Book Bridget to Speak at Your Conference

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: SOCIAL MEDIA, BUSINESS, & MENTAL HEALTH TOPICS

Photo of Bridget Willard
Photo of Bridget Willard

A PASSION FOR TEACHING & LEARNING

HIRE BRIDGET TO SPEAK AT YOUR NEXT EVENT

IN-PERSON & ONLINE

Teaching comes naturally to me. You can frequently find me at a WordCamp showing my friends how to use Twitter in the hallway track. When I can see that someone really gets it, my world is elevated and I feel complete. Some of the talks are on WordPress.tv here.

Contact me if you'd like to hire me for your private or public event.

Crafting an Effective Bio for Your Website and Social Profiles

WordCamp US
November 1, 2019
Slides

We have a tendency to write our online biographies as if they are resumes. Even worse is when we write them full of inside jokes or self-deprecating humor.

We do business with people we know, like, and trust. Your online bios need to show your human side. Are you into golf? Let’s talk about it. Do you have children, design tattoos, or grow watermelons? Let’s talk about your PHP skills in your case studies and leave the resumes for LinkedIn.

In this workshop, we rewrote our bios. I’ll helped attendees with the formula I came up with for over 40 speaker bios I’ve written for WordCamp speakers. The goal was to leave this workshop with a finished product you can apply to your sites immediately.

Developer Marketing Tips From the Car Industry

WordCamp Dallas Fort Worth
October 20, 2019
Slides

Have you seen the concept sketches for the new Volkswagen ID.Buzz? They’ve been marketing this concept car and evolving it since 2001. This isn’t new in the automobile industry. The concepts are always marketed years before they go into production.

And, yet, in the WordPress product space, we tend to build something, see if it is viable, and then throw a few dollars at marketing. And we’re left wondering why there are so many abandoned products and plugins.

Instead, my suggestion is to start a GitHub repo (or Trello Board) for your marketing so what while you are building your next SaaS Product or WordPress plugin, you will simultaneously be working on brand.

Backward Compatibility is Good for WordPress, not Mental Health

WordCamp Las Vegas

September 7, 2019

Video

Slides

Imposter syndrome combined with isolation is a concern in our increasingly growing industry, particularly for those working remotely. How do we address imposter syndrome without looking our internal programming or self talk?

Through talking with developers over the years, I believe many of us came to tech because of our backgrounds. Namely, computers are something we can control. More than half of the people I know in technology have dysfunctional backgrounds.

Teaching emotional coping skills with something developers understand (logical code) can produce powerful breakthroughs. Though I am not a licensed therapist, I do care about our developers, our community, and specifically, my friends.

In this talk, related how I've dealt with mental health through my journey and the insight into how destructive our self-talk is. It affects the jobs we go after, the work we do, and how we relate with each other. Instead of keeping old self-talk and growing around it, we need to make “breaking changes” in the way we talk about ourselves.

Bridget giving the keynote at WordCamp Seattle