At the end of 2017, we tried an experiment in marketing WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US — we added a banner ad to WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/. It was pretty successful; we went from an average of NUMBER 566 clicks from WordPress.org per day to an average of NUMBER 577 of clicks from WordPress.org per day.*
The intention with this experiment was to test whether we could boost discovery among WordPress users who were unaware of the existing community and community events. Because WordCamp US is one of the two flagship events on the WordCamp schedule (soon to be three if WordCamp Asia is organized in 2019!), it made sense to promote that event on the broad platform of WordPress.org.
The current plan is to use this tool to promote flagship WordCamps only. As flagship events, WordCamp US and WordCamp Europe are different from local WordCamps in a number of ways.
- They have the capacity to welcome 1500+ attendees.
- They represent a broad geographical region with a large number of established WordPress communities.
- They focus on aspirational and inspirational content, introducing the WordPress community to large numbers of attendees and sponsors that have never participated before.
This might be disappointing for local WordCamps, who face promotional challenges as well (who doesn’t?). While the Events Widget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. last year helped promote local WordPress events *substantially* (and in a targeted way!), organizing teams still struggle with getting the word out.
For local WordCamps, I’d like to propose that we keep working on the redesign of WordCamp Central Website for all WordCamp activities globally. https://central.wordcamp.org includes a list of upcoming and past camp with links to each. with the goal to make WordCamps easier for prospective attendees to discover, understand, and sign up for. There has been some progress on this project in 2017, with volunteers working on a proposal at WordCamp DC, WordCamp EU, and WordCamp US.
If you’re interested in contributing to a redesign of WordCamp Central, please comment on this post!
If you have comments, questions, or concerns about reserving WordPress.org banner ads to flagship WordCamps, please comment on this post as well. 🙂
*Whoops! I published this a little earlier than I intended. 🙂
