A Chat About the Local UK WordPress Events

BobWP:
Hey, I’m here with the Three Amigos. There’s a reference there if you in the US or you’ve seen The Three Amigos. But seriously, I am here to talk WordPress events and I have from the famous UK, Dan Maby, Paul Smart and Nathan Wrigley, and they are going to be talking about events, reviving events in the UK. What went wrong, what went right, is there hope, all those good things. So I’m going to first let each one of them introduce themselves in case you don’t know who they are and what they do. And I’m going to start with Dan.

Dan:
Hey Bob. Thank you. Really appreciate that. I’m Dan Maby, I run Blue 37. I’ve been the lead for WordPress London Meetup for over a decade now. I have been the lead for WordCamp London for some time and just generally get involved in events across the WordCamp and WordPress space.

BobWP:
And Paul?

Paul:
Yeah, hi Bob. I run a WordPress agency, Smart Digital and also one of the WordPress London Meetup with Dan. So I organize it with the WordCamp and the meetup and generally across the board doing events alongside Dan and Nathan.

BobWP:
Alrighty, and the voice of WPBuilds.

Nathan:
I’m Nathan Wrigley. I have a WordPress podcast called WP Builds. And also, I guess the reason that I’m into events primarily is because I run an online event called the Page Builder Summit with a friend of mine called LaRue. But that has changed recently as probably you’ll hear a little bit later.

BobWP:
Cool. Now I don’t want to go into a bunch of history, but at least you are all involved with events to some locla meetups, other kind of events. I’m assuming you are at the point where everybody else is where Covid hit. There’s the issues, things were pretty groovy beforehand and then that hit, but why don’t you just tell us a little bit about how it’s gone for your events and has it followed the same practice?

Dan:
Yeah, I think it’s been a really interesting journey. We’ve obviously said pre Covid. We were running events on a, in fact, at the time, pre covid, I was actually running events, physical events on a weekly basis. I was traveling around the country, livable London all over the place doing these physical events and having a lot of fun with it, getting the community together, really enjoying being part of that community. And then obviously as we all know, we switched to the virtual environment, which was quite a considerable change, but it did open up obviously the opportunity to be more inclusive with the community. We were actually able to get community members from across the globe were suddenly participating in our virtual WPLD and our WordPress London Meetup on a biweekly basis, which was a lot of fun at the time, getting community members together. But of course there’s been, I think a sense of tiredness around it.

People have worn outs with the virtual space. I think spending, we tend to spend a lot of time in front of screens working, doing our day-to-day jobs and then to then spend more time in front of the screen. It’s certainly been challenging. So we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to try and bring our physical in-person events back to London, but it’s certainly been a challenge. The costs certainly within London have been eye watering when it comes to venue hire. We’ve had some really big hurdles to overcome to try and get the events back into the room, and we’re very, very fortunate that we were able to work with a company such as Klaviyo. Klaviyo actually hosting us the WebPress London Meetup at the moment. So we relaunched three months ago and it’s been phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. As we’re back in the room, I loved the virtual space as I mentioned, that ability to come together as a community, as a global community. We ran obviously work, best live multiple times. We ran virtual meetups. It was a great opportunity and I missed some aspects of that, that aspect of bringing that global community together in that environment.

But there’s something very special about being in the room and physically having those conversations and being around people that I personally, I genuinely class as friends, so it’s good to be back and doing these events in person.

Nathan:
I remember when the lockdowns all started, I mean I can only speak of the uk, but I do remember sort of slightly being self-congratulatory about the state of the WordPress, excuse me, ecosystem in that we were, of all the industries, we were just ready to go. And if we didn’t have it exactly ready, we at least had our hands somewhere near the technology to go virtual. And I remember thinking, crikey, we’re really privileged with that because we knew about making videos and we knew about putting things online and making websites and embedding live things and all of that. And I remember thinking, that’s amazing. If I was in another industry which barely touched technology, that would be all a real another challenge in your life, which is already facing considerable challenges. And then of course the reality of that, which took maybe months, maybe years, I don’t know, began to sink in.

And I think Dan’s right, the sort of fatigue of doing things online, it was very novel for a while, wasn’t it? So I didn’t use to really hang out with a bunch of people online. I’d go to the events. So it was quite novel. And also whilst the pandemic was raging and there was that real fear of, okay, it really is a problem to go outside, it felt brilliant to be able to do that. But I just think people have just become a bit fed up with it. There’s that sort of sense of, okay, I’d really like to get back in a room now, obviously, fingers crossed the pandemic is over really, and we’re back to normal life. But as Dan was saying, making the step back into that, I think it’s fair to say that people have sort of become habituated. Not everybody obviously, but I think there’s a lot of people who’ve become habituated to not going out.

You only have to look at pubs in the UK, which five or six years ago were just these thriving businesses and they’re just going out of business handover fist in the UK because although people can go back, they’ve just chosen not to. Something about life has changed seemingly in an irreparable way. So maybe one of the things about this podcast episode, Bob, is to just get the word out that it’s happening, that if you live anywhere close to London and you fancy getting on a train or getting in the car or on the tube or whatever it is, there’s these things happening every single month live that you can attend.

Dan:
Yeah, I’d absolutely encourage, we were seeing it across the community that meet meetups starting to reinvigorate themselves. And if you’re in a city, if you’re in a town where there was a meetup and it’s not currently running, I’d highly recommend having conversations, get in the Slack communities and find out what options, what opportunities there are to reinvigorate your meetup locally, because that really is something special about having that event in that local community. Because obviously every local community has different focuses, different aspects of how they approach the events, and that’s something that was really hit me as an organizer when we were talking about doing the virtual events because we were seeing individuals that were joining us from across the globe that were coming at it with a very different perspective than we were usually used to in the room physically in London,

Paul:
I think by nature, we’ll pack on, obviously, so to be able to get back into the room together now, having been isolated for so long because of the pandemic. That’s why we see, say, for example, with WPLDN, how it is coming quite properly, quite quickly. This is only the third one that we just did last week, and it’s proven to be a real success

Nathan:
Can I ask a question, Dan, you know, said a minute ago about the cost of, I think you said hurdles, but I think the implication was the cost of accommodation and you said you got some outlandish, I guess invoices or where you were asking people what it would cost. Can I just ask you what is the magnitude of that? Was the cost of double or triple or…

Dan:
So to put some perspective into this, we used to deal with a venue that would on a regular basis, would contact us and say, we want to host you free of charge. It was a space that would benefit from having our community in that space. So we would regularly get emails, conversations saying, look, we will host you, we’ll provide catering, we’ll provide X, Y, and Z free of charge, come and do it pre pandemic. We contacted them post pandemic to see what this would look like. Could we reinvigorate start using the space They quoted us excluding VAT. So here in the UK we’ve got 20% VAT excluding VAT, excluding catering, security and cleanup, all of which were required for a free four hour event. They wanted 15,000 pounds. Now that was purely for the event space that was for 50 people in the room.

Nathan:
So one evening, right? A few hours,

Dan:
One evening,

Nathan:
Man. Yeah, that gives you some indication, doesn’t

Dan:
It? You are somewhere in the region of between 20 to 25,000 US dollars by the time you were putting in cleanup, security, VAT and catering.

Nathan:
That’s a bit of a hurdle.

Paul:
Oh, absolutely. It’s taken us what, probably close to 18 months now to find a venue that was something that’s going to be affordable for a free event that we’re running. I mean the matter of trips that we’ve dug to London trying to find suitable events,

Dan:
Something I probably don’t want to get into too much detail around this, but just to put some perspective into this WordCamp London was something that we were trying to reinvigorate in 2023. So we put a lot of work into doing this. There was a team of, I think we had around 16 volunteers. I was looking at the list this morning of individuals that had given their time to get us through to the budget stage to be able to deliver WordCamp London. Historically, we’ve always been, we’ve delivered the event in a university, which has sort of worked for us. There’s been some quirks around that, but we’ve been able to deliver a fantastic event for the community in that venue. That venue, the cost for that venue increased by almost a hundred percent between what we were being charged pre covid and what we were charged post or being quoted post covid.

So we actually looked at, I think we were somewhere in the region of 28 alternative venues to deliver WordCamp London in 2023, and the money was absolutely eye watering what we were being quoted for these venues. We managed to get very, very close. I’m talking within nine pounds, not a cost per person per day was given to us to be able to deliver WordCamp London. We got within nine pounds of that cost per person per day. But unfortunately that still wasn’t close enough. We still couldn’t get the budget over the mark. So unfortunately WordCamp London didn’t happen because of that budget constraint, but it ultimately comes back to the cost of venues within Central London at the moment.

BobWP:
Do you think the venues are, I mean, I know that cost has gone up everywhere across the board with rent and just whatever. Is everyone trying to make up for lost time or something here? I mean, it’s like suddenly, oh, we’re back to it now. We got these spots available and now we’re going to charge, like you said, a hundred times more or something like that. I wonder are they really getting those places filled

Paul:
Up?

Dan:
It definitely felt like there was a bit of a bell curve post pandemic there around venue hire. Certainly through 20 22, 20 23 prices were, as we say, astronomical. There’s definitely been a bit of a shift now, and I think it is this case of companies are realizing that they’re just simply not filling those spaces because of those costs and the costs are not, they’re certainly not coming down to pre pandemic levels, but they are certainly reducing and making it a little more achievable in terms of delivering events. But yeah, I mean as we know central London, as with many cities across the globe, it’s a very, very expensive city.

Paul:
Yeah, I think also as well, if you look at how much things have changed, you look at how. Less, although London is getting a lot busier now, how less busy it has been for so many people who still haven’t worked, and if they’re only going into the office for maybe one or two days a week, those spaces that were previously perhaps being used five to seven days a week, are perhaps now only being used a couple of days a week. So they then try to make their money up how they can and of course external events coming in where they will follow you around and they just want to get people like I’d seen to the space and there’s here you go. You can use that for free on a Thursday evening once a month. Now they’re looking at it thinking, actually, we need that. And as Dan says, costs are coming down. But we’ll just to see. How that works across, I think, not just London, but across cities across the UK and no doubt other places.

Nathan:
It’s kind of interesting because in the UK everything just stopped, didn’t it? And it really hasn’t come back. We’ve had a few events. So obviously you are now running W-P-L-D-N, and there’s been a word camp in the northeast of England at a place called Whitley Bay. I’m not entirely sure if there’s been any others yet. Has there been any other actual WordCamp?

Dan:
Not in the UK, no WordCamp Whitley Bay is the only word camp that’s taken place so far in the UK.

Nathan:
Which is apparently very popular in a really incredible event. From everything that I’ve heard, the people that went, but on a different scale, if that was the event that the UK had going on, it was much smaller than the WordCamp London or something like that. But from the outside, if you’re just a community member and you aren’t involved in organizing the events, you would just kind of assume that, okay, it’s dead, nothing’s happening, nobody wants to do anything. But having heard Dan there, just talk about the astronomical eye watering costs. Is it any wonder really? And so what’s the way around it then Dan and Paul, what have you done to, you mentioned a sponsor there, but what have you done to bring it back?

Dan:
It’s really come down to working with companies that are both focused on being within the community and have the space available space to be able to host an events such as this. And we’re very fortunate, as I mentioned, Klaviyo have agreed to host us. They’ve agreed to host us throughout 2024. We’ve got conversations going on about potentially going beyond 2024 as well with them. There are other costs associated with it. So we’ve partnered with both SiteGround and Mollie as well. So we’ve got the three partners that have enabled us to be able to deliver the work to bring back the WordPress and the meetup to the community. But there’s lots of options if you’re an organizer around venues that you might look at and have conversations with. Universities tend to be a really good option for meetups. They tend to have plenty of rooms that are suitable.

They tend to have some sort of AV in the room. So if you’ve got multiple people and you want to be able to have some microphones so people can hear you, that setup is usually already there within a university environment. And often you can actually connect in with teams within the university to help promote internally. So it’s actually a really good opportunity. Unfortunately within London, again, we saw ridiculous costs being quoted by the universities, but having spoken and dealt with universities outside of London, I’ve not had that same experience. So it did feel like it was, again, organizations really trying to recoup some lost costs due to the pandemic.

BobWP:
So you’ve said you’ve had some recent meetups. Yes. And they’ve been very successful.

So you’re doing good with the meetup and you got that in place, and that’s a key to finding that venue. So let’s talk about, you’ve been discussing all this stuff moving ahead, and the reason I had the three of you on is you’re really making this effort to bring it back to London, but bring it throughout the uk, get things going. Again, we’re burned out online, but is that still part of the puzzle? Is that still part of the solution? What do the three of you and Nathan, you’ve been doing an online event that it’s not a meetup, but it is a WordPress event. What have you been talking about moving forward now and WordPress? They’re talking about the next gen events, how to find creative ways to do other events. What have you been discussing?

Dan:
We’ve been discussing lots, to be honest. There’s lots of ideas, lots thoughts around what we can do. Some of the discussion happening around between the three of us internally at the moment is what would a larger event outside sitting between a meetup and a full blown WordCamp London look like? So maybe a 200 person in the 200 person event, what would that look like? We’re talking about the meetup itself. How do we evolve that, develop that into something that attracts people? Give you an example. We had a comment on the several comments, in fact, this month on the meetup, asking for the live stream to return an individual from Mexico asking for the content to be streamed to them. So people within our meetup are still looking for that content. They still want that content. So live streaming is something that we are certainly going to be returning to.

We’ve just gone through a process of setting up an AV system that allows us to be able to do that, but we wanted to make sure we were testing it and it was functioning as we needed it before we did that. We’re very fortunate in a meetup in that we do have the support of companies such as Klaviyo, SiteGround, and Mollie, because it does mean that we can look at how we use certain bits of equipment to support the delivery of that and expose the content that we’re doing within the event. But yeah, it sort of blend of the physical and the virtual and trying to get that right, making sure that there’s content there for those people that can participate physically, and obviously those people that would prefer to enjoy it virtually.

Nathan:
I have this intuition that it is just harder to get people now to attend an event. I don’t really have any evidence to back that up. I just think that that’s the case. If it’s, obviously if Taylor Swift came to town, that’s probably not the case. I’m sure they’d be flocking in their millions. But for an event of this, which is fairly niche, getting people back is a challenge, I think. And we just keep batting ideas around. Like Dan just said, we spent a little bit of time pondering what the AV would look like and how to turn out a credible video that people would enjoy watching with a high production standard and all that kind of thing. The guests, the timings even down to things like what sort of quirky things could you do during the actual live event that would engage people. And I don’t think between the three of us, we probably have every idea. So if anybody is listening to this and has some interesting idea of something that they’ve seen elsewhere that you could pass along to make those events interesting or different or engaging, I’d be really open to hearing those just because between the three of us, we have a certain set of expectations, I guess. And it might be that an idea is just sitting out there somewhere in somebody’s brain. It’d be lovely to hear what you’ve experienced or what you’ve enjoyed or what you think might be a useful addition.

Dan:
Absolutely. I was going to say had, as you do on your phone, you get the memories pop up from the photos that Google’s reminding you of what you did. Three years ago, I actually had a notification come up reminding me of an event that we ran called W-P-L-D-N all Day now. We actually ran that 10 years ago, and it was essentially, it was a contributed data, standalone contributor day, and it’s those sorts of ideas that doesn’t necessarily have to be associated with a WordCamp running a contributor day. It’s just an opportunity, again, to do something that isn’t slightly out of the norm. I think this is where the idea of these next gen events are coming from. How do we look at what does the format look like? Are there alternative formats that are interesting and engaging for the attendees? So we’re exploring all sorts of options and as Nathan said, if you have thoughts, ideas, then we’d love to hear from you.

Nathan:
Yeah, no matter how quirky they could be. Absolutely. Pizza, bingo, anything. Just pass the ideas down there.
Yeah, well we already have pizza.
Yeah, pizza’s a stable, isn’t it? Absolutely. Kind of interesting, does that whole discussion about whether you do do the online thing as well, because obviously if you’re trying to get people back in the room and you’re providing a mechanism simultaneously for them to watch the content at home, it’s such an interesting discussion, a difficult circle to square. Obviously if people in Mexico want to see it, yeah, there’s just no reason not to do that. But equally, if somebody’s in London, wouldn’t it be nice if they were able to make it as well? Yeah, it’s hard.

Dan:
Yeah, we had lots of conversation actually about this, again, pre pandemic. So going back many years when we first started live streaming. So we were very fortunate in that because we were live streaming before the pandemic, as you mentioned earlier on Nathan, it was very easy for us to transition into a virtual environment because we were used to that setup, but the conversations were around exactly that issue will live streaming the content, prevent attendees from actually participating physically. And the experience we had was not the case. People were wanting to be in the room, they wanted to have those conversations, they were wanting to be present, but it just opened up the opportunity for more people to participate. So individuals that were not within a location that could travel into London, it meant they could still consume the content. So I don’t necessarily advocate for every single meetup to have to go through this process of live streaming. It is a lot to undertake. We’re talking equipment, we’re talking time, there’s all sorts to be done there. And a

Paul:
Definite learning curve as well to live stream as well.

Dan:
Yeah. But absolutely just simply having people in a room and getting the community back together, I would advocate for all the time through 2023, we ran a number of events. We classed them as social events because the only option we had back then was to run them in local pubs within London, which I’ve never ever wanted to encourage. The problem with running a meetup in a pub is it can become an exclusive environment. It precludes certain individuals from being able to participate. Whether that comes down to age, religion, there’s multiple reasons for people to not be able to attend an event in a pub. But ultimately for us in that moment, it was that or nothing. And it actually, it was better to have that something rather than nothing. So yeah, if you’re listening and if you’re thinking about either reinvigorating a meetup or looking to start a meetup, as I said earlier on universities, libraries, there are lots of local venues that are potential options for meetups and would encourage people to investigate those.

Paul:
I think also as well, I think it’s about consistency. So if you can where it’s taken us time to find a venue now we have a venue for a whole of this year, so everyone knows that on the last Thursday of the month, unlike all these things, generally people need to get into a routine of the commonwealth and they enjoy it, they know problem. Whereas if you’re running an event that’s a bit hit and miss, it might happen. It might not happen more to the next. We don’t really know what’s going on. It’s going to be difficult to bring more and more of a community together.

Dan:
Don’t be discouraged If you run an event and you’ve got three people in the room, that’s a win. Do not be discouraged, as Paul just mentioned, you maintain that consistency and that will evolve. We got to the point where we were seeing there between 120 and 140 people in the room every single month. So it was like running a mini WordCamp on a monthly basis. Now again, not necessarily encouraging that people, that’s a choice that people make, but it literally started out with three people in the room and it evolved into that Paul’s spot on there in terms of that consistency focus.

BobWP:
Yeah, I think that those days of the real big meetups, I remember those myself of a hundred people and those days are, I mean, they could come back in smaller events, maybe meet up Nathan. So let’s talk about, I mean we’re talking about the next gen events and obviously we’re saying some people are getting burnout, but your event is a type that people from around the world are going to want to attend it. It’s just not so much local getting together the community. Is the future for online events like such as yours, do you see that continuing to be something that is valuable and worth putting together?

Nathan:
Yeah, it’s kind of curious because we basically, the entire conversation that we’ve just had flip everything upside down and that’s what we had with the PageBuilder Summit because we were in the planning of that summit at the end of 2019. So you can imagine the serendipity of lockdowns globally. Our first event hit more or less at the same time where everybody was locked down. So we had this opposite spike in that there was real sudden interest in things like that. And it was total coincidence really. But I think it is more difficult to do those online events than it was three or four, let’s say three years ago. Just because people are now, let’s say WordCamp Europe as an example, people have allocated the time for that. They’ve allocated the finance for that. They might be taking a week off work for that. There might be all sorts of things going on.

And so that’s putting pressure on the online events. However, curiously, our audience hasn’t altered, if anything it’s gone up now that could just be a cause of repeating it over and over again. We’re on version seven, so it may just be that people have heard about it, so they’re more, there’s a bigger audience out there who’ve noticed that it exists. So there’s that. But I think the squeeze on those events is definitely there because you are now competing with the likes of WordCamp, Asia and Europe and US and the wands that are coming back in all the different countries. But given the nature of what we do, I don’t think you could do our summit in person because we’ve got, it goes on for four, you could say five days. But really the first four days are where most of the stuff is happening. We’ve got 40 odd speakers, and that would cost a fortune if we were to put it in a building somewhere in a place that was near an airport, it wouldn’t be a profitable experience, it would just hemorrhage money.

So online really works. We can use WordPress as the website and all of that kind of stuff. And also the nature of the content. We’ve got speakers from all over the world, so it’s an international mix, and I don’t think you could put that in a real world environment and it be successful. Maybe in another industry you could do that, but possibly not WordPress. So I think that these events will continue. I’m not sure if they’ll be as frequent. I’m not sure if there’ll be as many as there was because, I dunno if you noticed, but that when the pandemic was in full swing, lots of events popped up, didn’t they? There were absolutely loads of agency style events and things that popped up and I dunno how many of those are still going, but I think quite a few of them are. It’d be interesting to see as the years go on, how popular they are.

One of the difficulties has been sponsorship because when we began the PageBuilder Summit, obviously I think a lot of companies in the WordPress space probably had budgets assigned for sponsorship, and then the events were taken away from them. So that budget had to be repurposed. So we found it fairly straightforward getting sponsorship, but more recently it’s been more difficult. Happy to say that for the page builder, summit seven, we’re doing really well with that. Obviously there’s a lot of companies out there who do value these things and they notice that there’s a big audience coming and that their attention is directed towards their products or services as a result. But that becomes a little bit more difficult because the sponsorship pot, if you like, is distributed much further. And I think the fact that we’ve been going for seven events now helps a little bit. I think if you were starting up an event, an online event, the sponsorship piece, if you needed that to be a part of your jigsaw puzzle to make it work, that would be a difficult road anyway, put it that way.

Dan:
I think we’ve got a really interesting situation around sponsorship within the WordPress space at the moment, because historically we’ve always had this focus around companies. Essentially it’s giving back to the community through sponsorship. But I just feel we’ve seen more and more companies need to see a return on their investments and it’s how do we provide value for sponsors? How do we create that value for sponsors, whether it’s through virtual events like Pagebuilder Summit or whether it’s through physical events such as meetups and word camps. Companies need to see some return on that, which is always challenging. I always feel a bit conflicted talking about this because my community passion side of me says Yes, companies, we need to see the community. We need to see the community come together because when the community comes together, special things happen. The open source project develops and becomes more, becomes a greater whole.

But then my business head turns around and says, well actually, these companies have also got to see return on their investment. And you could argue that they’re seeing return on their investment by allowing and enabling the open source project to be more. But many companies that we see, and many, I guess, I dunno whether it’s younger companies within the space or whether we’ve seen a bit of a shift from some of the older companies that have been in the space for a longer period of time, that just feels like there’s more of a requirement to be able to measure and understand what that money is actually returning for them as a business. And I think, I’m not sure that’s a problem that we’ve resolved yet within both the meetup and WordCamp space.

BobWP:
Yeah, I think, I know Nathan and I have had this conversation behind the scenes a lot on sponsorship because I mean, the events are podcasts, this podcast, and what I’ve discovered having done sponsorships for podcasts for probably a decade now, is that there’s no out of the box sponsorship anymore. You’ve got to really get creative and sponsorships almost have to be organic. They can’t be, it’s like, okay, we’re starting with this. This is what you can expect in visibility, but along the way, we’re going to find interesting little ways to increase that visibility. And it’s tough, but if you can send back constantly, Hey, we did this time or we pulled up whatever your product at this particular one, it was the right time, the right place. We got you a little extra exposure during that. There’s all those things and it’s hard to do, but I’ve done that. It’s like, here’s what you get the base stuff you get, but along the way, we’re going to find other little interesting things or come up with creative ideas because yeah, podcasts are kind of the same way with events that ROI, it’s great to support, but how many people stop in the middle of a podcast and go and buy something. So how was your effort to get the sponsorships you did? Was that a fairly smooth effort? Did you really need to put some serious time into that?

Dan:
We’ve been incredibly fortunate actually, the conversations with the likes of SiteGround, for example, SiteGround have worked with us for over a decade now in the WordPress London meetup or across the WordPress London meetup. So it was a fairly straightforward conversation with them when we said, look, we’re returning again. We’d love to partner with yourselves and make sure we can try and develop some genuine benefit for you as a sponsor, but also it enables us as a community to come together. And I think that’s where the conversations with, in fact, all three sponsors, SiteGround, Mollie, and Klaviyo, have all been genuinely focused on trying to return the community, get the community back together again. And I really appreciate the fact that we’ve got companies in the space that do have that focus, fully appreciate their courses. These companies also want to see something in return for that.

And whether it’s going to, if you look at the historical WordCamp sponsorship packages, they tend to be very similar in terms of what’s being offered. And it’s looking at that and can we adjust that and work with companies. And as you said Bob, it is about having those direct conversations with companies and building those relationships, which unfortunately only come with time, but there are enough of us within the community that have those relationships that when you’re talking about organizing a meetup or organizing a Word camp, there’s generally somebody within the volunteer team that will be able to have those conversations to be able to understand what the company is looking for.

BobWP:
Well, I got to say, this has been really great, hearing what you’ve been doing a lot of excellent advice and tips, but before we close out, why don’t you each share with how people can connect with you or learn more about your vent or any other last words you might have?

Nathan:
Okay, thank you. So I won’t concentrate on the WordPress London meetup. I’ll just mention the PageBuilder Summit again, but it’s happening in the latter part of May, 2024. If you go to page builder summit.com, you can find out things there. Or I have a podcast which is WPBuilds.

Paul:
WPLDN. UK, it’s where you can find all the information about our WordPress London meetup. We’re on the last Thursday, every month for the rest of this year, we’re looking for speakers. You can go to the website and there’s a deploy to speak page on the website. And if you’re interested, you’re in and around the London area or anywhere in the UK, you want to travel down. Last Thursday of the month, we have free pizza and really good speakers lined up. And as Dan says, all thanks to our great sponsors, Klaviyo, SiteGround and Mollie.Thank you.

BobWP:
Any last words, Dan?

Dan:
I’d just reiterate what Paul had mentioned there. If you’re interested in speaking at the event, we’d love to hear from you. WPLDN. UK forward slash speak. I think I just want to give a quick mention that we’ve already mentioned it. WordCamp Whitley Bay is going to be taking place in the UK 12th of July.So tickets are available for that. And if you’re interested in, you want to have come, you want to continue the conversation around events and getting involved. I’m always happy to talk about options and ways we can support one another as a community. If you’re in the UK Slack, WPSlack.co..uk head over to there, feel free to DM me. Always happy to do it. Always happy to continue the conversation around events.

BobWP:
Excellent. Alrighty. Well, yeah, everyone, you have all your information and got some great events coming up both virtually and in person. So just like to thank you three for coming on sharing your story. I hope there’s other people out there that if you’re listening and you’ve been doing a meetup or trying to get one started up and you want to come on and talk about challenges and the wins and all that good stuff, just reach out to me. But thank you three for being on.

Paul:
Thank you Bob.

Dan:
Appreciate the opportunity to come and talk about it.