Promotion
Getting the word out about the event to find your attendees isn't difficult. To make it even easier, we present a handful of techniques that we found most effective:
One of the big aims of Django Girls is to make it more mainstream for women to build the web. That’s why we like to engage the local press and highlight the participants and their enthusiasm. It looks like journalists like it as well!
Write a press release (or ask us for help with that!), and prepare a list of local bloggers and journalists who write for women-focused magazines and simply send them an e-mail. Make sure you do that early enough that they still have time to write an article and print it (2-3 months ahead of the event is good enough).
If you're working with a big company as a sponsor, maybe their PR department can help?
Getting the word out via social media is pretty easy today. Create a Facebook page, Twitter profile or fan page on whatever service you use in your city and ask your friends to help you spread the word. People share things really easily, and that has been by far the most effective source for us too.
Go to the resources chapter to find logos, images and photos you can use on your social media profiles.
You can also use photos from previous Django Girls events from our Flickr. You can freely use photos from our events in Warsaw and Kraków. Please check the licence of photos you are going to use. Some of them can be used only if certain conditions are met.
If you create accounts on other websites using your Django Girls event email address, you may lose access to these accounts if another organising team begins to run workshops in your city at a later date. Of course, if these accounts relate to your workshop and contain no personal information, you would likely be happy for these to pass to the new organisers in future anyway :)
Students and professors are a very active group of people who want to learn new things. Don't focus only on technical universities! Try to reach people with a different background. Here is what you can do:
1) Prepare a simple e-mail you can send to your local universities and ask them to pass the message to their students and faculty.
2) Find Facebook groups and communities of students, and post information about the workshop in those online spaces.
3) Print some posters and ask universities if you can put them up them.
Go to your local Girls in Tech, Geek Girl Dinner, Geek Girl Carrots, DevChix, and PyLadies meetups and invite them over to Django Girls! Check out meetup.com to identify your local meetups and communities.
Print some posters and flyers and distribute them in your local gyms (women's locker rooms are awesome!), music stores, cafes or restaurants. Think about where women gather in your city and use those places to get women with very different backgrounds. Diversity rocks!
Go to our resources page to find posters and flyers we already created. Don't be afraid to contribute yours, too!
In your application form, you can ask women to give you e-mails to women who they would recommend to be part of the workshop. Send them personal invitations and encourage them to apply.