I’ve volunteered to lead the marketing effort for SQLSaturday Orlando this year. Broadly speaking that means drive attendance to the main event as well as any seminars we host on Thursday or Friday. We’ve hit a cap the last few years, never getting beyond the 275-300 range (I’ll get exact number later this week for last year, or as exact as it gets anyway) and we’d like to see that number grow – training more people doesn’t change our cost a lot and we’d like to do more good for the same effort.
I’m going to write up what we try (or not), and why we try it (or not) here. Doing so gives us a record to look back at, and certainly it will be useful to share the ideas and maybe get some back in return. I’m not a marketing whiz, we’ll see how this goes.
Over the next week or so I need to get the final goals in place. Right now I’m thinking they are something like this:
- Grow on site attendance by 20% over the 2013 count
- Try some of the ideas I wrote about back in May 2012
- End the event with a plan that we can repeat (if we want to) next year
More later in the week.
SQLAndy 
Some thoughts on the marketing of SQL Saturday. I have been through it. I think the most effective techniques are to reach out to other IT User groups in your area and ask them to send out a email blast to their lists , or , mention the event at their user group meeting. True grass roots word of mouth. SharePoint and .NET groups are great candidates for this. Also, locate local groups on LinkedIn and post there. There is a group called Tech Orlando that may be good to post in. Lastly, reach out to your local Microsoft reps and sales folks. They usually know everyone running SQL Server.
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