If you’re organizing a WordCamp for the first time, it can be really daunting. This year was my first year as lead organizer and the biggest difficulty for me was the website. I wanted to share some of my WordCamp website tips so that it’s hopefully easier for you! There’s just so much you can do in the admin on your WordCamp site. Some things feel buried or just plain overwhelming because the amount of admin pages to look at.
Here are a couple of my takeaways from working on our WordCamp site and the things I really liked. You can also review the information in the WordCamp Organizer Handbook. This list is basically all the features/tools that I under-utilized.
CampTix > Tools > Revenue (Look at the last year for comparison.)
So I was trying to keep track of how many actual attendees we had signed up and compare to last year. I was accomplishing this in a roundabout way by taking the General Admission ticket numbers (plus our Microsponsorship ticket numbers) and then subtracting out the numbers of redeemed Coupons. Then I would do the same for last year’s and compare the numbers. Little did I know, until an enlightening meeting with my WordCamp mentor, I could’ve just looked at the revenue from the tickets in the CampTix Tools.
(By the way, I came up with a great spreadsheet to track the amount of tickets sold per day, broken down by how many days away the event is. – That way you can compare multiple years on a line graph that matches up, though your actual dates are not the same. The only problem is that for some reason my CampTix export did the date in this format, “May, 30th 2018” with the comma misplaced. So keep an eye on that because it will screw up your chart if you don’t have the dates in a date format. Contact me if you want this Google sheet.)
Read More About CampTix in the Organizer Handbook.
Working Budget (Keep this updated!)
I didn’t realize that this even existed and was editable by me! My mentor showed it to me and it helped so much. I already really liked the Budget feature in the admin, but finding out I could edit it on the fly really enhanced my budgeting abilities. It’s very helpful once the WordCamp gets within a few weeks.
WordPress.Slack.com – #community-events and #meta-wordcamp
I know I said it in every meeting with my mentor, but I should’ve gotten active on the Slack much sooner and asked questions more frequently. There are things we’re hoping to change in 2019 that we might’ve been able to change this year if we felt more confident in the changes. The Slack group would’ve been a helpful place to get experienced organizers’ feedback instead of just talking among our group of less experienced organizers.
WordCamp Planning Checklist
One thing I don’t like about the planning checklist is the fact that there are only three statuses – Pending (default), Complete, and Skipped. Ideally, I’d like the default to be blank, then “Pending” to be “In Progress” or something to differentiate between something being 100% done and things being actively worked on. “Pending” is really ambiguous and I had to leave things marked “Pending” both if I was working on them and if I hadn’t started them.
Some of the things probably could be broken down into more granular tasks, too. And the ability to add your own would be pretty nice as well.
The thing the Planning Checklist really helped with was the initial meetings with my mentor. It provides a good list to go through during the meetings and is really quick and easy to update. I know I could’ve used it more and had less piles of sticky notes.