101

Thank you again to all of you amazing people who have subscribed to this newsletter. Like I mentioned last week, I know there are a lot of great options out there, so I appreciate you taking the time to read mine. I will always try and keep them short and sweet, share tactical tips and tricks, and let you in to my thought processes for all things community & events.

As many of you know, I took on the DEMAND Conference this year. When I took the helm, we had 300 registrants and only about 4 months of planning time. No speakers were decided, no sponsors- just a platform tool, a few registrants, and a broad theme.

Here’s where we started:

1. decided on the topic- did we want to keep it? did we want to open it up a bit more? was it going to be interesting enough?
   ^^when you’re planning a large virtual event, you need to identify what topics would be most interesting to your audience. this means going to your audience, learning about what they care about- everything in between.

2. speaker submission review- we had over 150 speakers submit their abstracts. they were all so good. I had to make the hard decision on who to accept and who to reject.
   ^^I’ve already decided that Im changing how we chose speakers for next year. We will be doing a voting process to make sure the speakers are super relevant to the audience.

3. sponsorships- of course we reached out to past sponsors, but there were a lot of swaps and trades that were being asked of us, so we actually got a lot more new sponsors. honestly, that made me so happy. I love working with new partners and we got really great feedback post event- so I guess it worked!

→ don’t worry, Ill be sharing more insights into the DEMAND Conference (and other events I’ve produced) throughout this newsletter ←

One of my favorite things about community is connecting with each and every member. At Sales Hacker, I reached out to every single new member, every day. As soon as they registered, they got a message from me in the platform.

Why did I think this was a good idea?

1. It got members in the platform. They were notified via email of a message within the SH community. So that welcome message from me brought them in to the community and automatically engaging.

Fun fact- it didn’t work out anywhere near as I expected it to.
^^I hardly got any responses, but still felt it was a good initiative.

Now I use two new tools that I LOVE- Common Room and Dots.

→every member that joins the DEMAND Community gets a welcome message with tasks and next steps (like introducing themselves, and channels that they should check out)

→ on top of that, I use these tools for re-engagement strategies as well! It’s been super helpful

If you want to chat about these tools, just hit reply!

Thank you to the subscriber who sent this question (and if you have one, just send over to me too!)

Question: Im wanting to get into the community space, but don’t know where to start. Any recommendations would be helpful!

Thank you again for checking out the All Things Community & Events Newsletter!