SQL Saturday in Los Angeles

December 25, 2021 steverezhener SQL Saturday in Los Angeles

Retrospective on Virtual 2021 Data.SQL.Saturday.LA event

It’s been over 2 months now after our second virtual event and it’s time to talk about how it all happened. This LinkedIn article is going to talk about our original plan, the demise of PASS and replacement tools, some 2021 stats, and what worked well.

Our goal was to “rinse and repeat” our first 2020 virtual event:

300-400 remote attendees
30 speakers/sessions (5 rooms x 6 session)
5-10 sponsors
Rely on our battle-proven experience from 2020 event to deliver the 2021 event
Use PASS/SQL Saturday infrastructure

Running a PASS-free virtual event

Back in 2020, we had to adjust from in-person to delivering a virtual event. To deliver our 1st virtual event, we were using GoToWebinar software licenses (provided by PASS) to deliver virtual event as well as sqlsaturday.com to market event for attendees, speakers, and sponsors. As early as November 2020, we started to see the likelihood of PASS eventual demise. Needless to say, we started to explore alternatives. Luckily, as a non-profit we already had most of the tools. We had enough available licenses for MS Teams via Microsoft for Non-profit program as well as our own WordPress web site.

Here are the tools that we used to replace tools previously provided by PASS:

Event delivery platform – replaced 5 x GoToWebinar licenses that we were provided by PASS in 2020 with 5 x MS Teams licenses (we created 5 new generic users in our Office tenant with proper licensing)
Attendee registration – replaced sqlsaturday.com event page with Eventbrite
Sponsor registration – replaced sqlsaturday.com sponsor web page with a combination of blog post on datadriventechnologies.org web site to list all available sponsorship tiers, Microsoft Form to enable sponsor sign up, and PayPal invoicing to collect fees (we are working on automating it with Power Automate)
Speaker registration/schedule/session management – replaced sqlsaturday.com schedule section with sessionize.com
Event listing – initially replaced sqlsaturday.com with datasaturdays.com that was eventually replaced with a new sqlsaturday.com (fully owned now by SQL Saturday Incorporated)
Event/session feedback – replaced sqlsaturday.com feedback section with a custom Microsoft Form + QR code
Event raffle – replaced sqlsaturday.com SpeedPASS with a custom Microsoft Form + QR code and Microsoft Office Excel
Volunteer registration – replaced sqlsaturday.com volunteer section with a custom Microsoft Form
Email marketing – replaced sqlsaturday.com message system (it was quite awful to begin with) with Sender.net Email Marketing Platform
Evaluated different MS Teams offering – Meeting, Webinar, and Live Event

Event stats:

31 speakers with 9 sponsors
30 sessions (20+ recorded sessions are available here – https://www.youtube.com/sqlsatla)
5 tracks (virtual rooms) managed by 5 hosts (Brodie Brickey, Elaena Bakman, Laurie Carr, Maria Lopez, and Steve Rezhener) using MS Teams licenses
1000+ registered attendees

300-400 actual attendees

What worked great

5 MS Teams meetings (8 hours long) to cover 5 tracks/virtual rooms
Dedicated 1 host per 1 virtual room
Scheduled meetings for all hosts to test-drive MS Teams Meeting functionality
Scheduled meetings with speakers 2 days prior to the event to practice transferring control and sharing the screen using MS Teams
Created tinyurl.com links for each virtual room to hide MS Teams long URLs to provide convenience for attendees to switch between rooms (example: https://tinyurl.com/2021datasqlsatla-vmware)
Ran a Virtual raffle via Microsoft Forms + QR code (less than 200 attendees signed up for that) – we will definitely use it once we go back to an in-person event
Administered prize distribution after the event – we had 5 e-gift cards to deliver as well as 5-10 hard-paper books and other swag to USPS
Speaker gifts – still working on it
Scheduled reminders for all the speakers about exact timing of their sessions
Kept constant communication vie email with speakers to prevent no-show
Utilized a free-tier (all the features with a 15,000 emails a month limit) Sender.net Email Marketing Platform to send 8 email campaigns (welcome, raffle, schedule, to attend or not to attend, how to connect, message from sponsor, thank you for attending, recorded session)
Created and utilized a WhatsApp Messenger group for a internal communication between team members
Provided double opt-in for speaker content recording – we asked before and after recording (all the speakers agreed to be recorded)
Each host sent an email to all his/her room speakers to introduce himself/herself as well as to share an event playbook that included all the nitty-gritty details
Setup a 5-pages long PPT template to present event information by each host before each session (additionally, we used MS Teams Power Point Live feature to allow attendees to navigate to sessions/sponsors using hyperlinks)
Introduced LinkTree to maintain all links in one place – https://linktr.ee/sqlsatla
Produced promotional (3) and recorded (20+) videos for our YouTube channel

December 19, 2021January 21, 2022 steverezhener Los Angeles Data Platform (fka SQLMalibu), SQL Saturday in Los Angeles

Communicate using freemium tools

The Communication Team at the Data Driven Technologies is using the following freemium services to keep LA Data Platform User Group and SQL Saturday in Los Angeles relevant on social media. We choose those tools primarily due to their price and ease of use.

sender

To send all our email campaigns, we use a combination of Moosend and Sender.

Moosend.com is a freemium service (completely free under a 1000 email contacts) to schedule and compose email newsletters. We use it to communicate with 1,000 Los Angeles Data Platform User Group members. It’s more important for us to constantly engage our core User Group members, so we stay under 1,000 subscribers while sending as much volume of emails as possible. We send over 10+ scheduled email campaigns every month which translates into close to 15,000 emails monthly, so with MooSend.com we can achieve email volume for free. Sender.net is a freemium service (free with 15,000 emails monthly limit) to schedule and compose email newsletters. We use it to communicate with 1.5K+ SQL Saturday in Los Angeles members. We send about 5-6 scheduled email campaigns for 3-4 months prior to an event in June and 2-3 campaigns after the event, so we want limitless contact list while we can compromise on a total monthly volume of emails.

To manage social media posts, we use a combination of Buffer (free with 3 social media channels and 10 scheduled posts) and Planoly (free with 2 social media channels and photos only). Buffer.com is a freemium service to schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more while Planoly.com is a freemium service to schedule posts to Instagram and Pinterest. We have 2 separate accounts (one for LA Data Platform User Group and one for SQL Saturday in Los Angeles) to avoid hitting the free account limits too early.

linktree

Another great freemium service (free account is more than enough) that we are using is Linktree.com. Linktree.com manages all our digital touchpoints in one single place as well as collect views/clicks statistics. We keep all the essential links for both LA Data Platform User Group and SQL Saturday in Los Angeles members and use 2 separates accounts for each.

databox

Many sponsors are asking us for the audience numbers to make decisions, so we need an easy way to communicate those trends and numbers. This is where we found a handy Databox.com freemium service (free with 3 social media sources limit). Databox.com makes dashboards to highlight different social media KPIs. We have one account for each: LA Data Platform and SQL Saturday in LA.

tweetdeck

Tweetdeck.twitter.com is a completely free solution (TweetDeck is owned by Twitter) to manage and organize multiple twitter accounts. We occasionally use it to like, retweet, mention, and participate in interesting topics from @LASQLBootCamp, @LADataPlatform, and @SQLSatLA Twitter accounts.

mxtoolbox.com is a freemium monitoring service for your MX records to check on your email deliverability. We use it to check on our LA Data Platform and SQL Sat LA email campaigns.

https://uptimerobot.com is a freemium monitoring service for your HTTPS, web site. We use it to check on our web site up-time.

December 11, 2021December 19, 2021 steverezhener Los Angeles Data Platform (fka SQLMalibu), SQL Saturday in Los Angeles

Just Do It! Keep your local community vibrant and relevant! Virtual event is better than no event at all!

Introduction

What keeps your local tech community gatherings (User Group, SQL Saturday, and others) is you, your team, and your events. What might be obvious to some, might not obvious to all – having no events, no activities in your tech community will erode the foundation of your community and will lead to its demise.

Yes, we all agree that 2020 and 2021 have completely changed the game of running community events with many mature in-person events downsizing or completely closing its doors due to COVID and the local regulations that came with it. At the same time, is not to say that you can’t run events. If your local regulations are preventing you from running an in-person event, just run a virtual event, at least for the time being. And while virtual events are not a full replacement for in-person (primarily due to completely missing out on the networking aspect), it’s still way better than no event at all.

Problem

While the cost of virtual event is close to none and it requires less preparation, it’s does require new skills. Running a virtual event is very different than in-person, but it also much easier than in-person event. So, what do you to go from organizing in-person event to a virtual event?

Solution

For your user group monthly meeting, all you need is you (and maybe a backup person just in case), catch all tech support email account, tools to organize the event (Eventbrite.com), some marketing campaigns to promote the meeting, and some experience (and patience for few hours) with Zoom/MS Teams/other remote meeting software of your choice. If you want to go fancy, some familiarity with TechSmith Camtasia and YouTube would be needed to record and share recorded session.

If this is going to be a full day event with multiple rooms like a SQL Saturday event, you would need a great team of volunteers, catch all tech support email account, tools to organize the event (Eventbrite.com/SQLSaturday.com/Sessionize.com/and few custom Microsoft Forms), well thought through marketing campaign to promote the event and decent familiarity with software to run a long remote meeting. If you want to go fancy, some familiarity with TechSmith Camtasia and YouTube would be needed to record and share recorded sessions.

Great Team

You would need a team of really dedicated volunteers to moderate virtual rooms, preferably one volunteer dedicated per each virtual room for 8 hours.

Marketing

You need to involve email marketing, social media, but more importantly you need to reach out to organizers of similar events to help you out reaching out wider audience.

Consider adding Meetup to your marketing toolbelt. Please reach out to ms-data at microsoft.com to join Azure Data Tech Groups and get your Meetup cost comped by Microsoft.

Remote meeting software

Here you need to decide on Zoom, MS Teams or something else, get comfortable with it, have few dry runs with volunteers and speakers, setup 8 hours long meeting per each virtual room, and pray for it to work flawlessly.

To conclude

The Data Driven Technologies Team is running Los Angeles Data Platform User Group virtually for 2-3 years now. We have also organized and delivered 2 Virtual SQL Saturday in Los Angeles events (2020 and 2021).

If you need help, I am here for you. Let’s me help you with running your virtual event with handholding and guidance. I can help you out with everything your need – technology tools, marketing, speakers, attendees, sponsors, etc…

I want your User Group, SQL Saturday event and more importantly SQL Saturday brand to stay relevant.

May 25, 2021December 11, 2021 steverezhener SQL Saturday in Los Angeles

Official message about our move to sqlsaturday.com

It has been brought to our attention that there might be some confusion about the status of the 2021 Data.SQL.Saturday.LA event and our decision to deactivate our listing on the https://datasaturdays.com/ platform and move it to https://sqlsaturday.com/2021-06-12-sqlsaturday1020/

Originally the 2021 Data.SQL.Saturday.LA event was listed on https://datasaturdays.com/, but about a month or so ago we were asked to remove our branding and our logo. Our branding and our logo are very important to us for sentimental reasons and we decided to list the event on sqlsaturday.com instead. Everything else stays the same. The event is still scheduled for June 12^th and we will be sending out more details soon.

If you have any other questions about our move to the sqlsaturday.com platform or its affiliation with Redgate, please reach out to us directly and we will be happy to discuss.

May 2, 2021January 21, 2022 steverezhener Los Angeles Boot Camp (LABootCamp), Los Angeles Data Platform (fka SQLMalibu), SQL Saturday in Los Angeles

Choosing a FREE Email marketing service platform to engage your community event members

Introduction

Running community events occasionally is not enough to engage your attendees/members. Unless you are running daily events, you are advised to communicate with your members between the events, as much more as possible. Using Email Marketing Service (EMS) platform is one way to make it happen. This blog post is going to take you on a leaving the MailChimp journey and exploring few of the alternative Email Marketing Service (“EMS”) platforms that we (organizers of Los Angeles Data Platform User Group and SQL Saturday in Los Angeles event) chose to use as well as few DNS settings to setup to avoid the spam filter.

After years of using MailChimp to keep our members engaged for both LA Data Platform/SQL Malibu user group (started on 2013) and SQL Saturday events (started on 2017), we’ve finally decided to draw a line and choose something else.

While MailChimp has a great product, the company that became the staple in the world of emails got overly confident and decided to squeeze every dollar. Some of the features that made MailChimp the king for SOHO market are ability to schedule posts to Facebook and Twitter, superb email deliverability reports, and overall great interface. At the same time, some of those features became paid plan only features. We were enojying a FREE plan, but over the years MailChimp decided to make it less attractive by pushing some of the previously included features behind the paywall.

It’s started with something minor like making it difficult to BYOH (bring your own HTML code), continued with reduction of the contact list, and finally ended up with making campaign scheduling capabilities only available in paid plans.

Problem

We are a non-profit and trying to enjoy a champagne on a beer budget where we can. We prefer to enjoy free services as much as we can. With Mailchimp taking away campaign scheduling, we decided to seriously consider alternatives. We briefly migrated to MailerLite to only discover that sending 12,000 emails a month is not enough for us. If initially, our user group emails were mostly about inviting members to attend user group meetings, in a last couple of months we have added weekly links Friday campaigns which caused us to run out of 12,000 monthly emails quicker and making MailerLite not that attractive any longer. Hitting the 12,000 monthly emails limit for a free plan too soon, effectively brought us back to look further and consider much more forward-looking alternatives that would work for us today and a year from now.

Solution

What are we using today? We reviewed and analyzed all different alternatives here and chose 2 platforms. As of May 2, 2021, we are using Sender.net for SQL Saturday in LA event and ~~Moosend.com~~ for LA Data Platform.

What are we getting for free from each platform?

Sender – 15,000 monthly emails for a contact list under 2,500 subscribers with all features included.

~~Moosend – unlimited emails for a contact list under 1,000 subscribers. We can schedule campaigns and we can see open/clicks/problems reporting.~~ We will be moving from Moosend in less than 30 days (unfortunately, Moosend is no longer offering free account).

How did we migrate from MailChimp/MailerLite/Moosend?

Migration is a fairly simple process of exporting/importing your contact list and exporting/importing your regular campaigns. What might take you more time is matching every EMS platform dictionary (see Fig 2). What might be also a bit confusing is how to recreate Signup form, so people can easily subscribe to your mailing list.

Fig #2 – MailChimp’s Audience is MailerLite’s Subscribers is Moosend Mailing lists is Senders subscribers

Like with any EMS platform, you would want to invest some time in setting things up to improve email deliverability beyond the content of your email. You would want to make sure that your DNS is aware of your EMS. Luckily, all major EMS platforms can you help with that and would even provide you with instructions on how to fix it.

In a nutshell, you would need to add the following records to improve your email deliverability and avoid the spam filter:

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication method designed to detect forging sender addresses during the delivery of the email.^[1] SPF alone, though, is limited to detecting a forged sender claim in the envelope of the email, which is used when the mail gets bounced.^[1] Only in combination with DMARC can it be used to detect the forging of the visible sender in emails (email spoofing^[2]), a technique often used in phishing and email spam.

DomainKeys / DKIM is an email authentication method designed to detect forged sender addresses in email (email spoofing), a technique often used in phishing and email spam.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is an email authentication protocol. It is designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorized use, commonly known as email spoofing. The purpose and primary outcome of implementing DMARC is to protect a domain from being used in business email compromise attacks, phishing emails, email scams and other cyber threat activities.

While the 3 settings mentioned above are a great way to ensure your emails are reaching your member’s mailboxes, you would be strongly advised to get a free account with mxtoolbox that would constantly scan your domain records for problems.

Disclaimer

This blog post is partially based on the following resources:

https://tutorialdeep.com/blog/free-mailchimp-alternatives

February 22, 2021December 5, 2021 steverezhener SQL Saturday in Los Angeles

2021 Data.SQL.Saturday Call to Volunteers

We are looking for volunteers. We are looking for awesome people to help us to moderate sessions.

Please follow the link below to register as a volunteer.

https://tinyurl.com/1ixzy7dt

February 22, 2021July 21, 2021 steverezhener SQL Saturday in Los Angeles

2021 Data.SQL.Saturday.LA Sponsorship Plan announced

Sponsorship Plan

We appreciate you taking time to consider sponsoring 2021 Data.SQL.Saturday in LA. We have assembled a few sponsorship plans that you can select from. Donations for this event will be used to cover the costs of running the event and the LA Data Platform SQL User Group meetings. The event is put on by the Data Driven Technologies, Inc. a local 501.c.3 non-profit.

Event Overview

The Data.SQL.Saturday is a single day conference that offers data professionals the opportunity to improve their stills and learn about new products while networking with others in their field and connecting with other members of the local Database community and our sponsors.

This event is put together by a group of dedicated Los Angeles database community volunteers and local database user groups as well as volunteer speakers from across the globe.

Attendance

When the event was held in-person, it used to bring in 300+ attendees. In 2020 we moved to a virtual event for the first time and had 700+ registrations from all around the world, with 400+ attending the event.

Cost of Sponsorship

This year, sponsorship ranges from Swag Only to $1,000.00, depending on the package you select:

Tier	Swag	Bronze	Silver	Gold
Amount	$0	$250	$500	$1000
Sponsor Logo and URL on the event web site and	x	x	x	x
Sponsor Logo and URL included in email campaigns	x	x	x	x
Sponsors Logo included in session slides	x	x	x	x
Sponsor Logo included in YouTube videos	x	x	x	x
Social Media posts Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Instagram	x	x	x	x
Sponsor Raffle	x	x	x	x
Collect Raffle Leads		x	x	x
Email sent on behalf of a sponsor			x	x
Product-focused sponsor session (based on availability, first come first serve)			x	x
Sponsor a virtual room (name a room) (based on availability, first come first serve)			x	x
Short video advertising embedded in a recorded session (YouTube video will contain a paid promotion like a product placement, sponsorship, or endorsement)				x
12-months of LA Data Platform User Group sponsorship				x
Dedicated virtual sponsor rooms (MS Teams breakout)				x

Sponsorship Plan

*To collect and received leads you must participate in the raffle and offer a raffle prize valued at $50.00 or more.

To sponsor please follow this link to fill out the sponsorship form: https://tinyurl.com/3zjp744s. An invoice will be emailed to you (generated by PayPal) and can be paid by check or credit card. All fees must be paid in advance.

Cancellation Policy

Any cancellation that is caused by us will result in a full refund. It’s really that simple – no event, no expenses, no need for sponsorship money.

Raffle

The raffle registration is used to opt-in for us to share their information with our sponsors. Remember the raffle prize is your key to success and the better the prize the more leads you will collect.

We will manage the raffle and collect, cleanup and de-dup the data for you and send you the leads after the event. We will let you know who the winners of the raffle are, and you can send them the prize. If you prefer that we manage the prize for you, please let us know and we will work on the details.