<aside> ↘️ Global Government Forum is a publishing, events and research business that helps senior civil servants around the world build their expertise, knowledge and connections.
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Global Government Forum expanded from running two international events in 2018, to 6 events in the space of a year. This meant they needed to move away from marketing them from their main publishing website and create 6 individual mini websites for them instead.
They could have chosen to build these websites themselves. There are enough website builder tools around these days. But there were a number of other challenges to these, however, which added complexity.
Firstly each of the websites needed to allow visitors to register for the events, which meant data management. Not just for one website either - with 6, it's a lot more work. Secondly, the technical process of locating each one on a subdomain of globalgovernmentforum.com required skills they didn't have in-house. And lastly, Global Government Forum are a small, busy team, so the build process wouldn't have been as efficient and polished as they would have liked when everyone had other jobs to do.
As I'd already supported them for many years on their main website and marketing workflows, it made sense to get me involved for these new websites too.
Each website is very similar in structure and design, allowing for a straightforward, repeatable process when building each one. Working from a standard checklist of setup tasks, each basic website was set up one at a time, resulting in a ready foundation to add each event's branding, content, and data requirements.
They are all built on WordPress for consistency, as this was the platform their team was familiar with. On top of that, a page-builder WordPress theme was added, which allowed for faster page layout building – without the need to build a custom theme for each event.
Global Government Forum manages all it's marketing data in MailChimp, so we needed a way to update a unique list on their account for each event. I used Gravity Forms to build the registration form on each website, as it can be set up to automatically feed the data to MailChimp.
“Mark is extremely professional and uses transparent pricing and project management systems. If you are looking for someone who you can respect and trust, Mark is perfect." Global Government Forum
One the websites had been built, the next challenge was staying on top of the management and editing tasks that needed doing. Each event goes trough an annual cycle of planning and marketing, meaning there are quite a few times durring the year each website needs updates or technical attention.
Basic content on each website was updated by Global Government Forum themselves, but everything else is handled by me. To stay on top of these tasks - some of which were unique to each event, some needed to be performed across all events - I built a dashboard in Notion, a handy tool that combines notes, tasks, spreadsheets and data storage. From this dashboard I can easily find key information and website admin links for each event, along with a Kanban style board of tasks.
You can see the websites from these links: