Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast

Equalize Digital and Its NASA Project: Amber explains that Equalize Digital is a company focused on WordPress accessibility, particularly for people with disabilities. They have developed a plugin called Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, available in both free and premium versions. Notably, their premium plugin is being used in the development of NASA's website. Lone Rock Point, the company behind the NASA project, decided to use WordPress primarily because of Equalize Digital's plugin. Amber's team also played a crucial role in auditing and user testing the beta site for accessibility.

Gravity Forms and Accessibility: Matt asks Amber about her experience with Gravity Forms, a popular WordPress plugin for form creation. Amber reveals that they have been using Gravity Forms extensively in their projects, including the WordPress Accessibility Day website. She highlights Gravity Forms' commitment to accessibility and how it saves time for their organizing team, particularly in managing user registrations and creating draft posts for event speakers. They also discuss the value of Gravity Forms in creating efficient editorial workflows and how it benefits the event's attendees and sponsors.

Notable URLs and software mentioned:
* Equalize Digital's plugin: ~[Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker](https://wordpress.org/plugins/equalize-digital-accessibility-checker/)~
* NASA's website development by Lone Rock Point
* Gravity Forms: A popular WordPress form creation plugin
* Gravity Forms advanced post creation add-on
* Gravity Forms user registration add-on
* GravityWiz's "Populate Anything" add-on
* Zapier: Used for integrating Gravity Forms with Google Sheets
* WordPress Accessibility Day website: 2023.wpaccessibility.day

These two key points provide listeners with insights into how Equalize Digital is contributing to web accessibility and how Gravity Forms is aiding in the success of WordPress Accessibility Day.

ConvertKit Beta Add-On: Matt mentions at the beginning that they have a ConvertKit beta add-on available for download at the bottom of the dashboard. This is likely important for listeners who are interested in using ConvertKit or existing users looking to enhance their experience with this tool. Find the beta in your Gravity Forms dashboard.

Middle of the Funnel Importance: Jason emphasizes the significance of the middle of the funnel in email marketing, stating that about 85% of sales occur in this stage. He stresses the need for consistency in email communication, a well-planned welcome sequence, and intentionality in writing emails with a clear call to action. This insight is valuable for anyone involved in email marketing, as it highlights the often-neglected middle stage and provides practical advice for improving email engagement and conversion rates.

Important software mentioned:
* ConvertKit: The email marketing platform discussed throughout the conversation.
* WordPress: Jason mentions moving his website back to WordPress, indicating its importance as a content management system.

Overall, this conversation delves into the significance of the middle of the funnel in email marketing and announces the availability of a ConvertKit beta add-on, providing practical insights for podcast listeners interested in email marketing and ConvertKit usage.

Follow Jason on Twitter and download his NurtureKit Blueprint.

What is Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast?

Discover new WordPress opportunities through stories told using Gravity Forms. WordPress developers and agency owners rely on Gravity Forms to solve complex problems for their clients. Breakdown explores their stories to extract the most useful lessons for our listeners.

Join podcast host Matt Medeiros with special guest appearances from the team behind Gravity Forms to stay up to date on the next opportunity for Gravity Forms + WordPress. Whether it's a new Gravity Forms add-on or a new way to use our e-commerce features, Breakdown is the WordPress podcast you want to be subscribed to.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

Hey Gravity Formers, it's Monday, September 18th.

Lots of updates to your favorite contact form plugin for WordPress and two fantastic interviews

lined up, especially if you're into email marketing.

breakdown of Gravity Forms podcast.

All right, welcome back to Breakdown.

Let's get some housekeeping stuff out of the way.

First, number one, Gravity Forms is sponsoring WP Accessibility Day 2023.

You can tune into the live stream for free or a donation ticket on September 27th

through the 28th.

Find the website at wpaccessibility.day.

and stick around for the third segment of today's show

because not only will Amber Hines talk about the event,

but she'll also share how she built the website

using Gravity Forms.

And number two, join me on September 28th at 11 a.m.

Eastern, along with Adam Pickering from the team,

over on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/atgravitywp

for another 101 live stream event.

We'll be covering some of the important updates

coming to our add-ons and core features

like the orbital theme features and what's new with gravity SMTP.

Don't worry if you miss it.

It'll be recorded livestream to YouTube,

so certainly recorded and presented on our YouTube page.

Speaking of email, we have a few additional updates

to some key add-ons you might use.

Aweber 4.0 add-on was released last month.

This will use Aweber's new REST API,

so look forward to more enhancements to the add-on

as time goes on.

And we've officially launched our own ConvertKit add-on,

which is now in beta inside your admin dashboard.

Check that out if you're a ConvertKit customer.

For a while now, the ConvertKit add-on was developed

and maintained by the ConvertKit team

with how fast WordPress is changing,

along with our own software.

We thought it was best to have our own official add-on

to lead development and support moving forward.

We're working with the ConvertKit team

to make this as seamless a transition as possible for you.

So again, if you're using ConvertKit,

maybe you were looking for some other features

that the existing ConvertKit add-on didn't have

that you really desire.

We can check, or you can check out that beta add-on

in your dashboard, start using it

and give us some feedback.

That would be fantastic.

Some additional good news for you ConvertKit users

coming up in the next segment.

I interviewed Jason Resnick,

who runs a site called nurturekit.co

and specializes in ConvertKit for his customers.

So coming up next, you'll hear what it takes

to run a successful newsletter campaign

in what areas a lot of us, myself included, fall shorted.

Here's Jason.

(gentle music)

Hey, Jason, welcome to the program.

- Thanks for having me, Matt.

Excited to be here.

- I'm breaking you on because as of this publication,

on this recording, we should have our ConvertKit beta add-on out.

You can download the beta right at the bottom of your dashboard,

and we're looking forward to any feedback.

you know, you might have before it goes into production,

ready mode, but Jason, I've known you for many, many years

and you have a high concentration on ConvertKit.

So I was hoping you could share some of those battle stories

with us today.

- Sure, absolutely.

- So you have a pretty dialed in business.

I've been interviewing a lot of folks that have

and you might not like this phrase,

but I think a lot of people get it,

this sort of productized business where you can do this thing

and then connect up a service to what looks like a product

on the outside, but you do consulting and digital downloads

and all that stuff.

For the folks listening, what is it that you do

with ConvertKit these days and what is your product offering?

- Yeah, I help course creators and coaches

and some agencies even basically sell digital products

through email automation,

through most of the middle of the funnel to be quite frank.

Yes, while the sexy thing is ads and new subscriber,

onboarding and pitching and flash sales and launches and stuff.

85% of your sales are going to come through the middle of the funnel.

So that's what I really focusing on more so on the behavior side of things.

So by you giving good will, your subscribers are going to naturally fall into sales funnels.

And that's what I help folks build out.

What is it that folks are missing from that middle of the funnel?

And I'll just pontificate for a moment.

I think there's the top of the funnel.

It's, hey, check me out.

I got this value add thing over here.

I'm spraying and praying across all social platforms,

my website, doing all the things to drive and generate buzz.

And now they're in the funnel at the top.

What is it in that middle that a lot of people miss?

- Yeah, you said it, spray and pray, right?

Because they don't really think too much.

I mean, all right, I'll take a step back.

It actually is sending emails, this first thing, right?

on a consistent basis, not once a month

or every other month or just,

hey, I'm gonna do a sprinting right for two straight weeks

and then go dark for three months.

Pick a day, pick a cadence, pick a time

and show up every single day or every single week

like you promise and then show up with a plan.

Just spray and pray never works.

I had a lot of people, hey, it's Tuesday,

I'm gonna get down, I'm gonna write something.

The blank page comes up, whatever comes to mind.

That's what they write about.

Instead, I'm not saying that you can't do that,

but do that with intent.

You know what you have to sell.

You know what's profitable.

You know what you want people to buy.

Well, make the call to action for those

that are ready to buy from you.

The thing that you write about, right?

So write your stories, write your curated,

link lists or whatever the case is, but then at the end,

what's the next step for them?

Give them that sales page, give them that buy button,

whatever it is that you want them to do,

or book a call even, right?

Lead into that and do that with intent.

And when you do that in the middle of the funnel,

you'd be surprised how much money you do make

just from those links.

- I wanna talk about trust in email in a moment

because I think that's a big thing.

Technically speaking, is there something

that people miss in the middle of the funnel,

like from a technical level,

like should you be setting up a certain,

or is there like a blueprint for every kind of scenario?

Somebody signs up to the newsletter,

you must email them three times that first week,

or you must put them into a drip campaign

of minimum 12 emails.

Like, do you have like a technical idea

of what people miss,

or does it really depend on their situation?

What I think people miss, especially with regard to new subscriber onboarding,

is a welcome sequence that is designed to create a story arc to the thing

that you want somebody to buy.

A lot of people put welcome sequences up,

but they give them the best hits.

Hey, these are emails that worked,

and it's a mishmash of five emails in a row over five days.

And then just like, okay, that's great.

Like it's super helpful, but I mean,

where does it all lead?

Right?

I always like to say, how can we create that sequence,

whether it's three emails, five emails, seven emails?

It doesn't really matter.

But how do you create that story arc that leads

that when that final email of the welcome sequence lands

that you could send a buy button, the next email?

And it would make total sense for them.

many of us, and this is my own opinion,

which is gonna lead me into talking about trust in a moment,

like I'll be on Twitter, I'll see somebody tweet something out,

post something, and then be like,

oh, follow me, follow my newsletter for like more insights.

So, you know, I'm just whatever, I'm like scrolling through,

and I'm like, that was a pretty cool,

pretty cool tweet that they put out.

So yeah, you know, I'll check out their newsletter

and I sign up, and then days go by,

I've totally forgotten who this person was,

but there's that email in my inbox,

and they're already selling me something,

I'm like, wait a minute, who, how did I get here?

Where was this thing?

And I'd imagine in that scenario,

that person didn't have a welcoming onboarding sequence

because it's just boom, I'm getting sold.

And then on their side, I'm thinking as a marketer myself,

well, how are you successful with this?

It's like, how does this work?

It which all leads me up to trust,

but no question there, a little bit of a soapbox moment,

but any thoughts on that trust component

when onboarding people to your newsletter?

- Yeah, I try to, I mean, it takes a lot of work, right?

Like, and truth be told, I do those kind of tactics.

And that's what people see, that as a tactic

and what you're finding out is three out of four,

just add you to their list and then kind of get this email,

like where did this person come from?

You know, that's happening a lot these days

with various different ways people are growing that list.

But I try to create experiences with folks.

So how they come on to the list, I try to transition them smoothly into who I am,

into my welcome sequence, right? That talks about the value that I'm going to be giving them,

why they would even want to pay attention to me in the first place, like why I'm different than

other people, right? So taking a little thought and time through that experience, whether it's

from social, whether that's through a webinar, just have us and it doesn't need to be complex.

It's just how you bring them on, mark them as such to give them at least an email that

says, "Hey, thanks for coming in from Twitter.

Thanks for coming in from the webinar at Awesome Hot Time with the host and the current."

Like come in as a transition and that, I mean, you're doing 95% better than 95% of people

that are out there because you're, I mean, look, it's like somebody walks into your house

and they walk into your entryway and then you just leave them there.

And like, you just don't, right?

Like you take their coat, you say, "Hey, there's the living room," whatever, right?

Like otherwise, it's just like you open the door and then you just kind of walk away and

then it's like, "Oh, like, you wouldn't do that in real life, so why do it in email?"

- Yeah, yeah, and then this other factor of trust

is in the content and is in the cadence.

Here's another example, signed up for a newsletter,

same scenario, and I saw that on Twitter.

I was like, oh, that was pretty cool, very interesting.

Maybe it was even a pitch for their newsletter,

and I joined, and then suddenly,

I'm getting these emails every morning,

and I'm opening them up,

and it's just one sentence, two sentences

about whatever, a topic or something like that.

And then I, and it always linked out, right?

So the weekend went by, I had like four emails

in my inbox and I'm looking at all these things

and I clicked the links and it just brings me back

to their blog posts, but their blog posts

are only like three or four years old.

And it's just, I can tell like, again, from a marketer

and where I'm going with this is, I think a lot of us,

look, no one loves email, right?

No one's like, oh, I love my email.

We all are like using it as a utility,

email in your inbox is not the same as scrolling on Instagram, right?

You're not getting that same kind of kick in your brain of like, "Oh, this is fun."

So we all want to process our emails, though we want the stuff that we want in the emails, right?

So if all of a sudden I'm just getting these, you're just repurposing content as a marketer,

but you're not putting any extra effort in it, like you said, create an experience.

It's fine if you want to repurpose content, but not fine to me if it's just, you're just

like a rant, like it's like a lottery of your RSS feed.

Here's an email of a random blog post.

I talked about this thing once, like four years ago,

cool, but like if you're giving me something extra

in this email, it's gonna go many more miles for me.

If you see what I'm getting, like sometimes just like

marketers take the shortcuts and it's just like,

put it on repeat, send it out, blast it,

I'm gonna move on to the next.

And if these fools think that, you know, that this

is good content, I'm gonna sell something to them.

And to me, that's just you're really missing the mark.

- Yeah, I mean, there's different ways,

and I think different formats of email

that work for some don't work for some,

that kind of stuff.

And you have to find from a business owner perspective,

you have to find what works for you and for your readers.

And so, if it's a, I mean, look, I hate to say,

but like the AI newsletter craze of like the latest AI news,

I mean, like how many more emails do we need for that?

Like, I mean, that's enough already, right?

Like, but I mean, when AI came out,

there was a lot of people that were interested in it.

Now, maybe not so much kind of thing.

So it's like, how do you blend it in a way where, you know,

okay, now I have a link list newsletter that's curated,

But, you know, I have a business to run.

So I have things to sell.

I have, you know, services, whatever the case is.

You try to have to marry that in a way where even if you wanted to repurpose

something from a blog post or something else, like, like you said, like

add a layer on top of that, like recent news or something else.

Like maybe if it was a blog article, maybe you now have a YouTube video on the thing, right?

And so blend it that way.

Yeah, that's kind of like, I just think like people ever green and then they forget.

Yeah.

Like I mean, you know, I've had clients that have had a year long sequence that people go through.

I'm like, well, when was the last time you looked at that?

I'm like, oh, well, I looked at the numbers.

But yeah, I understand.

But when you've referenced 2020 and pandemic and things like that, that's not relatable now.

So it's like you got to go update the content too.

So.

Email is hard, man.

I get it is overwhelming.

It's hard to set up.

Um, it's not hard to set up.

It's just you have to like sit down and critically think, at least in my head anyway,

like critically think how you're going to set this segment up.

And then I also think my God, like how, like you just referenced one year sequence.

I mean, where is there a sweet spot?

Like at what point do you say?

Do you do like a 30 day sequence and then say,

"Look, if they don't buy or upsell into your next thing

in 30 days, then get them out of that sequence

and just move them onto something else."

Like, is there an industry standard or a litmus test

that you look at with your clients to say,

"Look, generally 45 days, if they haven't bought by now,

it ain't working, they'll find something else."

Like, how do you approach that?

- Yeah, I mean, there's a 90 day window.

Like, from when somebody finds who you are

to their first purchase.

I mean, that's the sweet spot.

Like if you can't convert somebody between then,

it's going to be harder to convert later on down the road,

unless it's like some high ticket thing,

like five figures or more.

But what I say is like, look, make it simple.

It's got to work for you, right?

Like I went from in 2020, at the end of that year,

I went from one-ish emails a week to six times a week.

For me, it was like, do I even have enough to say?

Am I going to burn my list?

Like all of those kind of self imposed doubts came into my mind, but I had

worked with so many clients that had three times a week, daily emails.

And I saw the impact.

So it was not like I was oblivious to like the benefits of everything.

So I was like, let me do it.

Like, let me switch that on and see what happens.

And I basically just said, how's this going to work for me?

How am I going to write six days a week?

And so I basically took a page out of James Clear.

And it was like, all right, what am I using as the queue

to write the email every day?

And it was my first cup of coffee.

Well, it takes about 20 minutes, half hour to finish that.

So it was like, once that cup is gone,

push send on the email.

That's it.

It's all you need to do.

Don't worry about, you know,

even like a content strategy plan or whatever.

Like just shit.

And so that initial start allowed me to get through that first test that I had.

And you know me, I'm like a day to geek, so I test everything.

All right.

Let me see how this worked for 30 days.

And that little framework at least gave me a short email that was, you know, there was

typos in there.

There was all sorts of mistakes and things of that nation.

That was fine.

But it showed that I was a human.

When people stayed on, I doubled sales, I tripled affiliate sales.

I mean, within a month, I was like, "Okay, I got to figure this out now.

Now how do I wrap a strategy around this?"

I don't say that everyone should do this, but it's an iterative process.

Once you start to see some benefits, you don't know what you don't know.

Until you press send, you have no idea what format your reader is going to like, how things

things are going to look how they're going to engage with you.

I mean, I can tell you to use an emoji in subject line that's going to get you open rates

up.

Yeah, for some people it will.

Some people it won't.

Doesn't for me.

So like, it is what it is.

So I say it's an iterative process.

If you want to evergreen stuff and you're thinking about doing that, then think about

doing it at least sending multiple emails in a week where your evergreen stuff is like

on a Tuesday and then you're sending live stuff on a Friday.

So this way, you still have the pulse of your list.

You could go on a podcast, at least on Friday.

You could send out that you're on the podcast, things like that.

So at least this way, you're best of hits or in your evergreen on Tuesdays, but you're

also getting the pulse and the live on Fridays as well.

Yeah.

I want to put you on the hot seat before we wrap up.

you on Twitter, you said you're moving back to WordPress.

- Cue the evil background music right now.

Welcome back to WordPress.

What made that switch for you?

- Yes, I am.

It's a block.

Yeah, I mean, truth be told, I want to write particles, right?

Like, so, I mean, I have one site that was WordPress

and that's been my site forever since the mid 90s kind of thing.

And then my business site, nerajikit.co,

that's been on a, a lack of a better term, a hosted platform

that was really built for SAS landing pages.

So there's no blog component, there's no publishing,

there's no CMS, there's nothing.

- Was it web flow?

- I thought it was web flow.

- No, it's so actually.

It used to be landin.com and then they changed name.

But it was really designed for landing pages.

And truth be told, when I spun off one service,

I needed a landing page.

And this way, you know, it solves a problem at the time.

Like I was just like, okay, I need a landing page

that does this and it worked great.

But now as certain things are matured

and like all my content is pretty much on my newsletter

and my email, some on YouTube, some in other areas

of the online space, but I wanna kind of have a home.

So, you know, my background in WordPress, as you said,

I was like, all right, let me go back there.

It's very different from when I left.

I think I left in 2019, somewhere around there.

Like that was my last WordPress site.

I've had clients use WordPress like Cadence and all that.

So, I'm not totally oblivious to the world, but yeah.

I mean, I'm back.co will be moved over to WordPress

if it isn't already by the time you're listening to this.

Jason Resnick, nurturekit.co, get ConvertKit optimized

so you can convert more leads if you struggle

with getting all this stuff set up like I do.

Check out Jason, Jason Morals, can folks find you?

- Yeah, you could go to nurturekit.co/blueprint

and that's the new subscriber to customer flow

that I recommend.

(gentle music)

equalized digital WordPress accessibility day, 2023.

We're gonna chat about all of these things,

but tell me a little bit about equalized digital.

Recently at WordCamp US, the headline speaker

talked about their building a website for NASA.

Your product is being used on that project

or a part of that project.

Tell us more about equalized digital and what you do.

- Yeah, so we are a WordPress accessibility focused company,

which means we're focused on making WordPress websites

work for people with disabilities.

And we have a plugin,

Equisageal Accessibility Checker.

There's a free version of it on WordPress.org.

And then we have a premium version

that has various licensing tiers.

And that is being included in the NASA website.

And actually, we were excited to know that when

Lone Rock Point was the company who did all the dev on that,

when they pitched NASA on using WordPress,

our plugin was one of the reasons

that NASA decided to use WordPress

over some of the other CMSs that they were looking at.

We also were the accessibility team on the project,

so we did all of the auditing and user testing

with people with disabilities on the beta site.

- There is a pretty strong presence

in the Gravity Forms ecosystem of using Gravity Forms

for nonprofit sites, for donations, recurring donors,

and stuff like that.

Have you, I'll put you on the hot seat,

Have you used Gravity Forms in any of your projects?

- Come in Matt, I brought Gravity Forms license in 2010.

So yes, we use Gravity Forms

on all of our custom website builds.

It's on my personal website, like my kids website

because I'm just like, if you're gonna build a form,

that's what we use.

And I'm sure we'll sort of dive into this,

but it's on the WordPress Accessibility Day website,

which I am one of the lead organizers

a WordPress accessibility day and the president of the board

because that is a nonprofit organization.

And we love Gravity Forms because there has been such a focus

on accessibility within Gravity Forms.

And so for us, it's a no-brainer to use it

on the accessibility day website

because we don't have to worry about fixing

bunch of things to actually make it work the way it should

for people with disabilities.

- Does your accessibility checker plug in?

Does it also, this is a foolish question,

but does it work on form fields as well?

And is that something that like a little recipe,

a little solution for the freelancer agencies out there

to test their gravity forms with your plugin

before they ship their sites?

- Yeah, so accessibility checker, what it does is

it gets the HTML and the CSS and it scans the entire page

for every URL on the website.

So it'll scan things in the header,

footer, side bars, main content area widgets.

It expands short codes if someone has short codes,

if they're not using a Gravity Forms block, for example,

they're kind of old-schooling it with the shortcode,

it'll expand the shortcode, and it would scan.

It'll tell you, let's say,

and Gravity Forms has a warning about this too,

but if you have a field where you haven't filled in the label

'cause you wanted it to just be blank,

it would notify you of that,

and it would say that you have a field with an empty label.

So the plugin can be used to test

how other plugins are outputting on WordPress websites.

We also have a handful of plugin developers

that are using it to test their own products.

So it can be used just to test products as well.

- Yeah, and that's a very common,

the sort of the blank field.

I'm just thinking about the end users that are out there

and myself guilty as charged as like,

"Building sites for marketing purposes."

You're like, "Hey, I just want the email signup box there

and I'm gonna put some copy around it

but I just want a blank field."

- Yeah, use a placeholder instead.

- Yeah, use a placeholder instead, right?

And that makes sense.

And I guess your customers,

the people who just don't know this space

and don't know how to check for this stuff.

And your plugin will help in those areas.

- We are doing a lot with Gravity Forms

on the WordPress Accessibility Day website.

We have figured out ways,

especially with Gravity Forms Advanced Post Creation add-on.

We have the Elite License for Gravity Forms.

We have access to all the add-ons, which is super handy.

But we're using that to really save time

for the organizing team.

So this year when people submitted an application to speak,

with that add-on, it created a draft post

in our sessions post type with all of the talk information.

And then we went through this whole anonymous selection

process, and then once we selected people,

we turned the ones that we selected in "dependent" posts.

And then we have a speaker onboarding forum

where they could come in.

And I think this might be using gravity whiz,

populate anything to populate,

it populates in a dropdown,

the titles of the pending posts.

So the speakers could choose which posts they were,

or which session was theirs.

And then they submitted their bio,

their onboarding forum, all of that kind of stuff.

And that created the people post

and automatically connected it to the session post.

And then all we had to do was go in

and make sure they didn't have any errors,

or anything wrong,

and then it uploaded their photo as a featured image

and to the media library with alt-types

and all that kind of stuff, which was awesome.

And then we just had to hit publish,

which in previous years,

I think we were doing a lot of this copying

and pasting manually.

So that was super cool.

Of course, we're accepting donations

and selling donation tickets to attend.

And we're doing a lot of stuff with things going over

to Google Sheets with the Zapier add-on,

which is super handy.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Are you using the user registration add-on as well

before everybody signs up and fills out all that information?

So yes, we use the user registration with our attendees

because our attendees at WordPress Accessibility

they get access to swag, like digital swag,

and they have the ability to enter to win.

like I know Gravity Forms is going to give away an elite license

and so people can go on Gravity Forms sponsor page

and enter to win that, but you have to be registered.

And so on our attendee registration form,

it creates a pending user.

They have to go verify it with their email

just to help us reduce spam and they're a subscriber,

but that gets everyone access to the things

that are only visible to logged in users.

- That's fantastic.

You know, I'll, it's the post creation and like creating these editorial workflows,

I think are such a, um, I don't know, under the radar feature of Gravity Forms.

And I'll, I'll admit something here.

I have another publication that I do that's just for fun, like hobby, for

podcasting stuff.

And I didn't decide, I didn't go with WordPress for this project.

Right.

Oh man.

I didn't go with WordPress and continuously kick myself because it's a

same sort of thing where people can submit their podcast setups and they can share like

what microphone people use software like how you record your show and all this stuff.

And I didn't choose WordPress for various reasons, but the biggest thorn in my side is copying

and pasting all this stuff back into I'm using ghost.

So I'm staying in the open source world, but putting all that stuff back into ghost.

So I'm like, every time I do it, I'm like, I could just be using gravity forms and people

I'd fill it out, draft the post,

and I could just go in and review it and hit publish,

and save myself a few hours every time.

It has saved so much time for us.

I mean, the other thing we did too

with that user registration add-on

is we have a front-end forum that allows people to,

well, I think we have a front-end login

that's powered with the Gravity Form shortcode.

That's part of user registration.

But we also have an update profile

because we didn't want subscribers

to have access to the backend of the website at all.

So we have that and it's using gravity forms merge tags.

So if you go to that form, it pulls in everything

that you've already have saved on your user profile,

but then you can edit it and hit save,

and that will change if users want to be,

they can choose on their own,

whether they want to be visible on the attendee list.

Before we had that in a prior year,

I think people were like, oh, I changed my mind.

I said no, but now I want to be there.

And so then somebody had to like manually go to it,

Now we're just like, give users a power

and it's saved us so much time.

>> Let's talk about the WordPress Accessibility Day.

Talk to me about how this organization is structured.

You're the lead host.

Is that how you, is that your running title for this year?

>> Well, so there's two different groups of people.

WordPress Accessibility Day, as of this year,

we became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

through in a partnership with Nobility.

As a result, we actually have a board of directors.

So that's myself, Joe Doulson and Bethenan.

The three of us are the board for the nonprofit.

We are also the lead organizers.

I'm technically the president of the board.

And then I kind of oversteal all of our marketing initiatives

for WordPress Accessibility Day.

But and then we have an organizing team

with a lot of other people who have stepped up

to help make the event what it is.

- And it's completely live streamed, right?

This is not an in-person event.

Are there ever plans to go in-person?

- Probably not.

I mean, part of, so WordPress Accessibility Day

is a 24-hour event,

and a big part of why it is that

is because we want to make sure

that we have accessibility talks

that are happening during business hours

for people no matter where they are in the world.

And it's on Zoom and we have live captioning,

we have sign language interpreters that come.

And having it that way removes the costs

or the travel barriers that might otherwise exist

for people being able to attend.

And so really it'll probably always be virtual

because that is what makes it most accessible

to the most people around the world.

- Completely free, correct?

- Yep, it is 100% free to attend.

There are options to donate if you wish to support

the organization since it is a nonprofit.

And obviously there are expenses involved with

bringing in interpreters and live human beings

to caption things and things like that.

But if someone cannot donate or they don't want to,

they are welcome to attend totally for free.

- Gravity Forms is one of the platinum sponsors

alongside your agency.

you can get access to the website at 2023.wpaccessibility.day.

I love these TLDs.

- I know.

(laughs)

- Look at dot day.

I wonder what that did to the dot com value

of selling domains when they released

so many different TLDs.

- I don't know.

It was sort of a fun switch that we did last year

when we rolled out that event and so yeah.

- 2023.wpaccessibility.day.

and behinds. Thanks for hanging out with us today.

Thank you.

That's it for today's episode.

If you could do one more thing for me today, share this episode on social media, your favorite

Facebook group or Discord channel, spread the word about this podcast.

It really helps.

If you haven't added Breakdown to your favorite podcast app, point your browser to gravityforms.com/breakdown

and click the icon of your app to add us and listen to us every two weeks.

Okay, we'll see you in the next episode.

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