A recap of WordCamp Asia 2024: Omnisend’s first WordCamp sponsorship

Omnisenders just got back from spending a busy and exciting week in beautiful Taipei at WordCamp Asia 2024.

This was a fantastic opportunity for Omnisend to continue to collaborate, contribute and build community with the WordPress ecosystem.

WordCamp Asia: A brief overview

In general, WordCamps are conferences that focus on everything about WordPress, and they’re put together by the WordPress community. A vast majority of the WordCamp events are local, and can be city-specific, like WordCamp Phoenix, or national, like WordCamp Germany. 

According to WordCamp Central, the first WordCamp was organized in San Francisco in 2006 by the WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg.  Since then, hundreds of WordCamps have been organized by local communities all around the world.

WordCamp Asia is one of the three flagship WordCamp events that happen every year, including WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US.

This year, it all went down in beautiful Taipei from March 7-9 at the Taipei International Convention Center. 

WordCamp Asia featured more than 50 speakers, 47 organizers, 600+ contributors, nearly 2,000 attendees and 38 sponsors. And this year, Omnisend for the first time got the chance to sponsor a WordCamp event.

Getting ready at Omnisend

We spent a lot of time preparing for this day, and we felt it couldn’t have gone better. The first, and most visible part of our sponsorship was our booth, where we were able to show the WordPress ecosystem what Omnisend is all about — and how it can help them get in touch with their customers, improve their sales, and keep those customers around for longer.

As many of you know, a big part of having a booth is having some impressive swag, and our Creative Studio team did not disappoint. Our hotseller was our bags and socks, but everyone also loved our stickers, luggage tags and anti-stress toys.

Contributor Day — the key to a healthy WordPress ecosystem

Before the conference officially kicked off on Friday, March 8, WordCamp Asia started with its Contributor Day — a time when new (and old) members of the WordPress community can come and volunteer their time and experience to solving various issues, or bringing in new ideas.

At Omnisend, we’ve already got two contributors that are deeper within the Contributor community — Milvydas, who is one of the organizers for WordCamp Europe 2024’s design team, and Bernard, who is a Marketing Rep for Make WordPress.

This time, Bernard was also a Table Lead for the Marketing Contributor Table, helping onboard new contributors interested in marketing.

Here’s what some of our Omnisenders had to say about their experience during Contributor Day:

Vytautas

“It was a really great experience. I started with the Photos team, then moved on to reviewing Plugins. It’s truly an amazingly open and collaborative community, and I’m excited to continue working with the WordPress community.”

Zemyna

“At first I joined the Photos team, where I was able to upload some of my pictures taken all around the world, and then I joined Polyglots — which seems easier than it looks. Overall, it was really nice to see how happy everyone was to help and explain what we needed to do. The feeling of acceptance of who you are was really nice!”

Mantas

“I enjoyed it a lot. I was new to the WordPress ecosystem and thought that it would be hard to start, but the people were super welcoming and helpful. I talked and worked with the community and was surprised that even without a technical background I could assist with ideas and structure aspects.”

Adele

“It was so inspiring to see everyone taking out their laptops, joining the tables and initiating some kind of contribution. I contributed the most when I joined Photos and Polyglots, but I also tried Themes, Support, and Community. However, next time, I’d like to explore more Marketing, Documentation, and maybe even try Design.”

A lookback at WordCamp Asia 2024

On the remaining days, more than 50 speakers covered topics that ranged from the legality of AI, to accessibility for all, to balancing your work life when you’re raising seven children.

Many of the Omnisend team spent their days helping answer questions of all the people that stopped by our booth. The time spent helping answer their email marketing questions really helped open up conversations to how Omnisend can help make the WordPress ecosystem even stronger.

Here are some of the takeaways the Omnisend team had from WordCamp Asia:

Rokas

“I realized that event attendees & other sponsors seemed to appreciate the fact that an email marketing solution (Omnisend) started participating in the WP community more actively. I think generally the community is used to look at these type of solutions/plugins as simply serving a very defined and simple purpose. I think with Omnisend’s presence we’ve managed to start creating some excitement around email marketing.”

Zulfi

“The WordPress ecosystem is very open and welcoming, and I genuinely believe we need to focus on educating the community on how we can support their users more. I see a lot of great opportunities for how Omnisend can make the ecosystem stronger, and I’m really excited to be part of that journey.”

Milvydas

“First timers usually have the impression that WordPress is all about coding, but there are many ways I see we can help the WP ecosystem. I would like to contribute to the Design team — not as an actual designer, but more as a person who shows the importance of good and clear design for a better-looking products.”

Bernard

“A big part of the WordPress ecosystem for me is about contributing to the open source project in any way you can and just genuinely making human connections. This isn’t my first WordCamp, but it continually surprises me just how amazing the community is, and I think that’s largely because they’re all united in that one goal: a better, freer ecosystem for all of us. Excited for the next one.”

We’re excited to be sponsors for the WordCamp Europe 2024 conference taking part in Torino, Italy, in June. If you’re part of the WordPress community (or considering it), please stop by — we’d love to talk!