More notes, hopefully not repeating any from previous posts!

• Karla has used the chart showing registration growth as a way to reinforce to sponsors that we’re on track for solid attendance. I suspect it also carries with it the impression that we’re engaged in trying to drive the number up, which is always good for a sponsor. The other part of it is that silver and higher sponsors that sign up now get their logo included in every email we send out to about 2000 addresses. Emails sent aren’t magic of course, but someone signing up as a sponsor in July will end up having their logo in twelve email messages. Or they can wait until September and be in a handful. From the event perspective we’re glad to help sponsors be more successful, and getting commitments early helps us make decisions on the budget.
• We’ve set up a half day seminar co-located with us for students. We’re using EventBrite for registration so we can clearly measure sign ups. I’m hoping for 25. If we get more we’ll be space constrained, but it would be a nice problem to have. I sent all the IT instructors a message about the event, plus powerpoint slides, plus an email message to send to their students, along with a soft ask to make it a class assignment or extra credit opportunity.  Rodney Landrum will be doing most of the SQL part of the seminar, I’ll do the intro and maybe a bit on career paths, we’ll have a recruiter, and someone yet to be picked to talk about networking, community, blogs, user groups, and some more odds and ends. We don’t know if it will work, but it’s worth trying.
• This past week our message was focused on our Dimensional Modeling seminar, with a mention in the close (and in the right hand pane) about event registration. The reg numbers barely moved the next two days, making me nervous about my strategy of alternating messages each week (registration, seminar, registration, etc). I need 30 a week to register. We’ll see. The good news is that we did see more signups for the seminars (I’ll share more on that later).
• We’ve added ONETUG, our local .Net group, as a sponsor. No cash, but we’ll be a sponsor at the next Code Camp. Good for both teams.
• I’ve been sending out my ad copy to the group for comments, which are often helpful but make me feel like I can’t aim sometimes. It’s not easy, for me anyway, to write something and critique it too. I put a lot of effort into the subject line (so they’ll open it) and a lot of effort into making the first sentence and the first paragraph the most important and useful to the reader. It’s a bonus if they read further or scan the right hand pane with the ‘calendar’ section.
• I took my ‘how to ask’ for the seminar message and sent it off to someone to see if they will pay, and also made a pitch for a local employer to sponsor with the idea being they could do on the spot first interviews.  Walking the walk is good. If it doesn’t work, I’ll still learn something.
• I’m scheduling 3-5 tweets a day in Hootsuite. I’m using the free version so I have to schedule one at a time, but at 3-5 a day it’s not a lot of effort. I also loaded all the speaker handles into a table and generated three different tweets for each based on name, session title, and handle. They are mechanical, but I hope that they catch an eye here or there, and it’s a way to try to get speakers to engage – many will retweet it.
• I looked at Twitter cards, but it requires access to the header section of the page and I can only get tags into the body. Something for PASS to look at.
• Not quite marketing, I’m handling the few unsubscribe requests that come in. There is an unsubscribe link in each email, but it requires logging in. Aggravating if you don’t want the email AND you don’t know your password, a lot of work to unsubscribe. Only 3 or 4 manually processed.
• Also not quite marketing we’ve had a handful of dupe registrations. The system emails if it detects someone registering with the same first/last name, but doesn’t change their status. We have to go look and decide/investigate. Good to do to try to keep to the reg count accurate. There is a status of “not attending – continue to email” that is perfect for someone who wants to get the messages at work and home, but will use one of the two as the “paid for” reg.
• Thinking about next year we really, really need a way to add source codes to registration links, and it would also be nice if the system captured the referring url too.
• 49 days out as I write this, and still two big things to work on – “bring someone” (our BS campaign!) and using our “mystery guest in October” to try to increase reg/decrease the standard Saturday drop, hoping to finish one of those this week