Make Your Own PodCamp

You know, Christopher S. Penn and Bryan Person, and Steve Garfield, and Adam Weiss and Steve Sherlock and Susan Kaup and everyone else who helped make PodCamp Boston didn’t have a roadmap, right? Chris and I winged it a lot of the time. But we did learn a bunch of things. LOTS of information about that is over at the PodCamp blog. I thought I’d recount, on the eve of PodCamp Toronto, a month out from PodCamps Atlanta and New York, and just around the corner from the PodCamp YOU are planning.

The goal of this piece is to give you some advice based on our experiences. The EVENT ITSELF is all love and fun. Planning is tricky, so see if this helps.

Venue: It’s the Hardest Part

We asked HUNDREDS of establishments. Out of that, there were two who said yes. One for $4,000 and the other for $1,500. We chose the one that was the most historically significant, because that’s how much you mattered to us, PodCampers! (Shhh, we chose the cheaper one, sillies).

We did lots of this work by email. We explained up front in the first paragraph (even the subject line) who we were and what we wanted. Lesson: Give people a quick out from having to read your request.

We didn’t give them TONS of details. We asked for a place for 200 participants, with wifi, where we could do media presentations. Other than that, the details weren’t that important until we got a maybe.

The venue, in case you’re wondering, costs nearly the most. So finding a venue sponsor, like the incredibly gracious Museum of Science, Boston, is key. Lesson: MONTHS later, we still share the love to our sponsors.

Fundraising

Boy, nothing costs like free. Chris and I worked tirelessly to get funds raised for the event. We did a lot of cold calling and a lot of asking, and we learned a lot on the fly. Here’s what we learned about the sponsorship process.

• Sponsors need to hear what’s in it for them up front. (Not evil, just important for them to understand.)
• Sponsors need to understand the audience they’re sponsoring. Potential customers? Reason to sponsor?
• Sponsors can be so very gracious, so share lots of love. (like to Topaz Partners and Podcast Ready, and to Jeff Pulver for making our Saturday night party a rocking success!)
• Sponsors want to stay connected and participate. Take advantage of this and get them into the program. Not paid marketing on their part, but if your sponsor has related products and services, it’s great to let them have the opportunity to interact with the crowd. Know who does this often at PodCamps? Talkshoe. They’ve been to Boston, Pittsburgh, and now they’re coming up to Toronto. I imagine they’ll hit NYC, too.

This brings me to another concern: Sponsor BURNOUT. Our joking method when we started out our fundraising was to target everything with the word “Pod” in the name. If ALL these PodCamps do this, you’ll burn out the sponsors such that they won’t really want to (or be able to) donate. So, be clever. See what local groups will work out best for sponsorship. For instance, in Pittsburgh, Justin Kownacki reached out to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh for a great space for the Friday night reception (that has somehow been baked into the “model” of PodCamps). Now, he’s got a potential spot to host this summer’s event in Pittsburgh (I’ll let Justin talk about that some other time).

So, be clever with your sponsors.

Handling the Money

The one trick of raising all this money is having a proper Tax ID to help take care of the financials. This turns out to be costly and/or tricky, unless you can get a corporate partner to help out. For instance, in Boston, Christopher Penn had the Student Loan Network help us out. In Pittsburgh, Justin Kownacki had Liberated Syndication help. This turns out to be a great way to manage that specific aspect of things.

But make it EASY for people to donate. Build PayPal buttons. Figure out all the various ways you can get money to flow easily into the fundraising effort, or you’ll find yourself fretting about the money endlessly. Free isn’t cheap, especially when we attempt to roll a meal into the experience. (Boston wasn’t good food, but Pittsburgh was really neat, with this great Vegan fare — could’ve used meat, but hey!)

Getting the Word Out

The most effective ways we used to get the word out included creating “buttons” for people’s websites that linked back to PodCamp for signing people up. We also started an email signature line campaign, adding links to PodCamp to our emails. We blogged about it ceaselessly, recorded audio promos for our shows and other shows. We did everything we could to get the word out.

But Pittsburgh! Thanks to the work of Something to Be Desired castmember Eric Schark, PodCamp Pittsburgh got all kinds of traditional mainstream press. Leesa Barnes and Mitch Joel and the rest of the PodCamp Toronto crew have done a lot with this, too. We’ll surely do more for Boston2. Lesson: Be as new media as you want, but find ways into the mainstream press and media outlets, too.

Wikis

We used PBWiki, a free online editable website software, to build out PodCamp. We used this for everything, from our transparent accounting to our registration to our session scheduling. Of that, the only part that STUNK was the schedule. It was *so hard* to edit tables in the wiki.

I would gripe about this forever, but hey! PBWiki fixed it. Their new editor makes it SUPER easy to edit the schedules.

Just the same, the only other part that kind of chews is the registration method. It was a little clunky to have folks register via the wiki, and it wasn’t that easy to scrape to send people group emails when the event drew near. To do it again, I think we’d do registration off-wiki, but tied to the website in such a way that made it feel fairly unified. Mr. Penn?

Event Rules

Unconferences are about as few rules as possible. The idea is that everyone is in charge. We pushed hard on that theme, from the very opening “un-keynote,” where I stressed the point that everyone ran the event. A piece of trash was YOUR piece of trash. A broken cable was YOUR broken cable to get the AV guy to help us fix. Beyond that, we stressed only a few things.

• The rule of “vote with your feet”- If you don’t like a session, quietly and politely leave.
• Everyone is a participant. – There is no audience. We encourage EVERYONE to throw a session, join a panel, have a roundtable, contribute from the crowd.

Did we have other rules? I forget. We had time guidelines, so we asked for polite things like that. But that’s not a “rule,” is it? Unless “golden rules” count.

What Did I Miss?

There have been PodCamps in Copenhagen, Berlin, and Vic Podcaster led the West Coast effort. We even had a PodCamp SecondLife, thanks to Lynette and some others. So, I’m sure I missed something in this list of helpful hints. Maybe Amber Rhea or the gang down in PodCamp Atlanta have something to add? Or some of the other folks who helped bring you the event?

AND IF YOU ATTENDED A PODCAMP: tell us in the comments what you thought, what worked, what didn’t (don’t say the food in Boston- we know!), and what else people should know.

I’m a few hours away from experiencing PodCamp Toronto as I write this, about to see some wonderful people. What am I looking forward to most of all? You know the answer: community. I am looking forward to meeting people I love, and people I’ve yet to fall in love with.

Last word: Don’t forget to wish Jon Swanson the very best for his weekend, where he is contending to become Senior Pastor (contending isn’t the right word, I guess- they’re preachers) for a community he and his family love with all their heart. Say hi.

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