Another year of Netroots Nation has come and gone. Our trainings are complete, bags are unpacked, and our Bay Area staff has almost readjusted from the midwestern humidity. This year, ShareProgress team members led four different Netroots trainings.

Our CEO, Jim Pugh, led a training on understanding viral growth and co-led another on search engine optimization. Cindy Phan, our Creative Director, co-led a training on creating a well-designed website on a limited budget. And Sandhya Anantharaman, our Data Scientist, led a training on engaging young people in digital campaigns.

The trainings were great–but we know that not everyone in the progressive world was at Netroots. And even if you were, you might not have caught every word (maybe you were still recovering from karaoke?). That’s why we wanted to use this post as a little ShareProgress training cheat sheet. We asked Jim, Cindy, and Sandhya for the top three things that they’d like their listeners to take away from their trainings. And now we sharing them with you.

Still can’t get enough? We’ve also included the slide deck from Jim and Cindy’s trainings below, for even more training goodness.

Jim (Optimizing for Virality and Introduction to SEO)
Top three takeaways:

• Virality isn’t a measure of popularity — it’s a measure of how much growth you have on your campaign.
• You can improve your virality by optimizing any of the following: action page, share page, or share language.
• 95% of search engine optimization is putting the right content on your web pages.

Cindy (How to Optimize Your Website)
Top three takeaways:

• Before you go into designing a website, think about what your primary goal and secondary goal for your website is. Then, map every decision you have on what you have your website to those goals.
• For an effective website, less is more — language, color choices, calls to actions — people can only process so much information, and are more likely to stay on your website if its simple to understand
• Always think about SEO — this is how searches are listed in sites like Google. Make sure your website appears at the top of the list by writing interesting and unique content, and making sure you are coding your website so its easy for Google to find it.
  

Sandhya (Engaging Young People with Creative Campaigns)
Top three takeaways:

• Gamification is a particularly effective way to engage young people online
• You can run experiments using online ads to learn how to engage new audiences
• Ad testing can reveal counterintuitive results about what works best to recruit new members

That’s the full round-up on our end from this year’s Netroots! Have any lingering questions about the trainings? Feel free to comment below. We’ll see you next year in Atlanta, and will be staying in more temperate climates until then.