 Anyway, these are my superhero glasses. So it's about using your WordPress powers for good, so you can be a WordPress superhero too. The thing about my WordPress superpower glasses or superhero glasses is I really can't see much through them. Number one, they're sunglasses, so and I'm indoors. Number two is I need glasses to be able to read my screen and these aren't them. So anyway, but it's a fun little way to kind of give you an idea of what the talk is about today. I need superhero reading glasses. If you find some, send me a link, I will buy them. But they have to be at least 1.75 to be able for me to be able to see them. Anyway, so it's all about using your WordPress powers for good. And the idea is that we are all part of the WordPress community. We take a lot of amazing things out of the WordPress community. What can we do with the powers that we garner from that? I don't know if you're aware, but WordPress is about powering almost a third of the entire internet. That's huge, right? That's enormous. It's an incredibly powerful resource and it's free. It's open source. Unlike some of those competitors that always try to, like YouTube is always trying to sell me on have I thought of this one and that one, they all start with W, but not the WordPress one. They are all trying to sell me on these things that are proprietary, right? So you can build a fast website on some of these competitors, but they own the software. You're kind of held hostage by them. WordPress doesn't do that. WordPress is like, hey, download it for free. Now, I understand that you can do absolutely everything for free with WordPress. Sometimes it becomes like that free puppy, right? Because I want to buy this theme and I want to buy that plugin and I want to pay for really better hosting and all those kinds of things. So it does, it can cost money, but WordPress itself, all the core files, it's free. It's a gift to you. But what do we do with such a gift? When a gift is given to you, it's your responsibility to use it somehow. So what do we do? We build websites. And sometimes they're really, really bad. This is one of the first websites I built when I started my company a few years ago. I think this is about five years ago. I was building websites, okay. Now this is US money, okay, because I'm from the US, but I was charging $300 a website and people were like, oh, I don't know, that's kind of pricey. And I thought, well, you know, if I couldn't do two or three websites a week, I'll be making all kinds of money. That's a lot of work, three websites in a week. My very first customer was this woman's website and she wanted e-commerce on the site as well. And she says, well, how much would you charge for e-commerce? And I was like, $500. I spent about 150 hours on her site. I ended up with like making pennies an hour, but it was an education that was priceless to me because I charge a heck of a lot more than that for a website now. And I am able to make money doing WordPress and doing things with WordPress. And this person who was the client that just I finally offloaded her, I mean, referred her to somebody else recently because I'm actually doing a full-time job now with another company and so I don't do as much with managing WordPress websites anymore. But she was an education for me and I will tell you, I learned CSS because of this website. I didn't even know what CSS was when I first started. Started a WordPress company. I started building websites. I didn't even know what CSS was. That's how you can do so many amazing things with WordPress and you learn on the go. I can do all kinds of stuff with CSS now. I can break things with CSS. I can play with HTML. I'm dipping my toes in the PHP. And guess what? You can really break a website if you start messing with PHP. But anyway, you can build really, really bad websites and guess what? You can still make money. Granted, that site did not make me a lot of money. But even some of the ones, do you ever make a website? And they're like, oh, you should put your link to your company in the footer and you're like, I would, but you made me build this really ugly website. And I don't want my name associated with it anymore. But yeah, so you can make money even with the really ugly websites. I had a customer who's an artist a few years back. And he showed me this website of another artist. He said, I want it to be just like this site. So I can't make it just like that site. Because if I make it just like that site, that's kind of plagiarizing. I said, but I'll take the aesthetic. And I will work with the aesthetic. And it was this lots of white space, very ethereal. So I gave him a mock-up. I actually gave him a site. I built about seven pages into it. I show up to his house. I'm showing him the site. He's like, it's just not quite right. We ended up with a black website with white writing and like sparks flying on every page. So that was another lesson because I built that website twice. And so we build really good websites. We build really bad websites. We make money. I like money. I realize that's a US dollar, forgive me. But we have fun too, right? I don't know, is it how many of you this is your first ever word camp? Oh wow, that's exciting. I feel privileged that you're sitting here with me today. Word camp is fun. I know right now you're a little overwhelmed. You're like, this is my second talk. And there's this like wacky woman with weird glasses in the front. But we have a lot of fun. You can wear wacky glasses to word camp that shows you how much fun it can be. But we do have a lot of fun. I have made so many amazing friends through WordPress and we have just a ton of fun every time we get together. But maybe we should do more. Maybe there's more that we can do. Maybe we should be using our WordPress powers for good. I like to think about paying it forward. So WordPress is a gift to me. What can I do to pay it forward with WordPress? I started mentoring people about four years ago. This girl here, Amanda, she actually now works for me. But when she first started out of college, she was building websites strictly HTML. And she came to me and said, I know you do websites too. How would I do XYZ? I said, well, you ditch the HTML websites and you start with WordPress. And she said, well, what's WordPress? And I said, oh, this is like exciting. It's like, let me introduce you to WordPress. And so I sat down with her. I mentored her through a summer. She is an SEO expert making money on the side doing SEO for websites. And now I hired her for the company that I work for. And she works for me. And we both have an office together in Hilton, New York. I run outside of Rochester. And so I mentored her. I also take on interns. And I have mentored them into WordPress and how to do business and how to do marketing. Mentoring is a great way to pay it forward in the WordPress community. Somebody taught me WordPress. My best friend had a, was starting a nonprofit. And she asked me to partner with her on the nonprofit organization to run it. And we said to her husband, who was a WordPress designer, we need a website. He said, great, I will build you a website. So he built us the structure of a website. He said, here's your logins, you and the content. And I was like, how do I even log in? I didn't know it. And that was six years ago. How do I even log in? Seven years ago. And so he said, well, here's how you log in. Here's a video on YouTube. I don't have time for you ladies. Figure it out. So I logged in to WordPress and I start poking around and I was like, this is really cool. I loved it. I had so much fun with it. And like I could make a change, hit that update button, go to the home screen and it like changed. Everything was the way I wanted it to be. I was so excited. So he sat down with me one day because I said to him, okay, I understand how to buy a domain. I understand how to edit a website, but how do I go from buying a domain to actually installing WordPress, installing a theme and having a website together? So they had five children. She worked evenings. He said, if you come over and make dinner, I will show you how to get from point A to point C. And so I did, I went over and made dinner and after dinner, the kids cleaned up and he and I sat down and he showed me how to download WordPress. He introduced me to Salt Keys and all these other wonderful things that I don't have to do anymore because there's this thing called one button install. Are you all familiar with one button install? But if you know the basics first, going into one button install means you understand what it's all doing and how to fix things and how to change your WPK of big file, your HTX file, et cetera. And that's because he mentored me. So I pay it forward by mentoring other people and showing them how to do things with WordPress. You can teach classes. So I started teaching classes in WordPress. I just decided, I wonder if anybody wants to learn from me. I put this little class together. I advertised it. I had five people show up. I was like, that's so cool. I taught five people in a day. I made $500 because I charged them each 100 bucks. And so I made some money off of WordPress. I imparted some wisdom to other people. I didn't overcharge, I honored my time but I was, and they felt grateful because they only spent that kind of money in a day. They started in the morning with nothing. They left with a WordPress website. Yes, of course they had more work to do on it but they had something they could move forward with. And those people continued to come back to our meetups because now they know what it's like to be a WordPress person and a WordPress user. So that's exciting. You can teach classes. My next class is coming up in, let's see what is that, two weeks. June 17th, Father's Day is my next class. You can hold a clinic. So I often will get together with people. I will hold WordPress clinics. I say that the doctor is in. Like the seat next to me is where if you're sitting in there you're the person who's getting some assistance and people will come in and ask me to help them with some CSS or what plug-in will I recommend for this, that, or the other? How can I change the color here? What theme would work well for this kind of an organization? And those kinds of things. And so I'm able to sit down with people over the WordPress clinic and just kind of help them with all those little nuance-y things that they need for their website. Sometimes it's just a matter of teaching somebody how to use the C-Panel on their host. Sometimes it's a little more complex than teaching them how to do CSS. But WordPress clinics are a great way to kind of be involved with the community, whether you're attending one or holding one. And in our meetup in Rochester we have WordPress co-working events once a month. So this last Thursday, which was only two days ago, yes, we had a co-working day. And co-working day actually also turns into a giant happiness bar because everybody's helping each other with their websites as well. So somebody will ask me a question about, hey, do you know what I couldn't do for this? And before I could even answer, somebody else says, hey, I just did that last week, let me show you. And it's this great happiness event where everybody's helping each other with their WordPress websites. And so it's exciting. And we get to meet friends, we get to hang out. A lot of people work on their own because we're a lot of freelancers. So when you have a co-working day, it's an opportunity to not be by yourself and to kind of interact with other people. We order lunch, we do all kinds of fun stuff. You could speak in a meetup. How many have attended a meetup in your area? Oh, fantastic, I love that. So meetups are great places to meet other people in the WordPress community, learn a little bit. Maybe you have a topic a month or a topic, you know, whatever it is that you meet. And it gives you an opportunity to learn from other people. But even if you're new to WordPress, you have the ability to speak and to teach other people what you're learning. The people at meetups are at every level of the spectrum and there's something that everybody can learn from everybody else. So this is, we had a meetup and Jessif came and he, who knows who he was teaching on from that picture over there? Yoast SEO. He was doing an SEO attack at our meetup. And that's the Yoast icon there, or gravitar I think probably. So you could speak at a meetup. In Rochester we have monthly meetups. I set the topics for the entire year and then I ask people to present on them. Now, just because we set the topic for entire year doesn't mean it won't change. Sometimes it does. But it's a great thing to be able to say, I know I wanna go in July because that topic is really interesting to me. And so we'll talk, you know, we'll set a month on security. We'll set a month on membership sites. We'll set a month on how to back up your site and make sure that you're hack proof and what do you do if you get hacked? Let me just teach you one thing real quick. If you don't have somebody to teach the session on what to do if your site gets hacked, be very, very careful. Because I set up a month where I said, I'd like somebody to talk on what to do if your site gets hacked. And nobody volunteered. So I said, well, I'm gonna have to do some research because I've never had a hacked site. Guess what happened? I had 21 hacked sites in the shared server space that week. And so I had to teach, I had to go through the process of cleaning up all the sites to teach that. So be careful what you wish for because you may be the person who has somebody to teach it. And if it's cleaning up hacked sites, it's not fun. And Adam's over here probably going, I could have helped you with that, Michelle. You need another class. Yeah, I have taught classes now. That's right, you know. So there's things you can do to prevent it, but there's definitely, even the best prevention, sometimes people can work around and you still have to be able to know how to fix it. But anyways, that's all about speaking at a meetup. So any topic on WordPress is usually something that people wanna talk about. How to integrate with social media is also a big one. Maybe you don't wanna talk, but you can help organize a meetup. There's usually more than one person that gets involved in helping organize meetups. And it's a great thing to be able to have a team of people that are putting events together, helping find the people to speak, helping get the word out. We post our meetups, not just on meetup.com, we have a Facebook group, we post all the events in there. In Rochester, we have something called Nextplex, which is an IT events calendar. So we post it in multiple places so that people find out about us and hopefully we get more people to come. We also think about paying it back. So paying it forward is great. People have given to me, I like to give to others in an event to pay forward, but there's ways that we can pay back the WordPress community as well. You can participate in the forums. Have you ever been to the wordpress.org forums? It's great, it's a great place to learn. I will say though, have you ever visited the Codex? Do you know what the Codex is? I want a plain English speaker version of the Codex. I actually thought it wouldn't be great if we had a WordPress wiki that we could just have kind of like plain English. I registered it, I've never built it, but someday we may have WordPress wiki.org or WP wiki.org. Now participating in the forums is a great way. Even if you just stalk for a while and kind of look and see what kinds of questions people are asking, and if you know the answer, don't know the answer, but you can learn a lot from there. You can also search the forums for your answers as well. But participating in the forums is a great way to kind of dip your toe and see different ways that you can help others out. And you can contribute to core. So if you're somebody who has the ability to code and understand how to do some of those things, like I said, I can do CSS, I can do HTML, I'm starting to learn PHP. I'm not somebody that really contributes to core much. I am very appreciative of it, but there are a lot of my friends who when you look at their badges on WordPress.org, you can see that core badge that's on there so that you know that there's somebody who's contributed in some way, shape, or form. And that's just a picture of GitHub. So if you're not familiar with GitHub, that's where the core resides. That's where core lives. You can also help with videos. So every WordCamp, we try to video every session. If you haven't been to WordPress.tv, it's a great place to go. WordPress.tv has probably thousands of videos now. You can search topics, you can search speakers, you can search WordCamp, so you could look up WordCamp Hamilton from two years ago and see who talked and see what topics that were presented there. You can look up a topic. Let's say you do want to learn how to do a membership site. Type in membership sites. There's lots of videos there that'll show you different ways to do membership sites. The way you can contribute is by editing videos and uploading them. And also there's a great push to have the closed captioning done on videos too so that if somebody is deaf or hearing impaired, they can read the topics. And that's a very laborious thing to go through a 45 minute talk, especially if you're doing somebody who talks as fast as I do. But to get that up there for people that's just a phenomenal gift. So if you have the ability to even just one video help out in one way, shape, or form, if you're from Hamilton, they're going to have a ton of videos to edit after this event and to upload. So if you have an opportunity to work with WordPress.tv, I highly recommend it. And at the very least, go explore it because there's just a gold mine of information. You could help organize a word camp. So we have some amazing organizers at this event this weekend. And it's a lot of work to organize a word camp. There's, it starts months and months, sometimes a year in events of the actual camp, lots of moving parts, lots of wranglers, we call them wranglers into different sections. So there's speaker wranglers and swag wranglers and registration and volunteer wranglers, lots of things to do. This is our very first ever word camp Rochester. It was my birthday. So I was the lead organizer and I said, I'm going to do word camp on my birthday. It's my gift to myself is to have this word press community in my own backyard. The bonus of it was, I had the best birthday party ever and WordPress paid for it. It was awesome. So it was just a phenomenal day. I was so exhausted at the end of it, but it was just the most amazing event. And organizing word camps, whether your lead organizer or contributing organizer or volunteer is just amazing. Speaking of volunteering, you can volunteer at word camp. So you don't have to be an organizer to staff the registration table or to help distribute lunch or any of those other things. You can get involved with word camp just by saying, hey, I want to volunteer. It doesn't cost you anything to give up a few hours of your time and be able to contribute in that way. And it's a lot of fun and it's just very rewarding. Have you heard of the happiness bar? If you don't know what the happiness bar is, raise your hand. Okay, oh, I get to tell you. Okay, so the happiness bar is this amazing thing and there's tables off to the back out in the main area here. And there's gonna be people sitting at them all day with their laptops. And that's what we call the happiness bar. Let's say you are building a WordPress website and you have a question. You don't know what to do, how to fix something, what plugin to use, what theme. You're having a conflict. Whatever the issue is that with your website, you can take it back to the happiness bar and somebody there will probably be able to help you fix it or solve it or answer your questions. It's just one way that we give back to each other. Nobody's paid to do it, that's for sure. But, and nobody is necessarily scheduled to be there but people just like to help each other out and they sit at the happiness bar. So you can go to the happiness bar today if you have any questions. I'll spend some time there today. I'm happy to help and answer questions. But you can also be somebody that if you know more than the next person, you can help them with what their questions are. I've sat at the happiness bar before and had somebody ask me a question that I was like, well that's really over my head but let me see if so and so can help you. But I've also had people say to me, hey, can you help with XYZ? Just a tiny little bit of CSS code and they walked away very happy because now what used to be red is purple or whatever it is that makes them happy. So helping at the happiness bar is a way to make people happy and it's a way for you to help or get help that you need. You could speak at WordCamp. Is that person looking there? That's Adam. So this is WordCamp Rochester this last fall and I had 22 amazing speakers and it was just a phenomenal day and WordCamp speakers just so you know we don't get paid to be here. It's not something we don't get our travel paid for and nobody gives us hotel vouchers. It's something we go to WordCamp because we like to participate. We like to give back. We think we have something people might wanna hear and so we like to be able to share that information and that news with you. And so speaking at a WordCamp is a great way to kind of get involved too. And this is my 24th WordCamp in four years and the 13th time I'm speaking at a WordCamp. So that very first time, like the butterflies in my stomach and the imposter syndrome that kind of kicked in, like I'm gonna get up and I was talking about the hidden features of WordPress I was like people are gonna go that's not hidden and who do you think you are and that's wrong and you know what? Nobody shows up to WordCamp with pitchforks and torches. It isn't that kind of an event. So it's all everybody was like oh that's really cool and then you have some developers who'll sit in the back like I know everything and then they coach me at the end of the like I didn't know that you taught me something. So it's exciting to know that there are things and if you wanna know the hidden features of WordPress that's on WordPress TV. Look it up later. But there's all kinds of fun things you can do. Anybody can present any topic. WordCamps are blessed usually to have far more speaker applications than they have spaces for speakers. So it isn't an easy task to select your speakers when you have so many great topics presented. But if you get selected to speak, just relish it. It's one of the most amazing things to be able to go to WordCamps and present. You're not an imposter. You know what you have to say and what you have to say is valuable. I hope you still say that at the end of this talk. You can participate in a hackathon. Have you ever been to a hackathon? Anybody, do you know what a hackathon is? Let me tell you what a hackathon is. So we had our first ever WordPress hackathon in Rochester about two months ago. And what we did is we solicited non-profit organizations in the Rochester area who didn't have a website or who had a horrible website and said, hey, we'll build you a free website. And so we had a full day. We went from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon. Everybody paid $10 a person to be there and that helped cover the cost of food. So even though you were volunteering your time, you actually still paid to be there because it helped offset. And we did have some sponsors as well. And then the venue was donated to us. I had 17 people volunteer to be there that day. I broke them up into three teams. Every team had people who were like, I've never logged into WordPress before or two. I'm a WordPress developer. And so I've got five or six people per team and kind of everybody at different levels. And by the end of the day, all three sites got presented to the entire group. They got walked through and I had two people from outside come in and evaluate the sites and there was a winner. So they had something to work toward as well. The winning organization got $100 gift card to Amazon to help that non-profit organization even a little bit more. But the exciting thing was that they were there all day working on websites for non-profit organizations that wouldn't necessarily have been able to afford the websites that were created that day. People felt good about giving back to the non-profit community in Rochester. The non-profits were just ecstatic because there was such amazing work and people who were willing to give them their entire day. And it was just a way to just kind of be there and help each other out a little bit. My husband came and he had never logged into WordPress site before but he was able to be assigned tasks that he could do. Whether it was go to unsplash.com and find us free images that we can use on this topic or that. And then we had people actually with one person from Buffalo, Skype in because he couldn't come and Brian Hogg from Hamilton drove down to be part of our hackathon that day. It was just one of those things where you go to bed at the end of the day and you feel really good for having contributed to some wonderful organizations. Highly recommend if you can get a hackathon organized. It's just an amazing opportunity. You could organize it yourself. So I said, hey, I participated in a hackathon a few years back with Girl Develop It in Buffalo and I was like, this is really cool. And it was for-profit organizations just getting off the ground. I said, what if we did it for non-profits instead? And so instead of having 150 people there building 10 sites, you start small and you build. We had 17 people building three sites. And these are the people that were there. I'm not in the picture because I took it if you're looking for me. I did not have my power, so we're here on glasses on that day either. But it was exciting. This is at the end of the day and you can see they're still smiling. So it must have been a good day. But organizing the hackathon, it's not as difficult as you might think. I will tell you honestly, the most difficult part was finding the organizations to build websites for and who wanted new websites because if you're searching for them they probably already have a website. So you can't necessarily Google for websites for people who don't have websites. So there's a little bit of a paradox there. But you can find organizations putting the word out and having people talk to other organizations they're involved in is the way we got them there. You can build a free website. Have you ever given away a website? If you're a freelancer, give away a website for free. Once a year, I give away a free website to a non-profit organization. I just open up a form on my website. I let them apply. I pick the one that I think is most deserving of my time and my energies and that I have the capacity to do. So there are some that are incredibly large projects that I know I don't have the capacity to do it well because it would take up so much time that I don't have to give. Unfortunately, those are not the ones that I can choose to do. But I'll sometimes offer a discount or I will find a way to refer them to somebody else who might be able to help them. But this was an organization called Uduk Hope. And Uduk Hope is raising money to feed children in refugee camps in South Sudan. I couldn't say no to those faces. So that's who I built a website for. They did have a website on one of those other proprietary organization websites and they weren't getting what they needed. They had just a PayPal button to donate. Their website was very bland. It was not exciting. It didn't jump out at you. It wasn't organized well. And so they came to me and they said, we would love to apply for your free website. And I worked with the Uduk Hope organization in Rochester to build a website for them. I found a great online donations plugin. And you see the donate button. I've got donate on the top. I've got donate in the bottom. The call to action is now very clear and they're making money to feed these children. And so I gave away a free website but I got so much more back from it because the feeling of not only giving to a good organization, this year I'm building one for a dog shelter. Dogs are worthy too but I'm telling you nothing's gonna hit my heart like these kids faces and the excitement and the videos that are on the site of them singing and it's just amazing. So if you have an opportunity to work with somebody to build a website for an organization or to do it yourself, I highly recommend being able to do that because that was just one of those things that just gets you. But you can be creative. You can look at the WordPress core and find bugs. If you report bugs, they love that because that's how we make WordPress better, right? As we find holes, we find vulnerabilities and we find bugs and we make them better. You can develop a WordPress plugin and put it in the repository. You can develop WordPress theme for the repository. And just this morning I discovered an app. So the one all the way on the right, you'll see it's working Hamilton on the front. There's WP Camps and it's an app, I don't know if it's for Android but I know for sure it's for iOS. And there's an app that pulls off of the WordCamp API and feeds the entire app. All of the speakers, the topics, the camps, the locations, you can favorite things so that you know which one you wanna go to and it's free. So somebody said, I wanna contribute to make WordPress and WordCamps better. I'm making this app and it's amazing. And I just discovered it this morning and I'm like, I tweeted about it, I'm telling everybody about it. And that's just one way that you can be creative and contribute to the community. But I have to warn you, there is a side effect. When you decide that you're gonna start contributing and you're gonna start being involved and you're gonna be part of the community, there are lots of side effects. One of them is, we have fun. And alcohol isn't always involved. This was a speaker dinner in Rochester. A lot of you were there and it was at a brewery so we did have a lot of fun that night. We had a taco bar, we had wine and beer and you can tell people just like being together. There's always a lot of fun when we get together. We develop friendships. I love this picture because it's a bunch of Canadians and none of them are here today. But this is just an opportunity to be and make friends. I have friends in the WordPress community now all over the states and internationally because I have chosen to be involved and to put myself out there and just reach out and talk to people and that's just a great way to do it. Another side effect is I get clients. I run the meetup, I organize the meetup in Rochester. People will come to the meetup because they see it on the WordPress dashboard. They think they're gonna learn everything they need to know in a one hour meetup to make their website better. They get a little overwhelmed and all of a sudden they're like, can I just pay you to do this? And the answer is never no. Absolutely, you can pay me to do that. And if I don't have the capacity, I will happily refer you to somebody else who'd be happy to take your money as well. And it's not just about making money, obviously. It's about making their site better and making the community better. But I get clients. I get clients because people now, Google, WordPress, Rochester and my name comes up. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that, right? I got a new job out of it. Last summer, I was speaking at WordCamp Ottawa and I was talking to the people at Give at their table and I said, I've used Give for urucope.com. And they said, well, let me look at that site. And they pulled it up and they said, can we blog about this site that you built? We'd like to tell stories about people who are raising money for really good organizations. I said, absolutely. And at the end of the interview with me there, I said, and by the way, if you're ever looking to hire yours as one of the organizations I'd love to work for. Two months later, they contacted me. They said, we're developing a new, we're developing a new department. We want you to head it up. I said, sold. When do I start? And I started in January. And this is Amanda, who I had mentored a few years ago. She works for me now and we share an office in Hilton and we are the Give customer success team. And we love it because we get to call people every day and help them with their websites. And we love it because we're helping people who are primarily nonprofits. So they're raising money to make the world a better place. So we're helping them raise money to make the world a better place. And it's all through WordPress because that's all Give does is work with WordPress websites. So it's exciting to even say that I'm able to get a job out of it. And we get happiness. I admit I drank the WordPress Kool-Aid. I know that I am somebody who is, and I'm a WordPress evangelist. I proudly wear the title. I have a lot of WordPress swag. My office is filled with WordPress everything. My laptop is covered in stickers. I love WordPress because it makes me happy. Everything that you've seen on the screen today, all of those things that I'm involved with, nothing that I've showed you today has ever brought me anything but joy. And WordPress is the way that I've been able to accomplish that. And it's the warm fuzzies. Who do they get warm fuzzies from helping somebody out? When you can help somebody out and they walk away happy, it makes you feel happy, and it makes you feel like you've actually contributed in a positive way. So you're probably asking, how do I get started? Why don't you get started? Thank you. I gotta get better at that. There's lots of ways you can get started. Join your meetup. If you haven't been to a local meetup, join your meetup. If you don't know where your meetup is or who your meetup is with, come see me in the happiness bar. Grab me at any point today. I will help you get connected to your local meetup. You already did the next one, attending word camps. You can attend one word camp a year. Come back to Hamilton every year. You will get so much out of it. You can start to attend word camps all over the region like I do. Adam travels a lot for word camps. We're both on the circuit quite a bit. We love it. It's an awesome way to meet people and to see people and to give back. Go to co-working. If there isn't co-working, create co-working. Find a space. Go to Starbucks. I mean, Tim Hortons. Go to Tim Hortons. I forgot I'm in Canada. Go to Hortons and start off. I know, but it's not as popular from what I understand. Anyway, go to a coffee shop. Find a coffee shop. Stake out a couple tables. Let people know when you're going to be there and have impromptu co-working. Just let people cut together and work on their stuff. Like I said, participate in the wordpress.org forums. Help somebody else out with what they're doing. Tweet about WordPress. Tweet about what you're doing. There's a great online community. Use the hashtags. Use hashtag WordPress, hashtag work camp. And of course, use like hashtag WC Hamont so that you are part of today's conversation as well. And ask. If you don't know ways you can be involved, ask. Ask on Twitter. Ask on Facebook. Ask somebody else that you know that does WordPress. Reach out to me. Reach out to anybody. We will absolutely help you. Because together, we make the WordPress community what it is. We make it the amazing community that it is. It's made up of us. It isn't a bunch of other people and we get to kind of look at it. It is us. It's every single one of us in this room and every single one of us that ever downloads WordPress and uses it on the website. That's me. I'm Michelle Ames. I'm the head of customer success for Give. You can reach me, Michelle, at GiveWP.com. You can find me on Twitter, SlideShare, or WordPress with Michelle Ames. And my slides are actually already on my slideshare.net slash Michelle Ames. Feel free to take a picture of this wonderful awesome picture. If you really want to, you can wear my glasses today. And I will tweet pictures of you in my glasses. But it's been my pleasure to be here. I have a couple of minutes left. I think about five minutes. If there are questions, I'm happy to take them. Yes? Are they really looking for people who you can look for? That's a great question. And I'm going to repeat it for the camera. The question is, if you are working with nonprofits, are they looking for somebody just to develop the site and take it over themselves? Or are they looking for somebody to manage the site? Ongoing, did I say that correctly? And the answer is both. So it depends on the organization and what kind of budget they have. When I build a website for free, I don't necessarily give away everything for free forever. I usually host them for free. And if it's really simple and I don't hardly ever have to make any changes, then I'm happy that way and they're happy. But if there's a lot of changes that go, I usually institute a half price per hour fee to continue to work with them. But there are some that are like, if you build it, we'll take it over. Especially if you teach us how to do it. And then we'll just come to you if we have questions. And so that works too. So it really is up to that. When we did the hackathon, I required three things of them. The first thing was that they had their URL already, so they picked their domain. The second was that they came with hosting so that we could build the site and not have to migrate it later. And the third was that somebody from the organization would be there working with the team all day so that we were on task and that we were on point with their message. But other than that, it really is kind of just like any clientele, it's working with them to see what their budget is and how they work forward. Excellent. Thanks. You're welcome. Yes? You talked earlier about membership program that worked on WordPress. And our organization, our membership secretary just resigned. And we want to go online. What membership program have you worked with and do you recommend? So the question is about how do we implement membership on a WordPress website and what kind of plugins we might use for that? We'll work well and friendly users. So those programs is what I would call plugins that we use on WordPress site. And there are several in the WordPress repository that work on a premium version. So there's a free version out there that you can get started with. BuddyPress, S2 member, there's a whole bunch of different ones. If you see me in the happiness bar, I'm happy to show you some of them later. So you don't have to try to write them all down right now. But there are a lot of free versions, free things you can use. And then, of course, there's some premium versions as well, some premium plugins that'll have a little more bells and whistles, so to speak. But there's lots of ways that you can do membership sites that might work for your organization. And some of that's going to be dependent on how large your organization is and what kind of control you want to give to each member over their particular function and how much of the website they have access to. But we can talk about that. Sure, my pleasure. Other questions? Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Like I said, I'll be around all day. So if you have any questions, feel free to stop me. But thank you for having me.