Oklahoma City is hosting its first-ever OKC WordCamp on July 30th and I am serving as lead organizer, along with a super organizing team! I was listening to WPTavern’s episode 234 with Andrea Middleton on WordCamps and all the WordCamp tools that are available for organizers to use in our WordPress website dashboards. I thought other WordPress people would be interested, so I did a video for you of how the Sponsor tool is used.
Listening to this episode made me feel quite fortunate and grateful for the great improvements that have been made for organizers. Last year, when we wanted to invoice a sponsor, it was a manual process with the tasks having to be completed outside the WordCamp dashboard (as I understand it).
Now this year, there is a sponsor tool we use and everything is done right from the website. This is so helpful because when we need to check on where the invoice is in the process, we don’t need to email WordCamp Central, or check some shared spreadsheet, we log into the back-end and check it from there.
In this video, we’ll walk through Sponsor tool and I’ll show you how it’s done. I actually had an invoice to generate for an OKC Bronze Sponsor (A2 Hosting), and you can see the process. Then we’ll look at how to check on the status of each sponsor, i.e. if the invoice was sent, if it’s paid, etc.
When Automattic created this tool, they were saving themselves time as well as making things easier for the organizers. As the invoice is created, we link it to the OKCWordCamp so funds will be credited back to our WordCamp. Then it automatically gets sent to WC Central to be looked over and approved and then they email it on to the Sponsor. The invoice contains all the information they need to pay it and then we check the dashboard for the status. When the invoice has been paid, then we go ahead and hit publish on our Sponsor draft and the sponsor shows up on the website. Very cool.
I hope you enjoyed seeing some of what goes on in the backend of a WordCamp website. I’ll try to highlight other tools in the next few weeks. Thanks to Jeff Chandler for giving me the idea!
Please leave a comment on this video or let me know of another tool you’d like to see highlighted.