Amplify your online presence and connect with your audience

Saturday, May 2, 10am-1pm CT via Zoom
Nonmember: $75; Member: $65; Student: $53
*EARN CPEs; TWO SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE

Blogs are out, substacks are in! Learn to build your own and get your writing to your audience ASAP.

In this one day workshop you will learn how to use Substack, a popular online writing platform, to find your audience and amplify your voice. If you are looking to develop a marketing strategy for your long-term writing goals, this class is for you. Participants will reflect on where they are as writers, where they want to go, and how they want to use a Substack to get there. We will examine other online platforms but focus on how to use Substack and its tools to build an audience, maximize visibility, and cultivate your own unique flavor. This course is designed for practicing writers 18+, who want to connect with new readers.

Workshop participants will leave with the following:

• A deep dive into Substack
• Short-term and long-term writing goals
• An assessment of your audience
• Increased confidence in your authentic voice

Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen is a writer currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a creative nonfiction writer who writes about assimilation, belonging, and power. Her work has been supported by Tin House, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, Macondo, Vermont Studio Center, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, where she received the Emerge Editorial Fellowship and edited Emerge, the retreat’s anthology.

Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a “notable” selection in The Best American Essays 2024, and has appeared in Longreads, The Offing, Foglifter, the Ponder Review, and New Rivers Press as the winner of the American Fiction Award. She writes humorist pieces in “Thursday Letters with Jen” via Substack. Along with writing, Nguyen is currently the director of postsecondary success at the Stupski Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation that will spend down its assets and sunset by 2029. Her writing and speaking are premised on how foundations should let go of power and control—in ego, reporting, evaluation, and telling funded organizations what to do—and have appeared in Designing Tomorrow, Break Fake Rules, EdSource, and The Center for Effective Philanthropy. In addition, with the support of the Stupski Foundation, she is the author the quarterly column, “Philanthropy Confidential” – a project of candid and humorous answers to anonymously submitted questions from the philanthropic field. Her professional experiences inspired her book-length critique of the field, Letter of Inquiry – a project selected to be a part of the 2025 Changemakers Authors Cohort, which supports the development of books that could have an enduring narrative impact.