Marketing a Conference From 7,000 Kilometres Away: What I Learned at PG Data 2026
How I marketed a Chicago conference from a desk in Sweden, and what worked
I met Hettie Dombrovskaya at PGConf EU 2025, and wanting some exposure to the North American PostgreSQL community, I volunteered to help with the marketing and communications of PG Data 2026 in Chicago. What followed was months of marketing operations for a conference in a city seven time zones away from my desk in Malmö.
Here’s what I learned:
1. Why “Wish You Were Here” Was a Strategy, Not a Slogan
The design concept I landed on was the postcard. Specifically: Wish You Were Here.
A postcard is sent from somewhere to someone who couldn’t make it. It says: this place is real, it’s worth traveling to, and you’re missing something. For a niche technical conference that most people outside the database world have never heard of, that’s exactly the emotional gap you’re trying to close. The Chicago skyline silhouette, the vintage stamp graphic, the postcard aesthetic — all of it was doing quiet persuasion work. Not “come to a database conference.” But: this community is somewhere you’d want to be.
The visual system also had to travel across every asset: social tiles, speaker cards, screen graphics. When you’re promoting something niche, consistency is credibility.
Takeaway: Pick a metaphor that carries your event’s spirit and let it do structural work across everything.
2. Community Sponsorships: Audience Research From Far
A task I had in January 2026 from Hettie was to identify community and academic partners to help reach developers and data scientists who weren’t yet plugged into the core PostgreSQL world. The challenge: I had never set foot in Chicago.
I identified three target sectors: civic tech communities, academic departments, and coding bootcamps. I built a list of 12 organisations with contacts and wrote two outreach email templates: one for community partners framed around closing the “PostgreSQL knowledge debt,” and one for academic partners framed around industry readiness.
The lesson: community sponsorship research is audience mapping in disguise. The partners you choose signal who the conference is for before a single person registers. You don’t need to be in the city. You need to understand the ecosystem. Read more about why this reminded me of my days in PR.
3. Live Social as a Real-Time Welcome Desk
The best conference social content isn’t hype. It’s reassuring. I have always believed in audience engagement, live updates pre and post event.
Speaker spotlights gave people a reason to come. Chicago travel tips lowered the activation energy for first-timers. Directions to Loyola University answered the question nobody wants to admit they have. Each post quietly answered an objection before it was raised. Check out how we did this on PG Data’s LinkedIn page.
On the day itself, tagging speakers and sponsors created a natural amplification loop: they reshared, their audiences engaged, and the content took on a life beyond our own channels. Reminder posts about who was speaking and what was coming next weren’t just logistics. They represent hospitality. They said: we thought of you. We made it easy. You’re welcome here.
4. Giveaways: Design Participation, Not Just Prizes
The passport challenge gave attendees a reason to move around the venue, engage with sponsors, and stay invested across both days rather than dipping in and out. But the mechanics that taught me the most were the ones that turned attendees into amplifiers.
Hettie’s book giveaway and the DBtune lanyard challenge both required participants to post online: pictures of themselves at the conference, testimonials about their experience, to be eligible. That’s a small ask with an outsized return. Suddenly your attendees are doing the marketing for you, in their own voice, to their own networks. It’s word of mouth with structure. Every post was a signal to someone’s followers that PG Data was a real event worth paying attention to, created not by us but by someone they already trusted.
That’s the underrated power of participation-based giveaways: the prizes are almost beside the point. What you’re really creating is a reason for people to publicly declare they’re here and they’re glad about it.
Many did not find out about the giveaways so we had to do a last minute push: an email, on-screen announcement and personal announcement made mid-conference, on the spot. Unscripted, slightly chaotic, and entirely effective, because it was responsive. We read the room, saw an opportunity, and moved without waiting for a perfect plan.
That moment taught me more than any carefully prepared asset did. The best engagement mechanic is sometimes the one you improvise under pressure.
The Art of Intentional Improvisation
Intentional improvisation doesn’t mean winging it. It means having such a clear understanding of your goals that when something unexpected happens, you know exactly how to respond. Every choice here had a reason behind it. The postcard had a theory. The sponsorship research had a logic. The last-minute announcement had a human paying attention to the room.
The United States PostgreSQL Association and DBtune believed in this work enough to fly me from Sweden to Chicago. I arrived with something to prove: not to them, but to the idea that technical communities deserve marketing that takes them seriously. That combination, preparation meeting spontaneity, is what I’ll carry into everything I do next.
I think we delivered.