CASE STUDY:

How to Date Your Dead People (workshop)

Creating social media assets, newsletter campaigns, and slide decks for this one-of-a-kind Book Launch + Mini-Workshop event by Dr Corey McAuliffe

Graphic Design / Social Media & Newsletter Marketing / Zoom Co-piloting / Digital Asset Management

After designing the book cover and website for Dr Corey McAuliffe’s self-published debut memoir, 23 Dates with My Dead Dad, a formal launch event was designed, with a captivating mini-workshop as a hook: How to date your dead people.

Corey asked me to design a few assets for this event:

  • the slides for the presentation during the event, and

  • the static marketing images for social media, and

  • the communications process and monitoring of the event live on Zoom

The goal was to host two live sessions on the same day at different times to allow everyone to join across time zones. This meant monitoring the flow of registrants to make sure they were tagged per their preferred livestream time, and coordinating reminder emails and other communications in a scheduled manner.

Hooking the audience

The title of the workshop, “How to date your dead people”, created a great opportunity to make captivating graphics that would draw audiences in to register for the event.

Using the branding that I had already designed for Corey’s website, I created 6 static graphics (two carousels, 4 solo posts) for her Instagram page that would reach across all levels of interests. This event was meant to be open and welcoming for anyone, and we needed to peak their engagement to bring conversions in.

Additionally, this language (written by Corey and edited by myself) was pushed into her newsletter as well, inviting her already-existent audience to participate in the space.

Managing Digital Assets & Zoom co-piloting

I love the term “Zoom co-pilot.” It is a digital skill that I have picked up over the last few years, when someone gets to be in the spotlight of a Zoom event but needs an extra set of eyes and hands and ears to navigate the digital space of the call room itself.

For this Launch Event and Mini-Workshop, Corey and I established a script, filled with queues of when to share screens and when to pin our cameras for the audience, and did multiple run-throughs to establish consistency and professionalism. We ensured that the audience would be comfortably setup to watch the livestream without any concerns of interruptions or technical troubleshooting.

Additionally, we experienced difficulties managing our audience for the email newsletter, and ended up switching platforms halfway through the pre-event process. This required a lot of asset management and codeswitching to keep track of signups, tags, and email lists. In the end, all communications were sent successfully to those who had registered for the event.

Results and engagement

Up to January 23rd, 2026, Corey received nearly 60 registrants combined for her events, and had an attendance rate of 18 for the afternoon session and 12 for the evening session.

Since then, I have compiled the livestreams into replays that are available on YouTube. These replays contain captions and start/finish thumbnail images. The first livestream session is available to view below:

Social media assets: made with Canva

Presentation deck slides: made with Canva

Video replays: edited with Premiere Pro

Livestream: hosted with Zoom

Email campaigns: created with Squarespace, and with Mailchimp