Below, you’ll find a description of the teams that work behind the scenes to make WordPress Accessibility Day happen.
Accessibility
While accessibility is something every member of the organizing team is expected to pay attention to, the accessibility team makes sure that we practice what we preach. This team has intermittent responsibilities for accessibility testing new web pages, forms, or event platforms. They also may create and maintain accessibility documentation for volunteers and new organizers. Native screen reader users or other assistive technology users are especially helpful on this team, but anyone who is familiar with accessibility testing can help.
Finance
The finance team works under the oversight of the WP Accessibility Day Treasurer to create a budget for each annual event. They manage the cash flow as sponsorships and donations come in and payments go out. Finance volunteers coordinate closely with the Sponsors team. They may be asked to help produce reports for our fiscal sponsor, Knowbility.
Marketing
The marketing team plans and oversees all event marketing, including creating graphics for sessions and sponsors, writing blog posts, scheduling social media, and sending emails to our email list. This is one of the most task-intensive teams that is busy throughout the year in order to ensure that we receive quality speaker applications, high attendee registration, and fulfill our commitments to sponsors.
The marketing team has roles for people with a variety of skill sets, including graphics creation and writing. Platforms in use by the marketing team are Canva, Mailchimp, Buffer, Google Sheets, and WordPress. Familiarity with these platforms is useful but not required. Training can be provided.
Speakers
The speakers team reads and reviews all speaker applications through an anonymized process, then meets and selects speakers. After speakers are selected, the team works them into a schedule, confirms that they can speak, and communicates with speakers up to and during the event. If you’re interested in having a say in WordPress Accessibility Day’s content, this is the team for you.
Sponsors
The sponsors team creates sponsorship tiers and pricing for the event, then finds sponsors to provide the funding necessary for running the event and ongoing operational costs. They identify potential sponsor companies and reach out to them, in addition to responding to sponsorship inquiries that come in organically. Having sales or previous sponsor-seeking experience is helpful for the outreach component but is not required.
After sponsors are identified, the sponsor team gets the sponsors to sign contracts and follows up to ensure payment is received. They also work closely with the marketing team to ensure that sponsor benefits are fulfilled as promised. After the event, they send a thank you email to sponsors and solicit feedback for improving sponsor experience in future years.
Technology & Vendors
The technology and vendors team is responsible for coordinating the technology used to run the event (Zoom) and accessibility service vendors (captioning, sign language interpretation, transcription). They maintain the technology information in speaker and volunteer handbooks, run practice sessions, and ensure that vendors have information as needed leading up to and during to the event.
Translation
The translation team helps organize communicating with the multilingual community to prepare translations of the captions of past talks. This team is active throughout the year, as the process of adding new translations is an ongoing need. Volunteer translators are welcomed at any time.
Volunteers
The volunteers team selects, schedules, and assists the volunteers who help run the event. This team is most active in the latter months of the event, reviewing volunteer applications over the summer and creating a schedule for volunteers a few months before the event. They maintain the volunteer guidebook and run training sessions with the technology team via Zoom. During the event, they support volunteers as needed to ensure the event runs smoothly.
Website
The website team manages our main and event websites. This team needs both developers and content creators.
Developers on the website team need to be capable of working with custom-coded themes and comfortable following a Git flow workflow while writing accessible, WPCS-compliant code. Developers maintain both a custom theme and a custom event schedule plugin. This code is available on our GitHub account for review.
Content creators on the website team work alongside the marketing team to keep content updated. They also manage the Gravity Forms forms that are central to many of our processes.
Post-Event
The post-event team is responsible for editing session videos, coordinating with the transcription vendors to get them captioned, and adding the videos, captions, and transcripts to YouTube and the applicable event website. In addition, the post-event team plans a virtual organizer after-party that takes place via Zoom, selects and notifies t-shirt winners, and handles other loose ends after the event.