Django Girls Inland Empire Retrospective

If you’re looking for a short recap of this event, see Django Girls Inland Empire Recap

Inspired by Django Girls Ensenada, Audrey and Danny started planning this workshop back in June. After holding a meeting, Tiffany found a location and a date for the event. We realized later that our date conflicted with DjangoCon US. Unfortunately, the event needed to be delayed 3 months to be rescheduled in the same space at UC Riverside.

We had assigned ourselves roles based on an assumed early September workshop date. As months passed, our roles changed. Tiffany and Trey took on primary organizer roles, collectively planning logistics, locating students and coaches, raising sponsorship funds, controlling the online presence, and planning decorations and swag for the event.

Finding sponsors was more difficult than we expected, mostly because we initially lacked the essential resources that sponsors require. Audrey and Danny helped us immensely on this front. We put together a prospectus with a concise value proposition and clear sponsorship tiers.

We really really appreciate our sponsors for this event. We were sponsored by Cars.com, Python Software Foundation, Eastridge Workforce Solutions, Two Scoops Academy, Truthful Technology, and JetBrains.

Finding coaches was not a difficult task. We knew folks in the Inland Empire and nearby Python communities who were interested in helping out at a Django Girls workshop. We held an optional coaches’ meeting a month before the event and many of our coaches showed up to participate in this event.

The coaches’ meeting gave us an opportunity to introduce the kind of respect and language we hoped the coaches would use. Our coaches were a mix of experienced and inexperienced Django Girls coaches, as such different people told us stories of caution and success, and gave tips to make our event the best possible. It also gave us an opportunity to discuss things such as color and how to make our event transgender friendly.

For creating and purchasing our swag, we relied on the resources listed in the organizer’s manual, the Django Girls organizers Slack channel, and recommendations from the Atlanta and Portland Django Girls blog posts. We found the advice from the Slack channel and other Django Girls organizers extremely helpful.

Finding participants (students) was a learning experience. We tried different techniques of connecting with people in person including attending Python group meetups and speaking to a couple undergraduate classrooms at the University of California Riverside (UCR), posting about our event on Facebook, Twitter, the local newspaper, the local library, and emailing staff at UCR to forward our event to students. Most of our attempts to find students were fruitless. Most of our students seemed to have found us purely because our Django Girls website existed. A couple students joined because they were significant others of programmers, who wanted to understand their spouse’s job better and be able to teach their children/grandchildren programming skills. Lastly another five participants were graduate students from UCR in non-programming degrees.

The event went quite well. Many of our coaches and attendees had very positive things to say about it and a couple of our participants signed-up to help out at the PyLadies booth at a local conference next month. We also set up a follow-up meetup for attendees who want to learn more or were not able to complete their website.

Success by the numbers:

• Original student sign-ups: 37
• Student attendees: 26 (most absentees notified us of their cancellation)
• Coach sign-ups: 17
• Coach attendees: 14

Lessons Learned

To raise sponsorship money:

• sell multiple sponsorship packages with high dollar amounts (e.g. $1500, $1000, $500 sponsorship levels)
• the person signing off on the funds wants to see a PDF prospectus, not a website
• make a beautiful PDF prospectus to let companies know you’re willing to put in the effort to make this event excellent
• make both a colorful PowerPoint-style prospectus as well as a text-based one

Finding participants (students):

• posting open spots on Twitter did not work (our followers are mostly programmers)
• posting open spots on Facebook did not help, although most of my connections are not programmers
• sending emails out to students at the University of California Riverside, did not work to get undergraduate students but we did get graduate students (perhaps they receive too many junk emails in a day)
• posting to the Riverside library worked in terms of getting two students and we made connections that could be better utilized in the future
• most of our students came from in person conversation, a couple were wives of programmers who wanted a better understanding of what their husbands do
• we need to do a better job of finding groups of people who are already interested in learning how to program and promoting the event in person to them

Thanks!

We couldn’t have held this workshop without our sponsors. Thanks Cars.com, Python Software Foundation, Eastridge Workforce Solutions, Two Scoops Academy, Truthful Technology, and JetBrains!