AWS Community Day is a one day, community led conference, totally organized by AWS community. It is a great way to bringing AWS conference into your town or country…
This type of event is organized by AWS Community, from the biggest one as AWS Community Day DACH, organized by multiple AWS User Groups from multiple countries, to the smallest one organized by a single AWS User Group like AWS Community Day Slovakia.
I created this article is based on how we prepared the AWS Community Day Slovakia for the first time, what we have to deal with and how it did go at the end.
Web page
This is one of the first things you are going to need. It’s up to you whether you create your own or use some template. We used a hugo template, which was created by AWS User Group Nederland and is available for other AWS Community Day organizers. 🙏👏
This is our page.
Registation
There are plenty of tools you can use for registration, such as: Eventbrite, Konfhub, Google forms and many of others. We decided to go with Eventbrite.
Call for speakers
This is same as with meetups, most people use Sessionize, or Google forms
AWS support
AWS Community Day page
Make sure to to over this page, where you can find basic information about AWS Community Day concept, FAQs, etc…
Downloadable content
AWS provide some downloadable content, which can be very helpful with planing and organizing your community day:
UG_toolkit.zip is very handy content of files containing templates, fonts, etc..
Slack channel
Make sure to follow the Slack channel community-day-organizers, where above many other stuff you can find a list of other community days, so you all got coordinated like not to schedule the community day in the same region on the same day, etc…
Also, in the same channel you can find information how to ask for funding – yes, AWS can provide some 💵 for you.😉
The event
Attendees estimation
This is pretty tricky, especially if you are doing it for the first time.
Try to look at:
– How big your community(s) is.
– How many people attend the meetup(s).
– How are much and how far are people willing to travel.
– How good your marketing was (will talk about that later).
Please be realistic and rather expect less and be surprised, than expect “summit style attendance” and be disappointed.
An example from us: Our Community Day was organized only by a single User Group having 200+ members and the meetups attendance is between 40 and 80.
The willing to travel is not that high.
So we started low, and thought that if highest meetup attendance was 80 out of 200, for a community day we can aim for 120 – 150 attendees (at the end we got 166).
This is almost pure alchemy 🤯 as there are other variables that comes into play like weather (during the storm you should expect less, during the super nice sunny weather probably as well, etc…), but some guesses can be done.
…and don’t be surprised, if you see a registration boom on the last day(s) before the event starts. 😀
The venue
The venue should be selected based on the number of attendees you expect and have to choose the venue that can dynamically work with number of attendees.Let’s say you estimated it to 150, so they (or you) must be capable to adapt the venue for 100 people and same for 200 people, by different type of seating.
Count at least +2 rooms more. You gonna need one room for storage which can be also used as your ‘3 minutes quiet&chill out room’ (thank me later), another room should be reserved for the speakers.
Also make sure the expo won’t be isolated too much from where people are gathered. This is not what you want – You want the people to interact with the sponsors. That said, it’s not the best idea to have expo on the other floor than the sessions are. Ideally when people get out of the session, or going from one room to another they should cross the expo area. Good plan is to get the food and drink tables directly to the expo as well.
The catering
This is a full day conference, where people expect some refreshment but don’t overthink it. Of course it depends on the eating habits in particular country, we did snack, lunch, snack.
Make sure to also put some refreshment to speakers room.
The tracks
Don’t be the overthinker here – less is more. The more tracks or rooms you create, the less people you have in each. It’s tempting to have 4-5 tracks in the same time, but really think about it before you do.
I must admit, we did a bad job in that. Expecting 150 people, we created 4 tracks which was not the best idea. Yes, venue can make them look that even with 40 people the 100-chair room looks almost full, but the people were complaining they had to do a hard decision to choose between the sessions they really wanted to attend.
This may lead you to another double edged sword – to stream or record the sessions. We decided not to do it, even if recording seems like a good idea for those who had to choose between the sessions. Maybe I am wrong, but if the sessions are recorded, what would make people to come?
What about the track format? It’s up to you, but usually what I saw on previous community days or summits I attended, we choose 1 hour format per speaker
– 30 minutes session
– 15 minutes for Q/A after session
– 15 minutes break for another speaker to prepare and for attendees to walk the expo and have something to drink
It may seem like too generous time, but don’t forget you have the sponsors out there at the expo, and they are expecting people to come.
With all the snack and lunch breaks, this is how our whole day looked like:
08:00: Start of the registrations
09:00 – 09:15: Organizers intro speech
09:15 – 10:00: Keynote
10:00 – 10:30: Snack break at the expo
10:30 – 11:15: Sessions slot 1
11:30 – 12:15: Sessions slot 2
12:15 – 13:00: Lunch at the Expo
13:00 – 13:45: Sessions slot 3
14:00 – 14:45: Sessions slot 4
14:45 – 15:15: Snack break at the expo
15:15 – 16:00: Sessions slot 5
16:20 – 16:30: Thank you from organizers
Planned start
This is very much dependent on when people used to start to work and how punctual they are. In Slovakia people usually start to work between 8am and 9am, and we are pretty punctual. But I can imagine in some countries 9am is pretty soon, so I would not plan keynote there.
We opened a registration at 8:00am, at 9:00 started a short welcome speech from the organizers, followed by the keynote at 9:15am When keynote started, more than 2/3 of the attendees were already there. Having a different habits, I would think about starting with one or two sessions, and then kick a keynote.
The Speakers
We believe in equal opportunities, so we tried to create a good mix between AWS employees, kickass experienced speakers from community and new speakers (everyone started somehow, and this is good opportunity). Also we tried to find balance between international and domestic speakers.
Make sure to communicate with speakers about their preferred time of their presentation (morning/afternoon).
Free or paid
The community day organizers are always dealing with this one… and there is no right or wrong way. Both have pros and cons.
Paid Event – Even symbolic price can reduce the no-shows (ratio between registered and the ones that actually showed-up) and increase the budget you get. But there is a chance you have to pay taxes, as you are creating the profit.
Free Event – Prepare yourself for a no-shows… 😬 It’s frustrating, but it is what is is.
We decided to go free and we experienced about 40% no-shows.
Marketing
This is probably something we underestimated a lot. I think having proper marketing, would end up in more attendees. We received a lot of feedback that people knew about the even only by coincidence or from ‘friend of a friend…’
Creating a linkedin group and meetup.com page is apparently not enough. Next year we will get more focus on that topic.
This is also something you can ask your sponsors to help you with.
Sponsors
Speaking of sponsors, they are the one filling your budget, so make sure to:
– Contact local companies and big players as well.
– Prepare nice introduction email.
– Prepare a contract and signing method, like docusign, or others.
– Create a venue plan and send it to them so they know what to expect.
– Some of the sponsors are eligible for MDF funding – a special budget they can claim from AWS. More information can be found in this slack thread
Be creative and come up with some sponsor packages with multiple benefits, so sponsors have some options to choose from.
Things you thought you never deal with, but you will 😂
How to get the money
You can’t get the sponsorship money just like this (I wish I could🤣). For that you need some company, or civic association, or something similar. It’s up to you, everything have pros and cons.
Organization team
It’s up to you, but I would say for small community day 2-3 people may be enough. We started 2 people team, then we asked another friend to join us.
Volunteers
Volunteers are very helpful, at least for registering and other stuff too. Try to ask the sponsors if they can allocate some people for you, maybe for additional benefit or so.
Event manager
Same goes for event manager. If you can afford event manager, or sponsor is able to allocate one for you, by all means take it. Having an event manager, you don’t have to deal with things like (which we had to deal with):
Badges: pre-printed or stickers?
We did not want to go the way, to pre-print the badges with names. We rather ordered empty badges, and printed the stickers ourselves. The reason for that was that we were expecting some no-shows and also the emopty badges can be used next year. So we ordered the empty ones and just pre-printed the stickers with names of the attendees.
Printers
We had many discussions if to buy or borrow and at the end we decided to buy one, which we can use next years. The one that we voted for was Brother QL-820NWBc, because this is the one multiple computers can share.
Earlier I mentioned the speakers’ room. Having a printer can solve the problem who should be allowed into the speakers’ room. Marking speakers and organizers on their badges will make it easier NIEKOHO BDGE
Lanyards
This is also something you can get from the sponsor, but we didn’t want to go that way. We wanted to distinguish between Speakers, Sponsors, Attendees and Organizers – and we did it with different lanyard colors: Red for organizers, Orange for Sponsors, Black for attendees and speakers. Same lanyards can be used next year if you have some left.
Some more advices at the end
Communication channel
This is a must have. For official announcements before the event, we used Slack with closed channel only for speakers and organizers.
We also created WhatsApp channel between speakers and organizers for quick updates during the day.
Sepparate WhatsApp channel between organizers and volunteers is also good idea.
Speakers’ slides
Surprisingly (or maybe not 🤣), many of the attendees asked for a slides. Communicate that with speakers, and if they are ok with providing them, put them on the website after the event.
Speakers’ dinner
Either sponsored, or paid by your budget – I definitely vote for yes. This is a great way to know your speakers, also they can meet each other before and have some food, drinks and a good time.
People being people 🫣
There is always someone not ok with something, requesting something, need something… Prepare for that. Even is you think you prepared everything, there is always something.😅
All being said, organizing AWS Community Day is a lot of fun, but also a hard work to do. It took us 6 months of work, from idea that we are doing that, to the actual event.
If you are still thinking if to do it or not – by all means we say Yes, go for it! 😉
