Floating to the Top: How website and social media strategy literally rescued us from the flood

Maybe you’ve seen videos like this where cars float downstream in what’s normally a quiet, little creek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzoaXclhnZs and thought, “Thank God that’s not us.” Only on August 11, 2018 it was us. Imagine being an 80-year-old community theatre (run entirely by volunteers) who finds itself under 4 feet of water after a devastating and historic flash flood.

Question: How do you recover when you literally lose everything and insurance money will barely scratch the surface and not be available for months?

Answer: Smart content and social media strategy learned from attending WordCamps led to massive media coverage, an army of volunteers we never met before, and more money than we dreamed possible raised in three days.

Speaker

About Laura Byrne

Laura started off her career with educational non-profits, where marketing was part of everyone's job description. After dabbling in in Microsoft FrontPage for a few years, Laura found WordPress in 2006 when she and a friend decided to build a website with a blog and forum for fans to discuss a then little-known book called Twilight. What started out as an obscure website, rapidly grew into the most popular Twilight website on the internet with millions of visitors each day from around the globe. Thrust into a vortex of viral website management meets Hollywood, Laura's marketing arsenal exponentially grew, as she hit the ground running with new skill sets in SEO, social media strategy, podcasting, event management, and more. These days, Laura works for WebDev Studios. She’s created/written content for over 50 WordPress sites mostly in the non-profit and entertainment worlds. Laura currently resides in North NJ