The whole idea behind Atiba University was bringing people together who are doing cool things in the technology industry to collaborate and offer a platform for sharing in the shape of a networking event. In the 18 months that we’ve been offering AU, we’ve discussed the Geek and Human side of lots of topics including mobile device management, cloud security, brand experience, search engine optimization and project management but we’ve not gotten hands on. Until this week.
Rachel Werner and Kristin McKinney started the Nashville chapter of Girl Geek Dinner in 2013 with the goal of encouraging and inspiring women to pursue careers in technology. So when we had the chance to team up for an event, we jumped at the opportunity to dig a little deeper into a topic. Atiba’s VP of Marketing, Whitney Blessington, is pretty passionate about email marketing and we realized there is a distinct Human side as well as a Geek side of creating an email marketing template and campaign. The idea of discussing the strategy behind sending an email campaign before getting into the code aspect of the template made perfect sense for our audience.
We grabbed our Creative Strategist extraordinaire, Leah Sos to design a fun template that was then broken down into layered PSD files that were further sliced into HTML and CSS by yet another Girl Geek Ammi Embry. Ammi has the prettiest southern accent you’ve ever heard and really should be a teacher. She was a very impressive presenter!
We had a lot of fun putting this together and then Ammi had a lot of work to break it down into teachable sections for the audience. But first, Whitney talked about why email marketing is important and useful to most audiences. The balance of her Human perspective set the stage nicely for the Geek side to come in and show us how to create a template from scratch. I was so impressed with how organized she was and how simple she made the process for the audience.
In an hour, our audience had created a MailChimp account, uploaded a contact list, created a campaign and coded a custom email template. Oh, we also had wine and cheese because that always helps in the creative process. Take a few minutes to learn about Girl Geek Dinner Nashville and Atiba University and feel free to come out and support both causes. Also, follow all of these women on Twitter. I made it easy for you… just click on their name. That’s how geeky I am!
Tags: collaborate, email marketing, Girl Geek Dinner, nashville
