We’re now just six weeks away from CMX Summit East! We’re throwing glitter bombs and we’ve got our CMX Summit dancin’ shoes on (they’re blue and they light up when you walk).
We’ve worked tirelessly to create an experience you’ll never forget, one that’s unlike any other conference you’ve ever attended. CMX Summit is about warmth, relationships, connection, and – of course – learning from the professionals who are doing the work to build world-changing communities.
Through the coming weeks, we’ll share elements of the conference that make it truly unique, as well as introduce you to our stellar roster of speakers, workshop teachers, and attendees.
“CMX is bringing together the VIPs of the ever-growing community industry to not only compare notes, but also to learn from the best in the field. After attending three years of CMX Summits on both coasts, I can’t wait to see what else the CMX team has up their sleeves!”
– Ashley Hayes, Senior Manager of Community Engagement & Marketing Strategy for Google at Zipongo
Get all the event info and register here.
Latest Speaker Additions
Each year at CMX Summit, we curate fascinating voices from all walks of the world: CEOs, founders, community leaders and strategists, non-profit leaders, and beyond. This year’s speakers are no exception. Here are the latest!
Jeremy Bird, Founding Partner at 270 Strategies
Jeremy Bird helped launch 270 Strategies after serving as the national field director for the 2012 re-election campaign of President Barack Obama and the Deputy National Director for the 2008 campaign. Dubbed the Obama campaign’s “Field General”, Bird’s contributions to this groundbreaking organizing model led Rolling Stone to recognize him on its 2012 “Hot List,” calling him “the Obama campaign’s secret weapon” with “a massive army of staff and grassroots volunteers for which Romney has no answer.”
Jeremy will be speaking about his revolutionary approach to volunteer management with the Obama campaign and beyond. You’ll learn how he leveraged the collective passion of millions of volunteers (and how you can too).
Bijan Sabet, General Partner at Spark Capital
Bijan is a founder and general partner at early and growth stage venture firm Spark Capital, which has proudly backed companies like Twitter, Oculus, Postmates, Slack, Wealthfront and more. Bijan primarily invests in digital canvases and online communities for people at work and at play. He typically invests in startups after becoming a passionate user of the product. In particular, he looks for new approaches to building communities through the sharing of ideas and interests. Bijan led early investments for Spark in Trello, Stack Exchange, Lily Robotics, Crowdrise, Foursquare, OMGPOP (acquired by Zynga), thePlatform (acquired by Comcast), Runkeeper (acquired by Asics), Tumblr (acquired by Yahoo) and Twitter.
Bijan will discuss what it takes for a community-centric company to succeed. He’ll distill his experience working with dozens of highly successful social products to share what makes community so special and invaluable to businesses.
Joel Gascoigne, Co-Founder and CEO at Buffer
Joel Gascoigne is co-founder and CEO of Buffer, a social media SaaS platform which helps over 50,000 customers to have the voice they deserve and a wider reach through social media. Buffer provides solutions for companies around social media marketing and customer service generates $9.5m in annual revenue. The startup is also known for its unusual business practices such as radical transparency and for its focus on company culture. Buffer is a 90-person team, which is fully distributed across 55 cities on 5 continents, with no central office.
Joel loves to communicate with customers to discover how Buffer better serves their needs, exercise, travel, and help other startup founders. He’ll join our CEO David Spinks for a fireside chat about building and scaling culture.
Announcing: CMX Member Lightning Talks
Our very own CMX members are some of the most talented community builders, mentors, execs, and practitioners out there. Every single one of you has expertise that we’ve seen ignite ideas in your fellow members, and we wanted to embrace that expertise at our conferences.
Here’s what you can look forward to:
Eleanor Whitney, Community Marketing Manager at Dev Bootcamp NYC
Eleanor Whitney is the Community Marketing Manager at Dev Bootcamp‘s NYC campus and a nonfiction writer. She has also worked at Shapeways, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, where she planned public programs for the Sackler Center for Feminist Art and worked as a museum educator. She is the author of Grow, a practical field guide for starting a creative business. A strong advocate of creative community building, she has also published zines and played in DIY bands for over 15 years. Eleanor will be speaking about how to build a safe, nurturing environment for your community the moment they walk in the literal or proverbial door.
Kim Pham, Head of Platform at Frontline Ventures
Kim is the Head of Platform at Frontline Ventures, building a best-practice venture capital community of European tech founders. She’s been working in startups since 16 and graduated from NYU with a degree in Marketing and Computer Science. There, she was the president of Tech@NYU and founding partner of Dorm Room Fund NYC. Kim is also the founder of EU Internal Ecosystem Builders, a hub for 50+ portfolio gatekeepers in 9+ EU countries. Kim will be sharing her frameworks for evaluating potential new community projects and reviewing the success of projects after completion.
Lindsey Erlick, Marketing Manager at Pearson Education
Lindsey is all about engagement. As a Marketing Manager at Pearson, she recently designed Pearson’s first advocate community, the Pearson Student Insiders, boasting 1200 members in the first three months. In addition to her day job, Lindsey leads CMX Series NYC and shares gluten-free finds online and with Instagram foodies. She’s also pursuing an MBA at NYU Stern School of Business. Lindsey will be speaking about how to build a community advocacy/ambassador program that delivers results for your company while increasing engagement with your members.
Jessica Malnik, Community Manager at The DC
Jessica Malnik has a passion for community building, writing and travel. All three of her passions intersect in her current role as the the community manager for The DC, an exclusive community for location independent entrepreneurs. Previously, she honed her chops working for Bigcommerce, where she was in charge of the social customer service strategy, and scaled the community team from a group of one to four. She can also be found writing on her own blog centered around community management, marketing and social media. Jessica will be speaking about customer support-focused communities and how call deflection, the traditional metric for these forums, is flawed.
New Workshops Added
We’ve spent hours poring over your feedback from our past workshops. We heard that you wanted to go in-depth on multiple topics, meet other attendees, and have a warm and welcoming experience. That’s why we’ve ramped up the number of workshops we’re hosting (we’ll have five to six to choose from and you’ll get to attend two of them). They’ll cover topics such as Community Strategy 101, Community-Driven Marketing, Two-Sided Marketplaces, and Results-Oriented Moderation.
Our workshops will also be an experience like never before: they will be held at the stunning High Line Hotel in Manhattan, where you’ll gather with fellow students in small classrooms to work closely with your instructors. We’ll get to know you over breakfast, bring lunch right to you, and even give you a break for cookies and plenty of time to network. Because what’s a good day without cookies? Our latest workshops are below.
Two-sided Marketplaces: Building Supply in the Gig Economy
Taught by Shira Levine, CEO of Fanchismo and former Head of Community for Yerdle, eBay, Zynga, and more
This workshop gives you an exclusive opportunity to work hands-on with one of the industry’s most experienced and passionate leaders. In this session, Shira will help you break down your community into addressable segments resulting in a strategy that will propel your entire plan forward. You’ll come out of this session with a department strategy that wows execs, unlocks product resources, and results in engagement and retention and whatever else you’re trying to accomplish with your community. All done with humor and heart–the hallmarks of Shira’s teaching style.
Building and Scaling Distributed Events
Taught by Sally Rumble, Chief Happiness Officer, and Lisa Cifuentes, Community Manager, at CreativeMornings
In this workshop, Sally and Lisa will cover how they built and scaled CreativeMornings, a globally distributed event series, from 4 chapters to 140 and growing. They’ll touch on how they keep get Hosts and Organizers engaged and sustain that engagement over time. From onboarding new organizers and communicating in multiple languages to walking the line of brand control versus chapter host’s creative freedom, they’ll provide a comprehensive set of resources to help your team build a local or global event series of your own.
Find a list of all our workshops on the Summit site.
Get In On This Hotel Block
If you’re traveling to CMX Summit East 2016, we’ve reserved a block of rooms at Hotel Le Jolie on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights (May 17th, 18th, and 19th).
Rooms are available until May 3rd at reduced rates. Take advantage of this great rate and book your stay today by calling 866-526-4097 and asking for the “CMX Summit 2016 group rate”.
We Will Donate 5% of CMX Summit Profits to Our Chosen Charity Partner!
One integral part of the CMX experience is giving back. It’s an important part of our mission that we support causes near and dear to your hearts as well as our own.
Each year, we donate 5% of the proceeds of the conference to a non-profit partner. That’s right, 5% of what you spend goes to a good cause. Want to let us know who we should partner with to donate a portion of our proceeds? Participate here!
Share CMX Summit with Co-Workers and Friends!
In joining together with other industry professionals, we’d love if you shared your enthusiasm. We want to see more of your friends there, and we want to introduce you to ours. So here’s an easy way to make this happen:
Share that you’re going in one simple tweet.
The hashtag will be #CMXSummit, so be sure to start using it now to meet other attendees!
Huge Thank You to Our Sponsors
This event simply wouldn’t be possible without our fantastic sponsors.
Salesforce empowers you to collaborate anywhere with your entire customer community. As our Global Partner, they’re fully invested in this industry’s success.
IBM is the largest technology and consulting employer in the world. As our Global Partner, they fully believe in the power of community-driven business.
Higher Logic is your organization’s private online community that seamlessly integrates into your existing platforms.
Lithium provides on-demand, hosted forums, chats, and other social media marketing solutions for companies ready to invest in community.
Vanilla provides a modern community platform to organizations who want to improve customer service, increase advocacy, and strengthen brand loyalty.
CMNTY provides ready-to-use (SaaS) software for building online communities. Easily launch a community around your product, service, brand or organization and create endless possibilities, including crowdsourcing and innovation communities.
Bizzabo powers the registration process for CMX Summit! They help organizers create successful events by empowering them to build amazing websites, sell tickets, grow communities, go mobile and maximize event experiences – using a beautiful, user friendly platform.
Sprout Social builds powerful, approachable software for social business. From social media monitoring to publishing to analytics, Sprout Social has it all.
Register for CMX Summit East 2016