Guidance for new attendees

[brunogirin]

We (West London) have noticed that a lot of our "no shows" are new attendees (students or coaches) and we suspect that people who have never attended a workshop before need a bit of hand holding the first time they attend, if only to understand how things work and who to get in touch with. Here's what I think you need to know when attending codebar:

On registration to codebar

• How to register on Slack so they can join the community
• How to register to a chapter

On registration to a chapter

• How to register to a workshop
• Who the chapter organisers are and how to contact them (chapter email)

On registration to a workshop

• How to attend (discord, in person, etc)
• How the waiting list and main list work
• RSVP etiquette
• What they will need to attend the workshop
• Who to contact if they have questions

All the information above is on the website in different places so it's more a case of directing people to the right info than creating anything new. It might also be an opportunity to re-iterate that they don't need to know anything about tech to attend as we get that question regularly. Maybe this can be done by having "welcome" emails? Or newbie variations of the emails we currently send?

Ideally, it would also be great if chapter organisers could contact newbies when they register for a workshop, just to tell them that we know they're new and we will make sure they have a good first experience. However, we shouldn't have access to emails so for this to work safely it would need to be doable from the chapter admin pages.

Thoughts?

[brunogirin]

Follow up on this: we just did a workshop and had 6 new students registered. I sent them an email prior to the workshop to detail what would happen and make sure they would come back to us for questions. We still had a no-show from 5 of them so it didn't seem to help.

[KimberleyCook]

@brunogirin oh dear, that's not good. I'm wondering whether an email the following day after if they don't show explaining that there is a waitlist so it's important that they cancel their spot, and several no shows will result in a temporary ban?

[brunogirin]

Here's the text of the email I sent for reference.

Also note that it's quite hard with the current tools to send an email to new attendees only. I had to get the full email list and guess which email addresses were the new people (which I could do for 5 out of the 6). Ideally, I'd like to be able to send a message to new attendees without ever knowing their email.

Hello!

You registered for the West London codebar workshop on Tuesday 26th October. We can see that you have never attended codebar before so we'd like to welcome you and give you a quick summary of how the workshop will go.

We open the workshop at 18:30 and use the first 30 minutes to register everyone and sort out details. The workshop proper starts at 19:00 and runs until 21:00. (All times are London times)

We will pair students with coaches and assign you to a room where you can work together. We endeavour to pair students 1:1 with coaches and we prioritise new attendees for 1:1 pairings. Some of our more regular members may occasionally be paired 2:1. You don't need any experience in any technology to attend, whatever your level we will have a coach who can help you. If you are completely new to tech and don't know where to start, this is fine.

The only tool you need for the workshop is a computer with internet access and Discord installed on it. Check out our guide for how to install it and how we use it for workshops: https://tutorials.codebar.io/general/setup/how-to-use-discord.html

We also suggest that you register on Slack where you can join the community and ask questions: https://slack.codebar.io/

If you can no longer attend the workshop for whatever reason, we ask that you cancel your RSVP before the workshop. You can do that on the event page on the codebar website. This is an important aspect of our process: by doing this, you make a space available for someone on the waiting list. If you can't make it and are unable to cancel, send us an email and we will handle it.

If you have any questions, either ask on Slack or send us an email at [email protected] and one of us will reply to you.

Your organisers for Tuesday night will be Clair, Paola and myself (Bruno). We look forward to seeing you.

Have a great weekend!

[KimberleyCook]

Just a little update.

I sent all our automated emails to our copywriter, she has now completed her feedback and amends. Throughout December I will work on implementing the updates to our codebase.