Thank You + Conference Survey

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Whether you attended WPCampus 2016 in person, watched the livestream, or followed along on Twitter, we’re so happy that you could take part in the inaugural WPCampus conference.

The WPCampus community and planning committee recognize the leap of faith it can require to attend an inaugural event. We hope we didn’t let you down.

We would also like to express our endless gratitude to all who were involved in bringing this particular dream to life. This event would not be possible without our attendees, speakers, sponsors, and the organizing team’s dedication and support.

Complete the WPCampus 2016 Conference Survey

We want this year’s event to be just the beginning so, to make next year all the better, we need your help.

If you have a few minutes time, we’re looking for feedback on what you liked, what you didn’t like, and, better yet, what value we could add in the future.

The survey shouldn’t take too much of your time and is invaluable to our planning and to the future of WPCampus.

Thank you again for your sharing this wonderful experience with us. We hope it was as valuable to you as it was to WPCampus. See you in Slack! Class dismissed.

We would like to extend a big thank you to our community sponsors, Coupons.com and WP Courseware, for their support. WPCampus is a community-driven event that could not take place without the generosity of our wonderful sponsors.

Be sure to say hi to all of our sponsors and visit their websites to learn more about their services.

Thank you Coupons.com and WP Courseware for your support of WPCampus and for your investment in the future of WordPress and higher education.

Coupons.com is a huge supporter of learning WordPress and the entrepreneurial spirit that is inherent in discovering how to better create and manage our digital landscape. Be sure to check Coupons.com before any online or offline purchase to quickly and easily save money!

WP Courseware is a learning management system for WordPress that allows you to publish a course in a matter of minutes. It’s as easy as drag and drop!

We are so excited to have LearnDash, Materiell, and SiteLock as the Undergraduate sponsors for this year’s conference. Be sure to say hi on Twitter and visit their website (and booth later this week) to learn more about their services.

Transform your WordPress site into a powerful learning management system using LearnDash. Sell elearning courses, track user progress, deliver certificates, and much more!

Materiell is a Washington, DC, award winning WordPress web design and development agency. We help higher education and school districts leverage the power of WordPress Multisite to promote learning and engagement. Materiell is a certified woman-owned small business and an Alliance Partner with Instructure’s Canvas LMS.

We offer a full range of services designing, implementing, and integrating WordPress with leading LMS providers like Canvas, Moodle, and Google Apps for Education. We are also adept at designing brand assets for a custom look and feel for your organization. Materiell provides comprehensive migration services between a number of platforms.

Currently protecting more than one million WordPress sites, SiteLock delivers a patented 360-degree website security solution to find, fix and prevent malware and other threats from affecting websites and their visitors. Services include malware scanning and vulnerability detection, automatic malware removal, an advanced web application firewall (WAF), PCI compliance and website acceleration powered by a global CDN. SiteLock provides phone support, available 24/7/365.

We are proud to have FlexiDB as one of our Graduate sponsors for this year’s conference. Be sure to visit their website, and booth during the event, to learn more about their services.

If you’re interested in sponsoring and supporting WPCampus 2016, sponsorship packages are still available.

FlexiDB is free for academic use. It’s a fantastic tool for teaching students and is incredibly versatile. It can be used for introductory courses through to final year projects. The level of complexity depends on the goals set. FlexiDB provides tools for creating databases, managing user subscriptions and roles and creating front-ends either in WordPress or on mobile devices.

See http://flexidb.com/academia for more details.

We are proud to have Pantheon as one of our Graduate sponsors for this year’s conference. Be sure to visit their website, and booth during the event, to learn more about their services.

If you’re interested in sponsoring and supporting WPCampus 2016, sponsorship packages are still available.

Pantheon is the website management platform top developers, marketers, and IT use to build, launch and run all their Drupal and WordPress websites.

Pantheon includes all of the tools professional developers need to build best-practice sites—like staging environments, version control, backups and workflow. Powering 130,000+ sites with hundreds of millions of page views, Pantheon’s container-based infrastructure allows you to launch websites faster, without worrying about traffic spikes, security or performance. It’s free in development. You can scale in software on the same infrastructure from day one, and never touch a server again. Create your free account now!

We are proud to have Sucuri as one of our Vice-President sponsors for this year’s conference. Be sure to visit their website, and booth during the event, to learn more about their services.

If you’re interested in sponsoring and supporting WPCampus 2016, sponsorship packages are still available.

Cyber security is a mile wide, and a mile deep. Hacked websites are only becoming more common as global hacker communities continue to grow, share their evil tools, and automate attacks using bots. You might never know if your website was vulnerable, or if the attacker took steps to hide their tracks. It’s enough to drive a webmaster crazy. How do you keep up?

At Sucuri, our labs are dedicated to researching and thwarting the latest and emerging threats to websites like yours. Our team handles your website security needs, so that you can get back to what you’re best at: running your online presence. Passion is at the heart of everything we do, and we cut through the noise to provide you with complete security solutions. Our services are built around three defining principles – People. Process. Technology – the three founding elements of information security.

Team up with Sucuri and gain the peace you are looking for with your website security. We secure websites, so you don’t have to.

CampusPress has been an active supporter of the WPCampus community and WordPress in education. We are proud to have them as one of our Vice-President sponsors for this year’s conference. Be sure to visit their website, and booth during the event, to learn more about their services.

If you’re interested in sponsoring and supporting WPCampus 2016, sponsorship packages are still available.

Since 2005, CampusPress has powered WordPress Multisite networks for thousands of schools and universities around the world. Our managed hosting, support, security, design, and development services are tailored specifically for education. Let us take care of your blog networks, faculty/department sites, ePortfolio projects, and even main websites.

WPCampus is surveying the educational community to learn how schools and campuses use WordPress and manage their website development. Our goal is to aggregate a useful dataset for anyone using or considering using WordPress in an educational setting, and we’d love to include your feedback in our results. The larger the data set, the more we all benefit.

This survey is no longer available.

The survey has a unique format: participants can opt to answer any or all of five sections, so you can choose which questions you feel qualified to answer. The sections include:

How Do You Use WordPress on Campus
Site Demographics, Traffic, and Data
Plugins, Themes, and Features
Security, Performance, and Hosting
Your Team Structure & Workflows

Most respondents complete the survey in 5-10 minutes.

wp-survey

What’s in it for you?

Participants who complete at least four of the survey sections will receive their choice of a $5 Starbucks or Amazon gift card. You’ll also be entered to win a free ticket to this year’s WPCampus conference.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to those of you who love analytics: just for participating, you’ll receive a copy of the anonymized, aggregated data – a wealth of information about how the community is using WordPress.

How We’ll Use The Data

The results will be used to publish a series of reports on the state of WordPress in public schools and in higher education. Contact information will only be used for those who choose to receive a gift card and enter the raffle. The data will not be used in any other manner. No personal information or institutional names will be released without consent.

Modern Tribe has been an active supporter of the WPCampus community and we are proud to have them as one of our Vice-President sponsors for this year’s conference. Be sure to visit their website, and booth during the event, to learn more about their services.

If you’re interested in sponsoring and supporting WPCampus 2016, sponsorship packages are still available.

Modern Tribe is a digital design and development agency specializing in user experience, content strategy, publishing, and product development for educational institutions, Fortune 500 companies, and other large-scale organizations.

In addition to specializing in large-scale WordPress deployments, we’re also committed to open source and excellent product design. We’re the team behind plugins like The Events Calendar, Event Tickets, The Image Widget, and GigPress.

Our plugins have been downloaded and loved by millions, including many folks here at WP Campus. Sponsoring this event is just one small way we like to give back to the community.

Ping us on tri.be and let’s talk about what we can do for you.

tldr; It’s the first and only conference focused solely on the use of WordPress in higher education. You’ll learn a ton of stuff, expand your network, and be close to the beach.

But seriously…

What you’ll get out of the conference

Oodles of knowledge – check out our schedule and you might just have trouble narrowing down the list of sessions you want to attend. With over 30 sessions packed into 2 solid days of learning and fun, you’re bound to find presentations on subjects dear to your heart, as well as some that are completely foreign to you. Hone your current skillset or branch out in a few new directions too, all while staying focused on using WordPress in an educational setting. The majority of our presenters work in higher education or with higher ed teams – we’re light on vendors and heavy on folks just like you.
Networking – meeting other web professionals from around the country can be invaluable and can provide you with a team of like-minded colleagues and experts to collaborate and consult with long into the future. With attendance capped at 200, you’ll have time to connect rather than just getting lost in the crowd.
Tons of fun – join us for our big social event Saturday night and spend your coffee and dining breaks socializing with your newfound friends.

How to justify the cost to your boss

Scour the schedule.

Decide which sessions you want to attend. With a wide variety of topics, you should be able to choose several key sessions that cover topics that are important to your boss and your institution (along with a mixture of other sessions for personal enrichment). Be specific and show your supervisor how these sessions will help you meet your strategic goals.

If someone will need to cover for you while you’re out of the office, reach out and arrange that tentatively so your boss will know you’ve already got your responsibilities covered.
Stress the ROI.

The more you know, the more valuable you are to your institution – especially in the field of technology, where everything changes rapidly. You can never stop learning, and this is a great opportunity for personal enrichment. It wouldn’t hurt to mention that the registration fee is only $99 – a fraction of the cost of most conferences. You can even double up by sharing a hotel room and shuttle rides to further whittle the cost down.

Not only will you return from the conference with a lot of great new ideas and advice from people in similar situations, you’re bound to meet some folks who can help you into the future. Having a network of colleagues to bounce ideas off of can prevent you from reinventing the wheel – you can reach out to the community and find out what’s already been tried. Or you may happen across a vendor you’ve never heard of who can fill a critical role.

It won’t hurt to throw in a comparison. Find a two-day advanced WordPress course near you and see how much it costs. It’s likely that registering for that one course is more expensive than your travel expenses and WPCampus registration combined. Then remind your supervisor that the local course would teach you about WordPress in general, while at WPCampus, everything you learn will be directly applicable to higher education, and you can custom-pick sessions that speak to your exact needs.
Bring it on home.

Let your supervisor know you’ll commit to delivering a post-conference briefing for your team, so they can all benefit from what you’ve learned. Take detailed notes throughout the conference, especially if someone presents a case study similar to a situation your organization is going through. It’s important to show your boss that he or she made the right choice in allowing you to attend.

We hope you’re as excited as we are to attend the inaugural WPCampus Conference. We understand that schedule conflicts, budgetary concerns, and the limited number of tickets will mean that not everyone who’d like to come will attend, so stay tuned for possible live-streaming options or recorded sessions.

Thank You + Conference Survey

What’s in it for you?

How We’ll Use The Data

What you’ll get out of the conference

How to justify the cost to your boss

Scour the schedule.

Stress the ROI.

Bring it on home.

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