequency of our updates, the tone of our content, etc.

Our website was done, in entirety and without any hesitation or even a murmur of complaint, by the fabulous Daisy Olsen. We went with a very basic look, stressing the information, and took a slightly different tact than other WordCamps by definitely going in the direction of CMS rather than blog. Daisy got the site and theme set up in lightening time, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s sat in on her theming sessions before. You’ll get a chance to catch her again at WordCamp Boston and shouldn’t miss it- she’s a master at the parent/child theming stuff.

Once the site was up, of course there were multiple hacks and plugins made over time, and we owe that to Daisy as well. Of particular elegance is how she worked with various plugins to give our speakers a way to easily post bios on site, linking to their sessions.

We divvied up the blogging duties based on our actual responsibilities, but we also knew early on we wanted a very active blog. We wanted to show our sponsors real value by talking about their contribution in an organic way, and hopefully, we’ve done so. We wanted to hint to our attendees at what was coming, without giving it all away, and most importantly, we often needed to communicate important dates and deadlines.

Due to Daisy’s suggestion, we installed Gravity Forms pretty early, and every form you’ve filled out on wordcampboston.com has been one of theirs. Its been remarkably easy, with almost every member of our team creating a form at one point or another, with ease.

A neat side effect of our vigilant use of the site was that our SEO became stratospheric, and resulted in some organic sponsorships happening. A number of our small biz sponsors noted that it was a primary reason for their support.

Simply due to wanting to put something in place as fast as possible, we regretfully skipped using WP-Ecommerce’s really awesome ticketing system, which many of you saw in place at WordCamp NYC. Instead, we went with our standby, Eventbrite. EB has a lot of functionality that we really enjoyed and needed, including a robust if not occasionally frustrating waitlist system, and communication tools and really advanced reporting capability. John Eckman quickly became our ticket guru, and managing the growing list of sponsors and attendees and special needs, and who gets off waitlist, etc became a very time consuming job. Notably, our attendees really stood up too, when Eventbrite had issues, taking them to course on twitter, and when we made a call to you to update your details with new questions…. every single one of you did so within 5 days.

Obviously, you’ve heard and seen a lot of us on twitter. We decided @wordcampnyc to embrace the #wcbos tag and its been prolific. Jay Neely managed our twitter account, with assistance from Erick Hitter. They created lists for our attendees, speakers and sponsors. We’ve also closely monitored the airwaves for mention of WordCamp Boston and you’ve likely heard from our crew individually to answer your questions.

We’ve engaged Mailchimp on a few occasions as well to message groups of attendees outside of Eventbrite, with great results. Mailchimp in particular works because its free for small mailings and has a very simple GUI. Notably, Mailchimp works with WordPress and Wordcamps.

Managing all that data is, as you imagine, a bit rough. So, many thanks to Erick Hitter for stepping up and auditing, organizing and cleaning up the list before it went to print. All of our team communications were managed through Basecamp, which almost all of us used daily, anyways. Basecamp was the perfect choice, and we made great use of the writeboards, file upload and to do lists.

For our frequent fly by chats on topics large and small, we simply engaged a system most of us were using: gtalk. Perhaps next year we’ll give wave a go, but for now, gtalk made it easy to get ahold of people in a flash.

Obviously, this has been a massive team effort, and hopefully, what’s resulted is clear communication with our attendees, ROI for our sponsors, and a better overall experience for WordCamp Boston. As a team, we’ve never actually physically gotten together in a room, our communication thus far has been almost entirely virtual. It’s also a great case study for any business or organization that in the end, there really is no “one great tool” that does it all, it often takes knowing which tools will do the job, how they’ll work together and notably: which ones tie in with WordPress