Howdy Community Team and our hardworking WordPress Campus Connect Organizers!
To date, WordPress Campus Connect (WPCC) events have reached students across 9 locations worldwide, including Kolhapur, Zamboanga, Kathmandu, and more.
We’ve collected organizer and attendee feedback to help improve future events and scale WPCC’s impact. Here’s what we learned:
What’s Working Well
- Hands-On Learning Drives Engagement: Students built live WordPress sites, explored hosting, and learned career opportunities in WordPress — particularly impactful for first-time learners.
- Skilled Facilitators Make a Difference: Facilitators were highly rated for expertise, helpfulness, and ability to answer questions effectively.
- Institutional Partnerships Matter: Schools with prior event experience saw smoother execution and higher participant engagement.
- Community Growth: WPCC continues to reach students unfamiliar with WordPress, helping expand the ecosystem globally.
Challenges & Patterns
- Technical Infrastructure: Internet speed, local installations, and domain claiming caused delays in multiple events. This is a recurring issue across regions.
- Content Accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility): Beginners found some sessions fast-paced; more scaffolding is needed for first-time learners.
- Event Messaging & Participation: Some local communities didn’t fully understand the event’s purpose, leading to lower participation.
- Post-Event Follow-Up: Students expressed interest in long-term engagement, such as monthly meetups Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook., campus clubs, and multi-day workshops.
Next Steps & Action Items
To make future WPCC events even stronger, we should focus on:
- Technical Preparedness: Mandatory pre-event tech checks, minimum infrastructure standards, and alternative setup guides.
- Better Planning & Timelines: Shorter approval timelines and clear scheduling guidance to avoid conflicts with academic calendars.
- Enhanced Participant Experience: Beginner-first content, more hands-on time, competitions, and improved physical setups.
- Community Engagement: Clearer messaging for students, educators, and local WordPress communities to boost attendance.
- Post-Event Continuity: Developing follow-up roadmaps, WordPress student clubs, and pilot multi-day events.
- Streamlined Administration: Faster certificate approvals, standardized reporting, and centralized post-event documentation.
Key Takeaway: WPCC continues to deliver strong educational value and community impact. By addressing recurring technical and engagement challenges, we aim to turn these events into sustainable pathways for students to explore WordPress and the wider open-source ecosystem.
Thank you to all organizers, facilitators, and participants who make these events possible! Your feedback is invaluable in shaping the next round of WPCC events.
If you feel you have the bandwidth to tackle any of these follow up tasks, please feel free to comment on this post or reach out to Destiny directly in the Make WordPress Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
