 The best part of WordPress is that it is completely open source and easy to use. That's going to start it with it and it is what keeps them using WordPress. So please give it up for Adam Walker. I think we might need to redesignate this the hat room. That was a really good introduction by a fantastic hat. So thank you for that. So I've got a couple of goals for this talk. One is hopefully to be an inspiration for each of you to use your professional skills for the good of your local community. Two is hopefully for us to have some good conversation and dialogue. So I'll try to leave a lot of time for questions and answers because I always get a lot of questions related to what I do. And three, just to be completely honest, is I'd love for you to sign up to be a volunteer at our London event because we need WordPress people that are passionate about WordPress and their community because the way that we build 48 websites in 48 hours is through WordPress. So I'm a big fan. I've been using WordPress since I believe 2004. Again, a lot of custom development on it. I have a team that does a lot of custom development on it. And I still keep a regular blog at one of the many links that you see on the screen there. So you're welcome to connect with me. Any one of the million ways that I've given you, which is probably too many. My apologies there. But I'd love to connect. And I'm going to be here all weekend and would love to continue to connect with the London WordPress community. So what is 48 in 48? It's an event where marketing professionals get together to use their professional skills to build 48 websites for 48 charities in 48 hours. The goal of the event is really just that we want marketers, we want professionals to be able to use their skills for good. You know, a lot of times when we think about going to, and I think this kind of goes into my next thing here, there we go. A lot of times when we think about giving back, or we think about volunteering for a charity, we think about doing things like passing out food or, you know, building things or giving away clothes out of shelters or different things like that. And those are all important. And those are all good. And I've done a lot of those things in my life. But I find that when I'm able to give back using my professional skills, I'm able to have a wider and deeper impact on organizations than I otherwise would. Because my time when I'm ladling soup in a soup kitchen has a different value than my time when I'm giving marketing expertise or consulting. And so the way I build my time is I'm a lot more expensive if I'm giving consulting. And so when I give that away to a charity, it's my way of impacting them in a much greater way because my time is more valuable in that sort of scenario. So we did this because the impetus behind this movement, my co-founder was a founder of an agency. He ran actually two agencies that he grew and then sold. And he found that a lot of times the people in his organizations wanted to give back. They wanted to be involved in the community, but they did not know how. And they didn't have a way to give back using their professional skills. And so he started thinking, well, what's, you know, we're a marketing agency. How can I use my team's professional skills to give back to this community? What's the most basic marketing thing that a charity needs in order to grow and thrive and just really do good work? And the most basic thing is a website. And so he started asking the question, okay, well, if we're going to build a website, let's do it over a weekend, let's do a hackathon type event. We're going to build a website. How many websites can we build in one weekend? And he started asking me, you know, we're dialoguing about this. And what I found out later is this is actually a setup. He already knew how many he wanted to build at the end of the conversation, but he's smart and he's a good salesman. And so he said, Adam, you know, how many sites can we build in a weekend? Can we build five sites? I'm sure we can build five sites in a weekend. How about 10? Okay, sure. We can build 10. Well, how about 30? Can we build 30 websites in a weekend? And I'm, okay, yeah, I could probably figure out how to do that. And he said, okay, can we build 50 websites in a weekend? And, you know, I hesitate a little bit and say, okay, I think we can build 50 websites in a weekend. Okay, I'll make it easy on you. We'll do just 48 in 48 hours to make the marketing work, right? And so that's what we did. In 2015, we launched with one event in Atlanta to build 48 websites for 48 charities in 48 hours. And I had no idea how we would do it. And I lost a lot of sleep for several months and would have nightmares about the event. And then we pulled it off and it was really amazing. And then the next year, everybody was so excited about it. We wanted to do it again. So we did it again. And then we made it our goal to continue to expand. And so we started in 2015 with one event this year, 2018. We'll do six events. One of those is going to be here in London in the fall and the others are in the U.S. So we're trying to expand internationally. And honestly, we did this because we wanted to do something big. I find that if you're going to set a goal, why not set the biggest goal you can possibly think of and then run really, really hard after it. And so our big goal for 48 and 48 is that by 2025, we would like to have 48 events in 48 cities worldwide. So we're in 2018 right now with six events. I'm hoping with the help of some great WordPress people, we can get to 48 events worldwide. So this is always the question everybody wants to know. How did you build 48 websites in 48 hours? So I started off with the idea that we would do this all custom because that's what my agency has traditionally done. We've done all custom websites. And so I thought, okay, we'll do custom builds. That was a terrible, terrible, terrible idea because custom builds aren't sustainable long-term. You can't validate code fast enough. A non-profit or a charity can't sustain a custom built website for a long period of time without having a lot of support and that support cost money. And so instead of doing that, we sort of moved towards a more templated model. So the first year we used Genesis themes and we built everything on Genesis themes and we scaled that way and it was great. And then later on, I'll get into this in a minute, but we used Beaver Builder now, which I'm a huge fan of and would advocate very much for. But first, the preparations. How do we build in 48 hours? First, it takes a lot of preparation from the charities. So we run the charities through three courses of work so that they're ready for the event. The first course of work we go through, they do things like setting up a Cloudflare account so that we can then integrate with Cloudflare later on on the back end and actually push the sites live at the end of the event with one click. We also walk them through, you know, how do you find where your domain is registered and all those sorts of fun things that charities have absolutely no idea about. Some of you are smiling so you know what I'm talking about. We also run them through coursework like trying to understand what their branding is. We take them through a detailed branding questionnaire, understanding who they are, what they are, what they're about, how they're trying to reach their community, what their mission and what their goals are. We ask some silly questions like, you know, if your charity was a celebrity, who would that celebrity be and why? Just trying to really understand the personality of the charity. Then we also run them through coursework around the website. So why do you have a website? Who's the target for your website? What are you trying to do with a website? What are the major features that you must have in the website in order for this to be successful? We really want to really understand that and that all translates into a document brief that the teams get at the beginning of the event and then walk through and really understand what they're doing, what they're building, why they're building it and really connect with the charity to do the best work for them. So the process, the weekend of, is pretty straightforward. We don't, you know, volunteers sort of show up without knowing much of anything on Friday. They do a very, very quick, very focused discovery time with their charities and this is not with the charities collaborating. It's focusing on the documents the charities have created and they do a call to find out how the charity, like to ask clarifying questions, you know, what's this mean? How do I do this? When you say this, you mean this, that sort of thing. And then they build. They just roll, so by the end of the first night, typically we have a homepage built for almost all of the charities and then usually the next day it was feature builds and sub-page builds and then Sunday is quality service testing, all the wrap-up you can think of, all the major stuff and Sunday night the sites actually do go live at the event, so it's pretty exciting. The technology around this, everybody always wants to know about that too. So we have had built a WordPress multi-tenancy setup, so we did not do a multi-site and so we wanted to do WordPress multi-tenancy so that they're all individual WordPress installs with individual databases and we can spin up those databases off of one core instance that we refer to as Methuselah, because why not? And so Methuselah has a core set of plugins and really one theme, which is the Bieber-Golder theme and all the things that we need to make the sites work and then we literally instantly spin up all 48 sites all at once and then we're able to deploy all of those at once too through the setup and through the system. If you want to get in any more into the technology I'll give you who you can tweet at. I'm not the technology guy for the team but I can talk the talk a little bit so I'll answer any questions that I possibly can. And then caffeine, there's a lot of caffeine so everybody wonders you know at a 48 hour event are you really there for 48 hours? An interest no, everybody has to sleep myself included, I learned a long time ago that going for 48 hours straight is a really bad idea and so everybody goes home and sleeps and gets good rest and comes back the next day refreshed and ready to go but really the event, it's a lot of work but it's really a lot of fun, it's a lot it's honestly a lot like a word camp there's a lot of community around it a lot of collaboration, a lot of people helping out one another and it's really becoming a thing where people look forward to it every year to see friends and meet new people and really make new friends so it's been great. So and my slides have stopped working. Oh there we go, okay. So seven takeaways after, sorry the main takeaways after seven events so we've done seven events now which means we've built, I can't do the math in my head but I'm gonna say like 350-ish sites somebody that's better at math can tell me don't tell me now and the first thing is always content is just a beast I think anybody that's ever built a website knows that content is probably the worst part of the entire process so I also run a digital marketing agency and it's true there too when we're working with larger clients they don't want to give us content and the charities also don't want to give us content and so we try to coach them through that process as best we can, we also try to let them know that content's nothing to be scared of you can do this, it's okay just carve out a little time and we try to frame it like that just carve out time, write some content it's gonna be alright, do the best you can and then we'll move forward from there the next lesson is set expectations early and often so I'm finding that when you're dealing with people there's a lot of misunderstanding that's surprising, I know everybody's shocked by that, it's ever been in any kind of relationship that there's misunderstanding but there's a lot that goes into really setting expectations and so we try to set expectations on the website when a charity signs up I actually recently recorded an entire five minute long video that walks through a whole analogy about what our event is like comparing it to a tiny house which is a house built on a tiny trailer which is like a thing in the US I don't think that's probably a thing here it's a little ridiculous but you should look it up they're entertaining especially in the process in a non-technical way and that was a way that I could do that we also send out a whole lot of emails we reset expectations over and over again we train our project managers to know and understand what the expectations are and to communicate those to the charities so that they know up front what's expected of them because yes this is a free website but there's also a lot of work involved from them because they're gonna have to write content and all that sort of thing and we try to make sure they understand there's also a free website but at some point you pay for websites whether you pay a hosting or whatever they cost money in the long run it's like a kit, you know, like you can have a kit they cost a lot of money I have five of them, I know they cost a lot of money and websites tend to cost money too not as much as kids, of course but they do cost money the next is plan, execute, learn and iterate and so you know when we did our first event in 2015 that didn't go very well so we executed the plan and then we we figured out what was wrong with the plan we learned from it and we iterated and the next year we did better we improved some things and there were other things that were wrong and the next year the same thing and so every event, literally every event there's something that goes wrong that I look back at and go I should have seen that I missed it how can I learn from that and do better next time I used to get better and better and the last is that WordPress is an amazing platform for giving back the reason I've used WordPress since 2004 is it's open source, it's free it's easy to use, it's easy to maintain after our event a charity can take their WordPress install and do anything they want with it they can download the whole thing, they can move to any hosting company they can just disguise the limit whatever they want to do with it as long as they don't ask me to do anything with it we're all set I love the community around WordPress I love how community-minded the WordPress community is and it's one of the reasons that we've been able to focus and grow as we've done this so again, back to my goals how you can get involved is a little bit of a pitch but I'm not benefiting from it the charities are benefiting from it so we are coming to London in the fall we would love to have the WordPress community support the event we're very excited about the event IBM yesterday about hosting the event in the Waterloo area right on the river, it's a really nice spot they have a really great and creative space that I think we're going to be able to use for the event and I've had a lot of other good meetings about it so I'm really excited about it and I'll be back so you can see the hat and it'll be a lot of fun working together and there's where you can sign up also again, just trying to promote the event a little bit there but not too heavy-handed about it alright, what questions do you have everybody always has a million questions about about what we're doing, so who's got a question we have a question right here so Jessica, thank you can you go first I did something similar in my bed like two or three months ago okay something like that with the Spanish WordPress community we had a few problems the problem we had was to get the charities we already got that's the biggest problem we have getting the charities to sign up, by mile that's the biggest problem we have I spend money getting charities to sign up for a free website then also it was not easy to get the people to do the job we were finally I think we did three websites just one of the real content but not the most content that was because the content problem I spent almost the time trying to explain about content which was not that easy we have training courses that help with that I think it would be good to train and send the charities all the information weeks before so they can have peer paths what they need to have for the event and also that was what I wanted to say so we start the training months before ideally and I should mention that getting charities is by far the hardest thing we do we actually need 80 charities to sign up in order to get 50 through the coursework because 30 are going to just wash out during the process we try to have 50 ready for the event in case that two wash out during the event which can happen for various reasons so if anybody knows a charity in the UK that would like a free website you can save me some money and you can help them sign up because I actively pay a salesperson and pay for like Facebook paid ads to get people to sign up to get a free website which is surprising nonetheless, that's what we have to do we want to help so badly that we will spend money to do it fantastic not done for us those are really good questions I'm glad, yeah so the first thing you should know is we typically will host a mini conference during the event itself for the charities where they can come in and learn the basics about how to use your website what you need to be thinking about as you're posting for social media so we'll do some general digital marketing training for the charities during the event itself so they can also meet the teams but then leave the teams alone to get some work done and get some training over here so to them we've got 30 days of free hosting and maintenance and what I would refer to as very limited support so it's email answers, that's it after those 30 days they can stay on our platform and pay for that I prefer that they don't and so we've got a year of free hosting from GoDaddy for them like ready to go and we've set up a partnership with a company that will migrate their site to GoDaddy for them for $100 we have no affiliation with that company at all that's just the cheapest I could find and so we make it really easy for them to move off the platform and go anywhere they want because I don't want them tied to us in any way it's probably more headache for me if they are so I'm happy to see them take their site in the flyway as it were and if they want ongoing support obviously we would encourage them to reach out to the community that built it and see if there's other people there typically some volunteers will remain engaged after the event we do not ask for them to do that we tell the charities that the volunteers will not remain engaged after the event but some do from time to time that would be helpful too does that answer all your questions? yeah, okay yes yeah first question about the teams that you put together so the teams are volunteers but do you have a representative of the charity who is working with as part of that not during the event the charity the team has access to the event sorry, the team has access to the charity by phone call on Friday night to ask clarifying questions they have a short meeting greet on Saturday other than that we keep the charities as far away as possible or the work will never get done they'll be looking over their shoulder the whole time the other part of the question how do you deal with as probably most of us know particularly like the way somebody looks they've got a big opinion how do you deal with that so one of the expectations we set early and often is that this is not client work, this is a gift and you get what you get and you don't pitch a fit, like I tell my kids and we just sort of say that nicely this is a gift to you it's going to go live, if you want to take it down the next day you can do that but this is how this works and if you're signing up for this process it's going to be done by professionals so it's going to look good if there's a difference of opinion they can do whatever they want after the event there's still some that are grumpy and we do the best that we can to accommodate that and as far as the teams go I should mention we have teams that come from agencies of all sizes they'll send teams of 2, 3, 10 to the event which is kind of fun because the team can kind of merge and gel together and really build some camaraderie also large companies like IBM will send a team, I think we're going to have 20 IBM employees at our event in 2 weeks for example UPS will send teams, people like that and a lot of freelancers also come together and they will join either existing teams or they'll create an ad hoc team together and have a lot of fun and finally I'll commit to sending teams from my company thanks for having a hat like that I'll borrow her hat for the event just for you can we work that out okay I know I just like that that's right what do you call a charity okay we're talking from time to time we're being sized for this certain event so we might join on the basis of that being a site just for one event not the main or the main website which I don't think will matter because that's a lot of work on it and also I'm hoping to pull that off and get over to you right yeah I mean we'll build microsites for charities absolutely and that's a lot easier and faster than building a full website for a bigger charity so yeah microsites are great thanks for asking that what kind of complexity not very so we do in order to maintain the integrity of the sites our platform is a closed platform so it's WordPress it's about and the beaver builder theme but we don't add any additional plugins because every plugin on there has been very very vetted by our team and so those 30 plugins you can do a lot of stuff we've got a calendar plugin you can do events, you can do donations limited donations so there's a lot of functionality there but it does what it does and that's it and so we tell the charities up front it's a marketing website it's not a high end functionality website but we're not getting into like member management and all that sort of stuff so is that a call kind of an assembly yes again we try to set that expectation earlier with the charities and then several more times there was two questions in the back I don't know if you want to your right we've talked a lot about teams are there any other roles that you would require to have one more developer on the marketing website so interestingly we need a lot of marketers on the teams in particular because we are using a page builder rather than actually coding but there's roles for we need organizers, similar to our camp organizers we have a good team started if you're interested we'd love for you to sign up and consider that we also need people to set up and tear down and help out and get coffee and just all the kind of things that happens during the event we also have typically support desk people so like we'll have several WordPress people in each event that are sort of WordPress specialists that just sort of sit out in a lobby and the teams come to it because a lot of the teams say from agencies and agency may not use WordPress but they may want to be involved in the event or IBM for example probably hasn't used beaver builder a lot but they're going to have a great team there and so we have a WordPress person that can help coach them through that process of oh you're trying to do that with beaver builder and then they go from there so we try to have two to five really WordPress specialists at every event if at all possible so yeah, sign up Mark check all the check boxes that apply Hello Of the client in the world and the charity websites how many of those do you find after they've been launched and after they've been released obviously there's a job to maintain the content now, do you typically find that what 50% one user might understand the content and 50% none of you or do you find that what is the percentage that you find we can't maintain any of the content and we train them to do that now how many of them actually are updating their site on a regular basis I couldn't tell you but I can tell you that our goal for this year is that 42 of the 48 websites at every single event go live because our first year was significantly less than that we want to make sure we're building sites that go live the other six out of the 48 will go live but they're just always extenuating circumstances like hey we have an event next week that we're raising funds for we can't have a new site launch right now for example but we do train them on how to use the website we also have training videos I think it's WP101 it's installed on the back end of the website for them and it's got 70 training videos on how to do anything imaginable and so they've got a lot of training and support on the website there was one question here in the front row I was going to answer the second question similar questions to the makeup of the teams oh right so I can go into a little bit more detail so typically a team will have a project manager a graphics or UX person often some type of front end person though that's it's helpful but not always required often a content person again helpful but not required a wordpress sort of specialist the teams the ideal team would have those five roles but I mean some teams have two people that just know wordpress and understand digital marketing and they can crank out two websites in a weekend and that's fine I've been on those teams supplemented in New York where we had one guy and he ended up being the only one that showed up from the team that he signed up with and I was like okay let's build a site so we built two sites together and it was great but there's a lot of peripheral support from the rest of the community at the event to help with whatever is lacking on the team so typically there are 20 to 25 teams at the event and so each team will end up building more than one site some will build two, some will build four it depends on the size and scale of the team well and how many we have there's one back there I think I know somebody first in the law gotcha that's great of course you manage it, I'll be quiet I was wondering if you were confident that the development would like to contribute that you would not find the time to join in person is it possible to contribute directly and how will that work? yes so we do have remote volunteers you can volunteer during the weekend of the event as a remote volunteer when you sign up additionally after every event we have a post event volunteer team that exists just to fix issues front end people are really great for that in particular we're building sites in 48 hours there's going to be bugs we take those bug reports put them all on the Trello board and then we have a team that knocks out each of those issues after the event we'd love to have some remote volunteers we need to make sure that's in that presentation next time you mentioned relating to the charities the pre event workshops that you run do you do something similar for the teams or does anyone just turn up on the day? we're working on that to date we haven't done a lot of that we have done some training videos for the teams in terms of how to get started but we've not done any actual coursework with that trying to figure out if volunteers would actually be willing to go through any courses or not I think maybe watching a few videos might be easier if we're going through actual courses but I'm thinking there might be some by the time the London event rolls around seems likely it's a really good question you're using Beaver Builder I was just wondering how much design you would do from scratch and how much you're going to have 10 plates to use in the future so we're using Beaver Builder and we're also using an additional add on what's called the Beaver Builder ultimate I forget so Beaver Builder has its own starting layouts and then Beaver Builder I forget the name but it also has starting layouts so we've got between the two of them probably 50 different layouts to start with and so what we do is we encourage teams to begin there with one that fits the needs of the charity and then highly customize those after that some teams will start from scratch because they're more confident and they really understand Beaver Builder and how it works but I find that the most effective teams will start from some existing layout and then highly customize it from there Hey Ross where are you if anywhere we're looking into UK specific charity issues like GDPR I'm going to all the GDPR sessions here first I'm also, I'm trying to dialogue with several agencies that have a lot more experience in this area to be sure that we're covering all of our bases there it's very important to me to make sure that all of the legal standards are met and really all just the standards are met for that so if anybody's an expert in any of those fields I'd love to chat with you that would be helpful I'm going to the sessions I'm talking to more agencies I've even had some conversations with a law firm here in the UK just to be sure that we're following all the guidelines I just wanted to clarify what your definition of charity is in the UK we have a legal status of charity but we also have public schools religious associations community associations right would you entertain them as well or do they have to have the legal status of charity typically just the legal charities so the criteria for the charity is very broad it's essentially a legal charity first generally non religious non political so that we're not hitting any extremes there and can't be on the extreme fringe of any sort of hot button issue the example I'd love to give which you'd probably appreciate is in America guns are a big thing so we probably would not do a website for a charity that's advocating every human own automatic weapons like it's not legal or it's not political or religious but that's probably a little too far to do that otherwise it just has to be small so under three million dollar budget we'd like for them to have a staff person of some sort have a part-time day maybe and that's pretty much it so we really want a big spectrum of as many charities as we can find I think schools will also be a little too complex is the other the other hard part of schools I've done some school websites with my company and there's a lot going on there it's a very interactive session I love that that's why I left a lot of time for the Q&A the question is already over but it's often to see how the audience is interacting with you but I would also like to ask a question so did this project influenced the way you were looking at volunteerism and how yeah I think it's helped me to to it's something to recognize that people tend to specialize and when we can engage people to volunteer in what is their specialty there's a lot more value in that and that's not to say it's not valuable to you know ladle soup at a soup kitchen there's a lot of value in that and honestly I would argue there's maybe more value to me personally if I do that because of how it impacts me as a person but there's a dollar value that's exponentially greater when I give my professional services away so I'm trying to not just advocate that with 40 and 40 but in all areas like where are we professionals to help more people in need I totally agree any more questions from the audience we still have a little time left if you want to last chance but you can always find me with the hat so yeah how has it impacted your company yeah so I run a digital agency and the charity at the same time which is entertaining it's helped us to gain some credibility we're a very small agency we started very small I never worked in a large agency before and so now I'm able to interact with more large agencies in a more credible way because you know I get it if I was a large agency I'd look at my tiny little agency oh you don't know what you're talking about but because I've done all this and I've interacted with larger agencies it's just given us a little more credibility to be able to work with them and do other projects so it's a very indirect impact but it's been a good impact upon someone and I'll be around all weekends and I've always got the hat so if you want to find me please do it yeah one last question from Tom thank you that's a great tool and I don't know if it was a chance to about how we can support that but on a personal level you talk about what happens after the event the website for what happens after the event yes I'm so I've learned this at every event I go to now I try to leave way before everybody else to get real sleep because I can't I'm too old to do this I can't keep up with all the younger people and I got five kids I got to keep my energy levels high so I tend to go back and sleep reasonable hours at the hotel I've got a younger staff that sort of stays and make sure everything's good and after the event I'm completely spent but two weeks the next three weeks we have two events so I've got to really conserve my energy carefully because it's going to be intense so this has been great thanks so much for coming thank you for giving us very interesting and inspiring talks so please one last a big applause for Adam Walker about GDPR