Last week, Mark Corcoran and I went to Providence, RI for the 7th annualNetroots Nation conference (#NN12<). If you followed us on Twitter (@ProgressTX you probably heard all about our conference. Mark already wrote about our first days last week. I wanted to recap the highlights from the last half of the conference.

On Friday, we attended what was likely our favorite conference - a presentation by Upworthy entitled, "EXCLUSIVE: 10 Ways to Win the Internets Through Sexier Sharing and Epic Visuals." It provided great tips on how to use creative headlines to expand your audience. Here's the presentation:

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We also attended excellent morning trainings to improve our skills. I went to a panel titled "Excel-erate! Turbo-charge your Excel skills" that taught about great ways of organizing data through Excel; Mark went to a panel titled "How to Make Clicks Mean Something: Strategic Planning for Online Campaigns." Together, we each learned some great skills we will be using to help grow our organzation and deliver better, fresher content to you on a regular basis.

Finally, I had a chance to help lead one of the last panels at Netroots Nation: Revitalizing State and Local Blogging. We talked about the challenges local and state bloggers face getting started, staying funded, and building networks to distribute content. I was able to go back to some of my work from graduate school, where I wrote my thesis on how to improve the 50-state blog network. You can watch the video of our panel here:

Overall it was a great conference, one where we learned a lot and got to make great connections with fellow progressives from across the country. We look forward to next year's conference in San Jose!