Off to Jacksonville for SQLSaturday #298

I’m looking forward to returning to Jacksonville after missing a year (or two?) to speak at SQLSaturday #298. I’m driving up with my family this afternoon to beat traffic and go to the volunteer dinner, then I’ll be at the event all day tomorrow. If you’re in/near Jacksonville I hope you’ll attend (and say hello […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 6 (Seminars)

Seminars (aka “pre-cons”) have been part of the DNA of SQLSaturday going back to #1. For those that weren’t there we started off with Joe Celko doing our first one and it went really well. I think we sold it at $99, included his latest book and lunch, and had about 70 paying attendees. That […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 5

More notes, many from a chat with Kendal. We wish we could see the open rate on email and an easy way to do A/B testing. The emailer in the site (mine, or a derivative maybe) was just built to send a lot of email, no bells and whistles. Would the open rate help? Don’t […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 4

I spent some more time last night thinking about the event and marketing it. Biased I am, but I think the event has a great value proposition and doesn’t require “selling” except to first timers (seminars are different). We seem to do pretty well at getting first timers to attend, so it worth extra effort […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 3

Not to short change fund raising, but the toughest goal to meet for this year is registration/attendance if we’re going to hit our 20% growth target. No, it’s not all about numbers, but our stance is that we’d like to deliver as much learning as possible – both to do good and to leverage our […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 2

Our attendance number for last year was 285, so we’re going to aim for increasing that by 20% to 342. Our registration count was 343, so we’ll need to increase that by at least 20% as well to get the corresponding gain in attendees – I’m going to round that up and say that our […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 1

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 […]

Speaking At SQLSaturday #298 in Jacksonville on May 10, 2014

Got the email confirmation yesterday that I’m on the schedule – looking forward to being back in Jacksonville.

Call For Speakers for SQLSaturday Houston (Before TechEd)

SQLSaturday returns to Houston this year, this time at San Jacinto College on May 10, 2014. That’s the Saturday just before Teched, so you can make a super week of it. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll attend, it turns out SQLSaturday Jacksonville is on the same day. Jacksonville is closer and has a Ted’s […]

Look At The SQLSaturday Orlando Home Page

One of the weaknesses of the current SQLSaturday tool set is that the front page isn’t strong by default. It does a lot of good work, but it’s not what I’d call great (and wow, is it better than v1 and v2!), but it does offset that weakness by allowing you to put in whatever […]