An unexpected opportunity to sign up testers

• Nick Rougeux
• June 05, 2008

Shortly after we started CommunityCollab, we learned that LISC/Chicago was sponsoring a national "Getting it done" conference, in March 2008, for community development practitioners (Flickr photos).

We asked them if we could have a table at the event to introduce CommunityCollab, explain what it was about and to recruit beta testers. They agreed and gave us a table near the main registration area.

To illustrate the idea of a tag cloud we created a poster to show the number of attendees by City (above). Bigger city names = more attendees. People found it very interesting as many had never seen a tag cloud before.

We also created a website that included two tag clouds of attendee attributes by organization and title, and a form that people could use to sign up to become a beta tester. 

As people came by, we explained some of our goals for the site and invited them to sign up. Towards the end of the signup process, we asked them to enter their primary area of expertise.

After they finished the form and pressed the "Save" button, we showed them a new tag cloud (partial screenshot above) that they had just helped create, based on areas of expertise. We wanted them to get a little bit of a taste of what if might feel like to be on CommunityCollab.

An attendee, above, fills out a form to become a beta tester. I am at the left.

We distributed sign up forms on tables at the final lunch that people could give to us or take home with them and sign up later.We recruited about 150 beta testers at the conference and another 105 online for a total of  255.

This gave us an unexpected headstart.