Case Study: Love Affair Workshop

Background

The Love Affair Workshop is a three-day photography workshop designed to “designed to help women build their business and reignite their passion.” Part of an ongoing series, attendees signed up as much to learn from and get to know other photographers from around the country as to learn from the educational sessions.

It was organized by four professional photographers and educators in Atlanta, GA in July of 2009.

LAW Goals

• Encourage communication among attendees prior to the event
• Build a lasting sense of community among attendees
• Educate attendees in the use of social media tools
• Help attendees plan their session schedule attendance

Solution and Results

Love Affair Workshop’s web site design was highly stylized, but Pathable’s flexible design system allowed us to create a virtual embed of the community into the hand-crafted look and feel of the existing site. They also weren’t using a formal registration provider, but Pathable’s “Import from Spreadsheet” feature allowed the hosts to create accounts for their entire attendee list and invite them in with just a few clicks.

The site hosted attendees’ profiles, including professional information, such as their career focus, personal and business web sites, and LinkedIn profiles. The tags chosen by the community ranged from those directly relevant to photography (e.g., “photojournalism”, “Canon”, “RAW shooter”) as well as background information useful for “getting to know each other”, such as “married” and “single”.

Despite being a relatively small community (less than 100 attendees total), the community continues to be active, with conversations about photography and small business ownership continuing on months after the workshop itself completed (over 1,100 messages sent within the first two months). The Love Affair Workshop is also a “gold medal” winner in that 100% of the attendees joined the community and completed their profiles.