Want to get new people excited about Drupal? The Global Training Days initiative is an exciting way to do so. Yesterday we held our first Training event in Gainesville, Florida with great success. We gained some insight on planning and running a great training day along the way, so I wanted to share some thoughts for those of you interested in holding your own training event, and better yet, get your thoughts and ideas on how to make the next Global Training Days even bigger and better.

Run Down of the Event

The training was led by myself and Mike Herchel. We did a full day event, starting at 9am and running to 5pm. In the morning I gave a presentation about who's using Drupal and talked a little about what Drupal is. Mike then went on to give a live demonstration of building a real-estate site in Drupal. We used a slightly modified version of the Hello Drupal course put together by Acquia in the afternoon to deliver some hands on training in building sites. Throughout the day we also left lots of room for questions, so hopefully everyone could leave with the information they were looking for.

At noon, we took a break for lunch and invited everyone to walk over to a nearby restaurant with us. This was a great time for getting to know the attendees better. One recommendation I would have for this, is contact the restaurant ahead of time to make sure they'll be able to give you quick service. For us, our lunch break ran long and the attendees who didn't join us for lunch needed to sit and wait for a little while before we got started again.

We had 19 people in attendance, many of whom had never used Drupal before. Several had inherited Drupal sites from elsewhere and were hoping to learn more about running their own sites.

Marketing the event

Training was held at the Center for Innovation and Economic Development, which is a venue run by our local Community College. We felt this was an excellent location as this venue is well known for having training events in our community. They also had a perfect room for us with projector and plenty of table space for people to set up their laptops and follow along. Additionally, this gave us the opportunity to reach out to their contacts in the community to inform them about our Training.

We then reached out to the College directly to inform their web development program about the event.

Next, we reached out to our local Chamber of Commerce and got our event on their weekly mailing list to businesses around the area.

Naturally, we also posted the event in the Gainesville and Florida groups on groups.drupal.org.

Checklist for the day

• Have coffee for your attendees
• Provide some bagels, donuts, cookies or other snacks
• Be sure to have water available for yourself and your attendees
• Go through all your notes and slides a few times before the event to help things flow smoothly

Next time, even better

Overall, I would say this day was a great success. We will be holding future Global Training Days events and will begin earlier to publicize the event, and in more places. March 14th will fall in the middle of a semester (as opposed to this event at the end of finals week), so we will reach out to more professors and students at the University of Florida and Santa Fe college. We will continue next time to reach out to the business community in Gainesville through the Chamber of Commerce and other avenues. Furthermore, we will reach out to local television and newspapers to see if they want to run a story on the event and what is happening with Drupal.

Thinking about hosting your own training events? What would you do to make this even more successful? Give us your thoughts and suggestions in the comments and we can all help to grow this incredible event around the world.

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