Our mission at CMX is to advance the community industry and help professional community builders thrive.
CMX was officially born on February 6, 2014 with our inaugural conference, CMX Summit. An attendee from that first event, Holly Firestone (who’s now the VP of Community at Venafi) recently recalled her experience:
“When I think about what was most valuable to me that day, it was that I was surrounded by people with which I didn’t need to push back. A huge weight that I had been carrying around was lifted off of me. I finally felt, without a doubt, I was making the right decision about my career. I left feeling inspired and reinvigorated. This was a huge turning point for me.”
Holly Firestone
VP of Community at VENAFi
It’s this kind of feedback that we heard from so many attendees and makes us confident that we’re doing something really important. We believe that community is the future of business, and that is why we do the work we do.
Since that first event in 2014, the CMX community has grown to tens of thousands of community professionals from the biggest and most exciting companies in the world. We host CMX Summit every year, regularly publish industry research, develop training and educational programs, and provide ongoing community programming in our online and offline spaces. Our members work together to advance the community industry, and help each other thrive.
Whether you’re brand new in the community space, or a community veteran, we hope you’ll join us!
Our Community Values
Be Generous
Community is in our DNA and essential to who we are. We live for the moments where we can step up to help another community member learn and grow in their career without asking for anything in return. We believe when one of us wins, we all win. We share our learnings with radical transparency. We leave no member behind.
Be Groundbreaking
CMX is a community for the bold and ambitious. We believe that community is the future of business and that we have an opportunity and responsibility to shape that future. We’re constantly experimenting and innovating. We challenge ourselves to grow and build new systems that future generations of community builders will benefit from.
Be Actively Inclusive
We believe that building inclusive spaces isn’t just the right thing to do — it also makes our community more valuable. We don’t expect our community to organically become diverse, equitable, and inclusive — we know we need to take an active role. We make sure that everyone in the industry can learn from the lessons we share, not just a select few. We seek out unheard voices and step back to make space for those voices. We work together to check our biases and improve.
Connect with and learn from over 15,000 community professionals in the CMX Community
Joining Forces with Bevy
It was a fog-free day in late 2018 when CMX’s co-founder David sat down for a coffee with Bevy’s CEO Derek Andersen. Their coffee chats had become a regular occurrence at this point. Derek would share advice on building a bootstrapped community-centric business, like he did with Startup Grind. In return, David would give Derek feedback on the Bevy platform and share what he was seeing in the community industry. Bevy was a new tool being build to power community-led event programs, like Startup Grind. CMX was using the Bevy to power our local chapter program, and provided feedback on product direction. We had a great partnership.
On this particular day, David was talking about his vision for CMX, and how it was feeling increasingly difficult to get CMX to its full potential with such limited resources as a bootstrapped company. This wasn’t the first time they talked about this. But this time, Derek had an idea. He took a deep breath and said, “Well… we need to build a community of community professionals, and you need more resources. What if we teamed up?”
Fast forward a couple months, a few hundred emails, and many gallons of coffee, and Bevy and CMX officially joined forces. The acquisition was completed in January of 2019.
Today, we are one team working together to advance the community industry and help community professionals thrive. CMX provides the platform for the exchange of ideas and resources. Bevy provides the tools to turn those ideas into action.
Fun Fact!
The ‘X’ in CMX is a wildcard! When naming the community, we wanted something that made people think of Community, but not anything that put us in a box, as we’re an evolving industry and what we do has changed over time. The ‘X’ is whatever YOU want it to be.
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