We opened registration for Joomla Day New England on March 4, 2009, to our immediate user group. We then started advertising on March 6.

By March 22, we had hit 100 registrants on the site. We recently decided to accept 10 more participants - just in case a few people decided not to show. Due to space limitations, we can't take more participants than this.

How did we get so many registrants so quickly? How did we manage to pull together the event in just a few short months -- we only decided to hold a Joomla Day at our January 21 user group meeting?

Here's a few tips and tricks from Joomla User Group New England!

0. The Joomla Day Team

Before you move forward with this, you need an excited, engaged team of people to put this together. We were fortunate to have two such teams.

Our Web Team did a fabulous job with cleaning up our user group website, as well as quickly putting together the Joomla Day website. This includes Romola Chrzanowski, Janet Hamblin, Heidi Stanclift, and Kristen Wilson. Romola, Heidi, and Kristen are alumni of the Grad Center, while Janet is currently a student there.

Our Organizing Team put the bones together for the process, and they'll help get the details ironed out between now and May 30. They include Barb Ackemann, Beth Armour, Samantha Bovat, Romola Chrzanowski, Jil MacMenamin, Meg McCarthy, Jen Kramer McKibben, Tamar Schanfeld, and Andrea Tarr. Once again, we have 6 alums (including 2 faculty members) and one current student of the Grad Center in this list.

Both teams contributed with everything to come below. There was never a more devoted, dedicated bunch to making Joomla Day New England a huge success!

1. Partnerships

We are holding our event on May 30, 2009, at the Marlboro College Graduate Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA. The Grad Center has showed committment to Joomla since December 2005, when one of the students completed their master's thesis project using Joomla as the platform. Since then, there have been several Joomla websites built each term as part of the master's thesis process, and Joomla has been incorporated into the Web Applications course.

When we asked them for space for a user group, they were very happy to provide it, free of charge. The group is heavily populated by faculty, alumni, and current students, as well as many area web developers.

The Grad Center agreed to provide us the meeting space free of charge, in exchange for sending literature home with all participants explaining their degree programs. They will also speak briefly to participants at the event. This is a great deal for both sides. The Grad Center gets a chance to market to a targeted audience that's a good match for their programs, while the Joomla Day gets to provide the meeting space, breakfast, and lunch to all participants, and travel fees fully reimbursed to all speakers.

2. Target Audience

Next we had to think very, very carefully about who exactly we wanted to attend our Joomla Day event. Do we make it oriented toward clients who might own Joomla websites? Toward extension developers? Front end developers? Graphic designers? Total newbies? PHP/MySQL experts who know nothing about Joomla?

Eventually we decided to target the audience to existing Joomla developers. These were people who have largely built a site or two in Joomla and know the basics, but perhaps don't know about custom template development, extension development, the Joomla community, etc.

We then designed our sessions around this. We are offering two levels of template development talks, one on SEO/marketing, one on the Joomla community, one on extension development (from the basics), and one on getting the most out of a Joomla site.

We chose our speakers as a mix of Joomla User Group New England members and OSM team members. Barrie North, Barb Ackemann, and I are part of the user group, and coincidentally, we all teach at the Grad Center as well. Elin Waring and Rob Schley are from the Joomla core team, while Mitch Pirtle is a former core team member.

3. Keep It Small To Start

We consciously kept this event very small to start with. 100 people would fill the space, but give the event a very intimate setting in which participants would not be inhibited from getting to know the speakers. We did not expect the event to sell out in 17 days -- but that was largely due to a great setting and a good marketing strategy.

Our speakers are mostly local. Rob Schley is coming by plane, but the other speakers are all within driving distance of the event. This keeps speaker travel reimbursement costs low.

4. Great Settings

Brattleboro is definitely removed from the big cities of the Northeast. The state of Vermont is approximately 624,000, mostly concentrated in the northern part of the state. Brattleboro is in the south and the 7th largest city at a population of roughly 12,000 people.

The rural setting plus a Saturday meeting date meant that this was the kind of place families could visit. So while Mom or Dad was busy in Joomla Day, there are plenty of things to keep families busy -- canoeing, kayaking, hiking, a petting farm, maple syrup demonstrations, and a thriving arts scene, just to name a few.

The nearest airport is a 1 1/2 hour drive from Brattleboro, but there is a train station right next to the Grad Center, meaning that there's an easy train ride available from Boston or New York. The hotels are also very reasonably priced relative to big cities.

The lower prices, good location, and great speakers make this a very attractive event, despite the challenging economy.

5. Marketing

The obvious groups for us to advertise about Joomla Day were the Grad Center's alumni and students, as well as Joomla! User Group New England, and the New England Adobe User Group, which also meet there.

But looking beyond the obvious, we wanted to market carefully and concisely to our target audience. While we would welcome participants from California, for example, we really wanted to focus on the New England community. (New England consists of the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.)

Therefore, we contacted user groups just like ours -- the New England Adobe User Group, the New Hampshire Adobe User Group, the Joomla! User Group New Hampshire, Boston Joomla User Group, Boston PHP User Group, and a mailing list in the Northampton, Massachusetts area, called Hidden Tech. The managers of these user groups were thrilled to advertise for us, and we are grateful to them for promoting the event. We look forward to being able to return the favor for their events.

Of course, we were also listed on the Joomla.org website, which was also part of our target audience.

We did not advertise in the local paper, radio, or beyond the New England area (outside of our listing on Joomla.org and our websites). While we could get more exposure, we're not sure we'd get the right participants for the event.

Finally, make sure it's a great deal for participants. Since we got the space donated for the event, we were able to provide breakfast and lunch for participants. Having food on site is important. You don't people sneaking out for lunch (into a potentially gorgeous Vermont spring day) and not returning. You also don't want them grouchy and without coffee. Coffee is very, very important.

6. Giveaways!

Great giveaways are important for keeping participants around until the bitter end. It's also just fun to get something for free -- who doesn't love party favors? They're also great marketing for extension developers and other service providers to Joomla developers. While we have asked a few vendors for giveaways, many vendors have asked us if they can provide some goodies. We are grateful to RSJoomla!, 4Web Inc, Marlboro College Graduate Center, Joomla Showroom, Wrox Press, Lynda.com, Alledia.com, Azrul.com, and JoomlaTraining.com for their goodies.

7. Recognition

Above all, remember that you're organizing an event that's largely run by volunteers. Make sure you take the time to thank everyone for their contributions, both privately and publicly. Provide links to their sites, and encourage participants to support those volunteers and sponsors.

We haven't gotten so far as actually executing the Joomla Day yet -- we've only planned it, gotten our speakers, got it working on paper. We'll let you know how the execution phase goes, and what lessons we're bound to learn from the process!