Content type: Lesson

Orientations are scheduled after an event application has been reviewed and approved to proceed. These orientations have three purposes. Orientations happen with the lead organizer (and their team if they like) for every event each year. The meeting must take place before the website is set up and the event is moved to “Pre-Planning”. The…

Budget reviews serve two purposes: What is our budget philosophy? We’re not a non-profit organization, but we do our best to act like one. We advocate lean budgets for a number of reasons: When does a budget review happen? After an organizing team has been approved for pre-planning, but before they announce their date or we…

Why do we review organizer applicants? Our approach is always to trust but verify, and investigating the people who apply to organize a meetup or WordCamp on behalf of the WordPress open source project is the “verify” part. Event organizers are community leads, and our community leaders work fairly autonomously on things like finding meeting…

About Office Hours While many organizer questions can be answered via email, synchronous communication in Slack can be quicker, more efficient, and friendlier.  We started organizing office hours in order to solve the problem of supporters working constantly in instant-reaction mode, and thus making mistakes due to constant multi-tasking. While some questions that crop up…

Currently, shipping swag is being handled by another team of sponsored contributors. However, it could be moved back to the Community team and we would like you to be prepared if it is. This lesson will give you a general overview of the process. Should you need to ship swag in the future, you’ll be…

Managing the Money Many events are able to use the WPCS system to process vendor payments and reimbursements, collect sponsor funds, and manage ticket sales. However, if they’re not in the US or Canada, they are not required to run the money through WPCS, and actually not recommended if it will result in the organizing…

Free venues are becoming harder to find for some Chapter Meetup groups. To help with this, we have started a Venue Assistance program that helps cover the costs. Here are the guidelines we follow. Check the Reasons First, check the answers to see if the organizers have looked for alternative solutions. Next, look to see…

Reviewing Income Tickets Make sure the ticket revenue figure is offset by an expense line item for Comped Tickets for speakers/sponsors/volunteers. If a community is trying to increase the size of their event or might be over-estimating the number of people who will buy tickets, adjust the ticket revenue line item so that they’re not…