I have always felt that there is no better way of learning and improving than by sharing the results and the processes.
Let me share some info about SQLSaturday Lisbon, Portugal that me & my awesome team (Paulo Matos, Paulo Borges & others) have been doing, because I honestly believe it might quite useful to a lot of SQLSaturday organizers.
– We start early, the first conversations, thoughts and dreams are shared around 11 months in advance. This means that almost 1 month after doing one edition we are starting to plan the following one.
– We open call for Workshop (aka Precon) for just 1 month. We invite speakers who we believe will bring something useful to our community. We select carefully and carelessly if we get enough support from our community. Yes, that means that we ask at SQLPort meetings our members about their will to sign up for submitted workshops.
– We try to grow our organizing team. Core team members are just 3, but we increase to 8-9 in the months before the event and go to 16+ on our event day.
– We know our most active community members.
– We collect all possible information. We try to optimize based on it.
– We run some very nice BI Dashboards, so we know about our current progress. At any given moment.
– We use Dropbox to share all those documents between Team members.
– We use Evernote for ideas exchange.
– We do marketing. Targeted Marketing.
– We have some of the most awesome partners and supporters in this galaxy – Miguel Vicente & Paulo Mena, who ultimately enable us to concentrate on the content.
Here is our gift for those, who have reached this point – the original SQLSaturday Portugal Marketing PowerPoint slides (0.8 MB, .PPTX).
Feel free to edit them and use as your own.
Let us know if you find them useful. ;)
to be continued…