During Dreamforce ’17 Erika Kuhl, Holly Firestone and their team showed us how they are working really hard to get more content ready for our Developer and User Groups, and some other amazing ideas that can help us to get more attendees, like Global gathering events.

But in the meantime their ideas take effect, I had to think about something to do it now, as every single day, the number of guests at North Spain Developer User Group, is lower. And to run a second Elevate in Bilbao didn’t sound like a bad idea. And that’s what I did, prepare a 1 day event to talk about Salesforce.

What did I do?

First thing to keep in mind, the main objective is to get audience that could be interested to continue attending SDG talks … and where can I get this?

University could be a good option. There are lot of students keen to know more about new technologies, solutions, and furthermore, that could be a good scenario to promote the open door that Salesforce can give them in their job career. And that is what I did, talked with the University of Deusto in order to run the event there.

Secondly, I needed some sponsors that could help me to support the event.

Salesforce Iberia, helped me with catering and Jon Ibáñez came to the event in order to talk about Salesforce platform. I really appreciated this introduction talk as it was really useful, even for me, that I’m on this world since almost 10 years ago.

 

NTS with Carlos Polo and Esteban Ugarte, was really helpful with catering expenses too, and also running a couple of sessions, like the one that Gorka run about Salesforce and Chatbots. Looking forward to know more about this topic, that allows you to create chats able to answer questions.

But I also needed some more help with sessions. FinancialForce was also an amazing help. Miguel Moro and Agustín Jimenez came from our Granada office to talk about the company itself, and also run a really good talk about Separation of Concerns (SoC) #qualitycode guide, that can help us to enhance our code and make it more readable and useful via the FinancialForce open source ApexLib.

Also, I wanted to provide a success case to the audience. Not only explain all benefit that Salesforce could bring to us. I wanted to show a real use case and I got it closer than expected. University of Deusto is a Salesforce customer too, and we had 2 good examples. First of all how they use Salesforce as a solution provider to the needs that the University can have. And secondly how they use and configure Salesforce without technical knowledge, with just #clicksnotcode.

Finally, the main goal of the event, promote other events, but we needed to start talking about Salesforce Community, our #ohana spirit , how we help each others, that we need some others to continue with this job, and how events like SDG or dreamin events could help. And guess what? As part of dreamOlé organizers, obviously I talked about this event that will be run in Barcelona next 27^th of April.

 After a nice lunch…

We moved to the afternoon sessions, Chatbots one run by NTS and Process Automation with and without Code that I also ran.

And finally, time to dirty our hands working with Salesforce via Trailhead. Thanks Christie and your team to help me with this section and sending to me such nice stickers!!

What have I learnt on this event?

2 years ago I run a similar event but Trailhead just appeared few months ago and sessions we run were workshops to learn how to starts. Because of the low level of the content, some attendees complained. They were expecting something more than how to create an App with #clicksnotcode.

That made me think to prepare this Elevate with sessions with higher level, and Trailhead allowed newbies to start from scratch.

However, this year feedback was that it would be useful to have a quick overview of the platform, a demo or something similar as a first session just for starters, and then move to other sessions.

So keep in mind my feedback if you are thinking on running something similar for your group.

If you want to take a look at slides, find them here as well as some others. And don’t forget to join us at North Spain Developer User Group.  Next talks about Data Mining and Einstein, Javascript and Salesforce and working on a Salesforce DX workshop.

Thanks to everyone that helped me to make this Elevate event real