 Thank you. Thank you Just see that this is um, it's loud enough for everybody Excellent. I understand that most of you have hangovers this morning. So I won't be too gentle or else. He'll fall asleep So Paul be joining us later on Paul is my web developer and he had to work work with me and nurse me through the Rebirthing of my WordPress site recently so happily But I've got him here case you've got Questions for really really smart people that that he can help with but he'll take over for a little bit later But I'll sit down, but really on Cool I was a teeny bit nervy this morning getting ready for this and my husband said but you know heaps of public speaking What's what's the difference here? And I said yeah, but usually when I talk it's about fundraising Which I know so well, and I'm talking to a room full of volunteers and volunteers are always awesome people He said oh what so you're talking to a room full of assholes today. I Said yeah, probably not you all look all right But basically I'm putting myself up as a use case of WordPress. I'm an avid WordPress lover App lover. I mess around with tools all the time and try and push the boundaries of what they can do for me and my Audience so I'll just take you through a little bit of a journey so you get Where I'm at For people who like structure here's a little bit of an overview If you do like structure you'll probably end up hating me because I'm a creative and I'll get like an idea that comes And bams me on the back of the head and spits out whatever I was saying and takes over so Just just bear with me. It's all good So who the hell am I? Basically all the background. I do like to have a bit of a funnel rant I'm a little bit anti funnel, but we'll we'll get there and then I'll take you through I've got five tools that I'm going to showcase that I use on my site So a bit of who I am we'll start with the problem that that I came across back in 2005 When I was I guess looking to start the business So the problem was at school and fun school and club fundraising organizers Who are the PNC committee the PNF committees even like the guides organizing this the volunteers organizing this conference? Fate organizers, kidney organizers. There was a high turnover of them They received no training. They're all time poor volunteers and they had to reinvent the wheel all of the time Not only that they didn't really have ready access to Information about the suppliers who could help them So what we have created in the time from then until now is a comprehensive supply directory a Massive library of resources and we've built an amazing community of school and club volunteers a Little bit of how I came to be the fundraising whisperer. I was a lawyer. I call myself a recovering lawyer And then once I went back to work part-time after having Children and when I had my third it was just a little bit hard So I stopped working my stepfather was distributing a laundry detergent, which was environmentally friendly and worked on a refill system I came up with a genius idea that it would make an amazing fundraiser Schools could get ongoing revenue and all of that and so I threw myself at this project as I do With everything and I'm research the crap out of school and club fundraising in Australia And there was really nothing that did a great job of connecting the suppliers with the volunteers And plus there was this whole reinvent the wheel issue That business the laundry detergent business Failed Dismally it was Bit of a disaster it just didn't work But as well Disney said failure is only failure if you don't learn from it And so that through that process of course I get to see this huge gap in the market And I meet this lady Helen Creswick who is here with me to the right of me She had a hobby fundraising website and we caught up had coffee and we were soulmates from the start and Both of us in the same breath Described what was needed by the industry, you know, we need a publication that is sent free to the committees We need a website that has a lot of resources We need to build a community where everyone supports each other. I was saying wouldn't it be great if they did that, you know, they and it genuinely never occurred to us that we would actually do it and so, you know We went away and it was about probably a week or so later that I literally I don't know what I was in the middle of doing, but I stopped and I sort of had this Literally list the light bulb moment. I go all they is we and I don't even Met her once and I found her up. I go Helen Helen. We could do it. She's going. Yeah, we could do it Running around crazy in the next week. We put in $500 each to start this thing So we start the fundraising directory and it was a success from the start and we had an absolute ball The sad part of the story is that Helen passed away in 2008 about a month ago was 10 years And so obviously that was awful And I probably took six months just not doing anything just recovery, but Particularly in honor of her. She really wanted it to grow into really the Bible of fundraising and it has So she would be tickle pink So we have a print publication. I have a question mark over whether that's a dinosaur certainly has gotten smaller over the years We're putting our 13th publication together for next year and we do send it out free to Volunteers out there On the cover is my youngest child. I'm too cheap to pay for models. So I doesn't make my own The the downside of that is I've ended up with five children. So I Took that a little bit far But it's a it's a cool one and then I have this website. This is the remodeled website that Paul helped to build It's pretty cool. So there's a lot on it There's a lot of complexities and Paul will take you through a little bit of what he had to deal with when faced with this project But I'm really going to take you through sort of the how we've extended it with some extra tools Now I'm going to see if this bit works No right It has a twin Bit of a video, but I'll play on it. There we go Anyway, so I'm just just a tiny little demo that I can't really explain unless I'm taking you through it So this is our supplier directory And it's just a beautiful interface now It wasn't before and you just click on the filters and that sort of auto refreshes What it displays so you can really find any kind of fundraising supplier that you're after It's awesome. And then we've got our free resources. We have heaps of them and they're all free to download And so this again is a beautiful interface And then you just sign up to become a member and download it. It's all membership is free to So it's gorgeous obviously so we needed to customize the site quite a bit to be able to Deliver all of these these are out of we have so many articles been around for so long Like we could post twice a day for a year and still not use up all of our content So there we go, and I know it's going to move on to my next slide now Okay, now Facebook is sort of where it's at for us a lot of people are on different platforms but This I took this screenshot on Thursday was 35,000 and 95 followers today, it's 35,287 so it's actually like it's quite a Dynamic growing group, but it's also really amazing groups actually Facebook is where the community that Helen and I dreamed of Creating that's where it's taking place. We thought it was forums We all laugh at forums these days, but The Facebook is where it's at and in particular our closed Facebook groups. We have about three and a half thousand members in our closed groups and This is actually now where all of our content creation comes from Because these guys are all chatting to each other. We've got a fade organizers group They're all asking questions and then all these people come straight on and answer them There's an article for us. How do I run my hot chip stand? 25 responses and then we just create curate that really into an article someone types into Google How do I run my hot chip stand? There we are but it's a fantastic Groups for them as well as for us And these are our free resources. I took you through a little bit before try to keep a whole range of resources for people to use Fun social media images they can download and share on their committee page This one is for our suppliers who actually because we may come on out of advertising in case I didn't make that clear So our clients include Cadbury the entertainment book all the tea towel fundraising people So we give this away free for suppliers Now before I move into my My favorite tools. I'm gonna have my little bit of a funnel rant And I know funnels are helpful particularly Click funnels because they do help to organize you and get you thinking about what your core value is how you communicate it properly and all of that But what bugs me and maybe Facebook has flagged me as a gullible idiot because I just get bombarded with these ads for people selling funnel training And that's the one sitting on a farm luxury farm or sitting in Santrapas sipping pina coladas and going are you too could automate your whole business and Not do any work and become rich like me Well, the reason they become rich is because people believe that they can have their lifestyles almost multi-level marketing Yes, but there we go. There's my there's my rant. It wasn't too toxic Okay, now the first of my tools is probably the least word-pressy But I love it last year we did in collaboration with QT actually the Australian said that for nonprofit studies We did a national fate research project. So we did a big survey of all primary schools in Australia We got 500 responses out of 7,000 schools, which is Very good very difficult to reach But they said statistically significant which I interpreted as really really happy with the results But we got an awful lot of data out of that and so I'm turning that We're just about to launch it actually Into a set of resources where people will come in plug the date of their fate And then we will send them the resources to count them down to that event So basically they get any information they need at exactly the right time. They need it three months to go This is what you need to be thinking of if you haven't already booked that book here And by the way, here's a list of suppliers that can help you But that's all and we obviously Replicate that through our website the content is on there, but we also ship it out to them Here's another toy I'll be playing with the upside to being an app addict is that I have some cool stuff on My site that I can engage my audience with the downside is that I can waste an awful lot of time playing with tools I Have more lifetime deals than I know what to do with most of them just sit and Waste away But there are some that are amazing I'm an avid fellow follower of app sumo every couple of days I'm going back and seeing what else they've got for my hoodie bag But here's one I bought a couple of weeks ago, and I it'd be love so Because I can't be on the website all the time I did have a chat a live chat thing on there It was pretty annoying. It would come up on my phone. What are the raffle rules? Everyone wants to know what the raffle rules are And so I point them the right way so I decided to get in an assistant the fundraising whisper bot Now helps me so I've got some this bot Curia bot So You'll see she's Up there on the left. I've launched her. She's coming and asking what we can help with And She's saying. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we'd love to let you know what we're all about. Well, how can we help you? We've got a list of the most common Questions or places we want help with This one asks just tell me what you do and so I've got this lovely graphic that pops up that Basically takes them through the guts of what it is we do But if if you are after raffle rules, it'll sort of take you to where they are if you want all of the common Questions, it'll find a way and if we can't answer them It Sends a question to us that we can later answer But also we have the Mailchimp sign-up built into it So we sort of end every conversation with you know, we send out fun emails every week Surely you want to get one you want to sign up to the list so So that's pretty neat This third one is possibly my favorite. I had so much fun doing this this is a Hybrid I use type form, which is a form builder. It doesn't need to be type form that you use Zappia, which I couldn't live without It does a lot of things for me. So basically The exercise I was after was I Creating articles for my clients. So I've got however many advertisers As a SEO exercise, I want to get links back from them because it's all relevant content and highly valued Google juice So what we're offering in exchange for that is going well, we'll do a profile like a behind-the-scenes a day in the life of You and put it on our site as long as you link to it So the process of doing this I created a type form For those of you who don't know type form. It's sort of very much an interactive question answer form builder And but I've used hidden fields to put in the name and business name of the client So when they open the form, it's hey Toby What's the first thing you do when you get to the picture products office each morning kind of thing and then and then it's all Ready to post which through the magic of Zappia So I've got a wee demo of just how quick it takes How quick it is and now I've done the work once and there's nothing more to do anytime So there's the link that I send them they click on the link that has the hidden fields their details in it So how do you start your day obviously they would write Actual content I've just put in a couple of words to demonstrate quickly how this works What's the one thing that happens sure to bring a smile to your face good reviews and as soon as they Submit this document you'll see what happens. So I go back to my WordPress backend And it's actually would be quicker than this if I hadn't missed the click, but it's there as a draft So, um, yes press preview silly So I'm going to use this also for Doing like fate profiles getting fate organizers just come and do a wrap-up of their event Again, it's just zero work for me content creation engagement all of that. I love it Oh Yeah, and then you just obviously edit it you can actually if you get them to upload an image It will create that as the featured image, but I'm a trophy. I want to know what all of that looks like So I don't have that functionality, but you can it's pretty cool Here's another app that took my fancy and is it's pretty cool. It's Bima get Bima. I mean, it's basically a what's new And it's a little pop-up that comes from the side and again, this is a very quick demo of it You click the what's new that doesn't just come up automatically because that would be annoying And that pulls automatically from your WordPress content as you're posting content You can turn off the display on Bima And then you go into the Bima interface add extra stuff So I put this little gif in to say our website was about to be launched Yep, which is pretty cool But that's a lot of fun because then we can also make little announcements. You know, we've got this new advertiser They've got this offer. It just means we can add extra value to our advertisers in a very simple way So that's cool my final tool It's so she'll be that I've come to rely on it could be any of those evergreen social media Feeders aggregators meet Edgar social be I Can't think of the name of other ones, but basically You've load your content in Two categories within social be you set your calendar. Yes, I want a funny to post on Tuesday morning I want a case study to post Thursday afternoon And then it just pulls from your library continually and it has certain rules. It won't repeat content within three months And it's basically you set it up once and it just feeds it out it can pull automatically from your new content through WordPress I Don't do it because I have so many categories because I have quite a carefully crafted social media timeline That when I post something new I It's very simple because they have a widget So basically you go to your article that you want to post you click on the plug-in the widget on the tool bar So should be it pops up with this you choose where you want it to post you choose which category it goes into You write your little bit of a blurb and then it's in the library and it'll stay there forever You're probably going to have a fair bit of content existing to be able to get away with Doing that But if once you do and once you put the work in the first time and it means that I go in and post the fun stuff So I'll go share current stuff This is not just what we do We certainly do have like you know that actual engagement But I think you still need to get the value out of all of your existing content. I think I've clicked through to an advertiser and And that's a great way to do it. I Decided to throw in some unsolicited advice just because I've been in business a very long time And my first bit of unsolicited advice is not to listen to unsolicited advice. So you can all just sit back and relax Probably number one thing is a business is only a clever idea until someone hands over money and I Say this because I have Followed my tail many times over the years with little clever side projects That have eaten up a lot of my time and money And these days I stick to my knitting and I think Tim Ferriss talks about it in his Four-hour work weekbook about just getting to that point as quickly as you possibly can even if you kind of mock up Website with the product you buy it at retail cost or whatever just to prove there's a demand before you then go and service it and create a whole framework to service it Stay fun. I like to keep a lot of a lot of that energy in what I do and I guess it's sort of The the feel that I work in is for it because certainly volunteers want to have fun A lot of the problems of the volunteer engagement is because there's not not as much fun in like committee life meetings blah blah blah blah blah, but Yeah, but that's a good thing persistence overcomes resistance And I think the what I bring to the table with this kind of work is I'm creative. I'm a problem solver and I'm a dreamer and a doer so I get stuff done. I actually have this saying I like to add GSD to everything I do which is get shit done But that's my part of the talk I'm going to bring Paul up here To have a little talk about how we came to create a website that needed to service this This audience Okay, thank you Mandy so my name is Paul Dunson and I am Really Mandy's overlord when it comes to web design and development Mandy's an interesting case In terms of a client for us as you probably imagine, but not as unique as you think So talking from agency world, which is where I come from although we try not to think of ourselves as a traditional agency We're actually seeing 50% of new business coming through the door of Discountable customers who've had a previous developer who are trying to change where they're at now and move on To something better and we're all trying to move forward to something better the man is an interesting case because She's been in business for 12 or 13 years. She's obviously a smart person. She's made Yeah, she she's made her way and she's finally got the job done with a very successful business but To change Where she's come from doing a similar kind of thing for 12 years, which is unusual Coming through the door We went to really type really take a few steps back and really slow down So in this particular case with Mandy We actually went through four revisions of the scope of work before we actually did anything So I know Mandy and I went back and forth back and forth About money and scope and this and that and timeline and all that sort of thing But I think if you're in a position where you are changing Agencies or developers or even technology it's really important to instead of getting excited and jumping in head first to really slow it up and Determine where it is that you see yourself in the next few years And really look at things from the long-term play Wordpress has over time kind of been associated with cutesy little blogs and you know mom and dad kind of sites, but There are some serious projects online that are in wordpress. There are some very big players that use wordpress and I think The people who really succeed in wordpress are very strategic And I think that's where Mandy combined with us worked well as a particular case study So in the case of Mandy we had to do a complete back-end rebuild She had a number of third-party custom tools that we really just pretty much had to throw in the bin We did a complete migration to Amazon web services Which is unusual for a lot of people a lot of people who are used to the wordpress World they're used to dealing with shared hosts We're actually built a complete environment in Amazon with a staging site, which shouldn't be Particularly unusual for you. If you don't have a shut the staging site, please get one and One of the big areas where we really succeeded with Mandy was regular catch ups So what I mean by regular catch ups is you know every few days we check in and we go Okay, so-and-so in the teams working on this particular area. These are the challenges. We're having we need this more information and I think a web project really runs well when the client takes some time to invest in it after all is their business and We get we get a lot of clients through the door and a lot of them try to Completely hand off everything to it's like the web developer will solve all my problems and I'll take no involvement there's a really good balance between too much client involvement and Just enough as a service provider. We need to find that balance But I think it's very important if you are running a small business or a large business that You take the time to understand as much as the web developer does if not more about what's going on in the project where you are heading because Having two heads looking for those problems is always going to be better so working with Mandy's enthusiasm our approach so Yes, she's certainly more one of our one of our more exuberant clients and yes largely humoring her In times of challenges definitely a strategy The self-proclaimed app addict So At OEC we're very much about Website performance and finding that balance everybody's talking about mobile access to the web The majority of our economy commerce clients are now seeing 60% of access to their sites by a mobile device and WordPress has a terrible reputation of Existing with of being sites that well I should say the WordPress community has a terrible reputation of basically loading up websites with Plug-in upon plug-in upon plug-in so much. So we're actually seeing clients come in with 75 plugins installed on their website So one of the most common areas of our business is actually picking up new business from people who have slow loading websites That will end up probably stripping back to about 30 plugins that do the same job with some clever thinking So I know in Mandy's case not that she was the worst and she did not have 75 plugins But the number was up there. So finding that balance is I think is really important if you're in the WordPress space Maintenance costs When I went to when I went to university. I was a Griffith University boy So back in the day they used to say and I assume the numbers are pretty similar that's 68% of The cost in terms of running a digital project is in maintenance It seems like everybody's forgotten that these days So if you're going to go and spend $10,000 on a website, then you need to be counting You know accounting for the fact that to be competitive You need to be spending and upgrade updating and you need to be paying for hosting and you need to be evaluating on a regular basis, so I think if you're a long-term player and The money is there And your business case supports it the maintenance is something you need to be considering really up front So as a WordPress builder Our advice to you Take the plug-ins to a minimal One of the things we see Bizarrely is The development community community in general Like everyone knows what an include is right We're basically you include something on one page that you don't use on another It seems like they've completely forgotten this when it comes to WordPress so You can actually include on each particular page you use in WordPress only the plug-ins you need to make your site run faster Super simple fundamental hardly anybody does it so if you're upskilling at home And you're trying to pick up some new tool pick up some new tricks. Make sure you're looking at that kind of stuff backing up your site It's so it's so strange like so many of our new clients come to us with no backup strategy, so Generally what we do is we have nightly backups storing between five to seven retentions incrementally with the e-commerce clients where the data in the database is changing sometimes It's even more but even for static brochure sites. We always spend time on a backup strategy with our clients It may be annoying to spend An extra 20 bucks on a server to back up your site per month But for us to recover the whole thing when you wipe over a file or completely destroy things The cost is Exponential and nobody wants to do it WordPress has its limitations like every any project and It's extremely powerful Where I think One of the big focus areas. I don't know. We've just sat through the the futuristic Talk is that I think what what we call internally a WordPress hybrid project is where we're going to see a lot of it come The WordPress community has a lot of plugins that you can build from scratch and the codex allows for it. It's very easy Apparently times up But I think knowing when to actually use WordPress and when to actually use languages like PHP and so forth and RESTful APIs in unison Is a really good skill to have I think picking your battles in terms of the code structure that you use is when you can really make the most of WordPress and That would be my advice to you Okay