SQLSaturday Baton Rouge Business Intelligence and Recap - 2 of 2

(This is the second part of a two-part post on a SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2014 recap.)

Out of a total of 614 attendees in house on August 2, 264 responded to our post-event cross-platform flurry of online survey invitations to surveymonkey. After reviewing this valuable feedback, it is definitely something we should have also been doing all along. We got some great feedback and testimonials, like these actual responses:

• It was great networking, learning, fun and there were light-sabers.
• Some very good talks with great content, large community of very smart, talented developers, great networking, and awesome SWAG/goodies
• Great networking opportunity, good way to get to know the community. Some talks were really excellent presentations on state of the art database techniques.
• Lots of companies with great networking opportunities; lots of free training and free stuff. High quality and free is very unique.
• It was a fun way to network and learn about how everyone is using technology that we can bring back to our own organizations. It is a chance to learn something new, and meet new people.
• My first sql saturday and certainly not my last. Had a very nice time.

We also got some great info on stuff that we, our speakers and our sponsors could do better in 2015. You better believe we are listening to those and will follow up on it. I highly recommend to SQLSaturday organizers to followup your event with a survey like this.

As for what sessions people want to see next year? More demand for content at both sides of the spectrum, from expert level to beginner, and lots of requests for new technology topics, summarized by these actual responses:

• I would like to see more "deep dive" presentations. Those submitted were good, but would like to see some that go more in-depth. Some did, but several were very high level. It's good to have variety, but I feel there could have been more "deep dive" sessions.
• More advanced areas in each track 
• more intermediate or advanced BI/BA

• Cover beginning concepts to persons new to SQL
• Basic SQL Server Indexing, Generally more SQL Server basics
• Even the "beginner" level seminars were way above the heads of people like me who are truly beginners and who don't yet have real world experience with SQL. A few sessions truly targeting newcomers to the field would help.

• Anything new and upcoming to keep me up to date with technology.
• SQL 2014 specific stuff
• Machine Learning
• Underwater basketweaving

We asked attendees about their attendance during the day:

I was there all day!	75.10% 196
I missed some of the afternoon sessions.	19.54% 51
I missed some of the morning sessions.	5.36% 14
Total	261

We asked attendees how we could best reach them to tell them about SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2015:

Answer Choices–	Responses–
Email from SQLSaturday.com (back in March)	34.10% 89
Social Media - (Facebook, G+, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFace)	18.77% 49
A colleague at work	11.88% 31
User Group meeting	8.81% 23
Email from the User Group or tech community	8.81% 23
Friend	6.13% 16
Events Calendar from media outlet (newspaper, TV, radio)	4.21% 11
My manager	3.83% 10
Other (please specify)	3.45% 9
Someone I manage	0.00% 0
Total	261

We asked attendees who their favorite booth was (by any measure they liked), and envoc's shag-carpeted, comfy-couch swag pad was the winner:

We asked who was the favorite speaker at the event, and the world-travelling Kevin Boles and his two auditorium-sized SQL Dev sessions carried the day. However, a whopping 37 different speakers received at least two votes their "favorite speaker", so great job to the 13 track, 5 session schedule lineup of speakers this year!

	Percent	Count
Kevin Boles	8.2%	19
Raghu Dodda	5.6%	13
Jennifer McCown	5.6%	13
Brian Rigsby	5.2%	12
Sean McCown	4.7%	11
George Mauer	4.3%	10
Cherie Sheriff	4.3%	10
Carlos Bossy	4.3%	10
Thomas Allsup	3.9%	9
Mike F. Robbins	3.4%	8

We asked about our jambalaya lunch (from Pot & Paddle Jambalaya Kitchen):

Answer Choices–	Responses–
Lunch was great!	63.01% 155
Lunch was just OK.	23.17% 57
I chose not to eat the free lunch.	10.98% 27
I missed lunch.	2.85% 7
Total	246

We got lots of good feedback about improving next year and praise for the this year. Too much to summarize here, other than that rest assured - we hear you!

Finally, on the suggestion of my wife with a business degree, we asked the classic "Would you recommend SQL Saturday" question. 

'Nuff said.

SQLSaturday Baton Rouge Business Intelligence and Recap - 1 of 2

(This is the first part of a two-part post on a SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2014 recap.)

Been quiet on this blog the past few weeks as the crush of one of the world's largest SQLSaturday events arrives.

SQLSaturday #324 Baton Rouge this past Saturday was a big success for us and made me very proud of my alma mater (which made attendance mandatory for the entire Masters of Science in Analytics program), my city (except for its traffic), our 2014 sponsors who filled the atrium with booths, and the crew of the Baton Rouge SQL Saturday planning committee, who worked to clean up two full-size trailer loads of garbage. A big public and personal thanks to all of the volunteers and planning committee members who helped this year!

We had 614 verified attendees in 2014. This is a great accomplishment for Baton Rouge and a 9.4% increase from last year's actual attendance. Here's our photo album of the event.

Here's the final numbers on some of the business intelligence we worked up using registration data from the last five years of Baton Rouge SQL Saturday events, which includes all but our first year of the event in Baton Rouge in 2009.

Note in the first graph below how we registered 274 attendees in the final workweek of the event, that's 31% of our total registrants and 45% of our actual attendance. Look for the plateaus in the lines - those are weekends.

Building on my feelings from last year at this time, I believe that doubling the number of registered attendees one month away from the event is a decent indicator of actual attendance. In this case, roughly 300 registered on July 2 turned into 614 folks through the doors.

Registered volunteers this year gratefully rose to meet the occasion. We had new volunteers, older and young, who we'd never met before, hauling garbage out the back door well after the raffle ended. I couldn't thank enough and still feel indebted grateful from my tired feet for helping move and clean.

Curious when your folks register? Tuesday is the most popular day for folks to register but Monday at 9AM and Friday at 9AM at the hottest hours of the week. This data has been compiled over 5 years of registration data. Note the impressive spike at 11AM on Saturday morning - prime lawn-cutting time turned into productive stall tactics?

Twitter is staggeringly popular among the SQL Saturday speakers - many of which were pulling their hair out as I10E crawled to a halt on Friday afternoon before the much-anticipated banquet at Baton Rouge's best churrascaria. This was the first year that more than a quarter of our attendees registered with their Twitter accounts, and judging by activity on #SQLSatBR it was a popular event.

This isn't a big surprise - Louisianans overwhelmingly make up the attendees of Baton Rouge SQL Saturday...

 ... but this part I am proud of. As we continue to grow the conference to its (theoretical?) limit, the percentage of locals in our natural gas-boom-bound city is rising, this year overtaking the number of folks from outside the city. That's word of mouth marketing for you.

Finally, and this may be related to some of the anonymous feedback we received in our post-event SurveyMonkey, we saw vegetarians make a resurgence in attendance after slipping in each of the past three years. It looked like they were headed for extinction until a big bounceback in 2014. Perhaps this should have prepared us for an anonymous comment excoriating us for the lack of cruelty-free vegetarian lunch alternatives.

Thanks to everyone who was a part of SQL Saturday Baton Rouge! There is a post-mortem meeting this week for the 2014 event and to begin prep for the 2015 event, if you'd like to get involved, please email sqlpassbr at gmail com.

(This is the first part of a two-part post on a SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2014 recap... continue to part two)

SQL Saturday Baton Rouge 2014

Since I have been involved with and eventually head of the Baton Rouge SQL Saturday planning committee each year since 2009, my July's annually have been pretty hectic. Putting together orders for shirts and supplies, drinks, coordinating speaker communication, wrangling volunteers, working with sponsors, etc. But each year I am part of an awesome team of volunteers and sponsors from the Baton Rouge technical community and our efforts culminate in the annual SQL Saturday Baton Rouge event, one of the largest and longest-running annual SQL Saturday events in the world!

SQL Saturday is a global event to bring Information Technology speakers and professionals together for a community-driven, community-attended free day of technical training. The Baton Rouge SQL Saturday 2014 event is produced by the Baton Rouge User Groups, and will be our sixth annual event on campus at LSU. We expect ~600 regional IT professionals and national speakers to join us.

This free conference is open to the public and is perfect for students, database administrators, .NET developers, business intelligence developer, SharePoint admins and developers, IT managers, server admins, network admins, and job-seekers.

We've got almost 70 one-hour sessions in 13 tracks and a broad range of expertise in technologies coming to our event at the LSU Business Education Complex on August 2.

SQL DBA Foundations
DBA Advanced
Business Intelligence
SQL Dev
.NET 1
.NET 2 / ALM
Web / Mobile Dev
SharePoint
IT Pro
PowerShell
Career Development
CIO / IT Manager
Special Blue Cross Blue Shield Track

Register today! sqlsaturday.com/324/