• Reg count at 479. Looking very good for hitting 500!
• First sponsor sent out a geo-targeted message for us, another one working on it, more to go. We wrote a ‘suggested’ message to decrease the friction. First vendor even sent back open rates on the email!
• Karla/Shawn dropped in at ONETUG meeting last night to hand out flyers and coordinate ONETUG sharing the PASS table
• Just scheduled sponsor mention tweets for next two weeks plus day of event (need to do same for speakers/sessions next week)
• Signed up for trial of Hootsuite Pro to do the scheduling, works reasonably well
• Our half day student seminar seems to be resonating. Our initial target was 30, we hit that and asked for a bigger room. Today we hit that cap of 60, so we’re moving to a room that seats 100! We’ll see how many how, but still, this is a much bigger response than we’ve seen with our previous efforts to engage them.
• We’ve tentatively decided to include them in the main event lunch, but not to register them or give them event raffle tickets. That keeps the sponsor list fairly targeted. Students will be welcome to attend sessions or visit sponsors after 1 pm.
• One of the things we talked about this past week was a photo/video plan, need to make sure that covers the student seminar (is now in a different building)
• We need a couple raffle prizes for students (most will leave at lunch), an eval, what else?
• Wrote the ‘you haven’t paid for lunch yet’ message that goes out next week, still a lot more messages to write
• Starting to get news on raffle prizes, will try to add that to messages too
• Networking landed us a local gold sponsor, working on a second one. Pays to maintain relationships!

My goal since Part 2 has been 500 registered and 350 attending, it’s exciting to be close! But if our projection holds, we should still add another 100 before the event. The real question is what our drop rate will be? I’m expecting it to be higher than last year due to the longer sign up cycle, but that’s only a guess. We’ve set the waitlist threshold at 600, can we do it? We shall see.