A Toolkit of Awesome - Tips & tricks from seasoned Django Girls organizers

This awesome blog post was written by Dori Czapari, member of Django Girls Budapest.

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Hey, we are the organizers of Django Girls Budapest: Dori Czapari, Szilvi Kádár and Daniella Kőrössy. Our first workshop happened in December 2014 and we’re planning our 4th event at the moment. We’d like to share some bits & pieces of our organizing experience, and we hope you’ll find some useful ideas for your next event!

The 3rd Django Girls Budapest took place in November 2015. We had big plans: to organize 2 whole workshops for 30-30 people on the weekend, plus a warm-up party. Little did we know how much effort this was going to be. As all of us are working full-time and organizing Django Girls is a strictly voluntary activity, we had to be extra efficient to manage it all in our free time.

We’re proud to say our event turned out to be amazing - inspiring and professional to every little detail, something to be remembered. We had an extra hard time making it work, but we have learned so much in the process.

It’s important to note that the first workshop had 2 organizers (one local and one remote), the second had 3, and this time we were 4. This is when things start to get tricky, and the flow of information is not always smooth.

Distribution of tasks

In the beginning we assigned each larger issue (like applicants, coaches, sponsors, food etc.) to someone. It was crucial not to meddle with someone else’s tasks. It’s easy to generate chaos when one of us tries to help another out and answers some emails that are not assigned to her. Naturally we can re-assign and ask for help in the process but we made this a Number One Rule.

Communication

We’ve only used email (and sometimes Facebook chat) before. We tried to make new threads for new topics every now and then, but naturally most of the time we got lost between the hundreds of mails digging for a piece of information.

This time we decided to try Slack. Best decision ever! We made channels for each issue like #coach, #teams, #venue, #sponsors, #website, #presentation - we have a total of 20 channels now and it works!

We just started to play around with Slack’s more interesting features - we configured the Slackbot to remind us if we’re talking about some random thing outside of the random channel, it shouts motivational one-liners when mentioning someone’s name and it’s full of inside jokes now.

Bonus: emojis! ✨🎉🎈

Project management

Instead of keeping half-updated to-do lists in our heads or in Google Docs, we gave Asana a try. This was the perfect tool for managing everything around the event. We can break down a Django Girls Workshop to sections (like venue - these pretty much echo the Slack channels) to tasks (like decorations) to subtasks (like order balloons, bring party lights, assemble decorations). We can assign each of these to someone and set a deadline - this is so much better than constantly reminding each other of what has to be done. Plus a rainbow unicorn flies over your screen every time a task is completed. Isn’t it the best thing ever? (Confession: we sometimes added already-done tasks to Asana and clicked “Complete” just to see the unicorn.)

Note: We’re at the beginning of organizing Django Girls #4. There’s one upgrade so far: we’ve connected Asana and Slack so we’ll see new and completed tasks in the #asana channel right away. We tried both Slack’s own Asana integration and Zapier but we can’t decide yet. We’ll let you know after the workshop!

Planning

As a lot of people ask us about our plans and the next events, we have to be well-prepared. So we hold planning meetings every few weeks to set our goals, deadlines, important dates. These meetings are longer than the standard ones: the entire day is about talking, thinking and planning. If we have a clear goal and see the important deadlines, it’s harder to lose focus. Being conscious about our tasks makes them easier to get done.

Organizing our documents

Previously when we emailed documents (like contracts, invoices) we didn’t really care much about them. So naturally we were pulling our hair out when we had to find them again. This is over! We have a super detailed, organized folder system on Google Drive and we upload EVERYTHING that comes over email or in a paper form. We also keep our sheets there - financial calculations, scoring of applications, teams, shopping lists - and our email templates. Yep, templates. These are really important. If you organize more than one event, sometimes you have to send the same emails, like a Meet Your Team mail or acceptance/rejection letters. But you don’t want to repeat yourself, right? Keeping your email templates saves a ton of time.

Workflow

We tried to have a meeting every other week - these are great to give us an extra bump of motivation and energy to get on with our tasks. Sometimes we spent these events sipping rozéfröccs (a Hungarian specialty made of wine and sparkling water) and trash-talking, but sometimes we got extra productive.

• We agreed to check all the Slack channels every day at least once, and notify the others if we can’t do it for some reason.

• Before sending an email we asked the others to proofread and correct it.

• When making decisions we tried to have everyone’s input, but if time was pressing or the issue wasn’t super important and not all of us were online we just went with 3 organizers’ opinion.

Be professional

At the previous events we didn’t really care much about the public image we’re creating for ourselves, but we’ve gotten famous enough in Hungary to start paying attention to it. No more “hiya thx for the $$$ cheers” emails to sponsors! We’re lucky to have Szilvi who knows that communication is key and pressures everyone to send emails that are well-written, informative and professional. It’s really embarrassing to send a million “oh and I forgot to mention…” emails. But to avoid turning totally corporate, Dori always has a light-hearted and goofy speech to deliver:)

All in all, we’re trying to balance the original, cheerful & kind Django Girls image but we also have to think about scaling. In our opinion we’re doing pretty good so far.

Team health

When things start to get serious it’s natural to see some tension emerge inside the team. We always have to communicate our concerns, goals and visions clearly because not doing it can lead to huge misunderstandings and hard feelings. It’s important to keep in mind that we are doing this as a passion, not as some compulsory thing. Of course, sometimes things are just not meant to be working anymore. We shouldn’t blame each other at times like this - we should analyze the reasons and acknowledge the state of things without letting our emotions overtake. So it happens that we had to part ways and we’re a 3-people organizer team again. But we’ve learned a lot from this too. We won’t treat agreement  and equal passion inside the team as a given anymore, we know that we actively have to work on things to go smoothly on an interpersonal level.

Feedback

Organizing an event isn’t over when the workshop day is over. It’s very important to gather & give feedback. We’ve sent out evaluation forms to our attendees and coaches, so we can have a clearer idea of what was good about the workshop and what could be improved. Never forget to check the feedback when you start to organize the next one! We also want to thank the sponsors for their help: we made a thank-you brochure with photos and some statistical facts about the event. (95% of our participants want to continue coding. Isn’t that amazing?) It’s also useful to have an organizers’ meeting for winding down: talking about our experiences, making memos of our new ideas, looking at what our participants wrote in the feedback form and crying with joy (well, at least some of us).

Also, give feedback to each other: what went well and what could be improved personally? What have you learned about yourself? By thinking about these questions you develop yourselves without realizing it. You can become a better person and you all become a better team. And assuming you don’t want to stop organizing events, this is way to go:)

We hope this is going to be helpful for some fellow organizers! If you’d like to go more into details about something or get some help, feel free to ping us at budapest@djangogirls.org. Happy organizing!