At CMX Summit, we do our best to ensure that your experience is equal parts educational and engaging. Our goal is to make sure  that when you leave you’re informed, inspired, and equipped with practical, ready-to-implement solutions to solve your organization’s greatest community building challenges.

But before you get to CMX Summit, you may need to convince your boss that it’s worth it. And for some of us, especially people who have bosses outside of the community sphere, that can be a challenge to know how to message it right. If you’re looking for the information that can help convince her, you’ve come to the right place.

An important note before we start—the CMX Summit Agenda is ready for you here!

Ok so here’s what you should do to get that approval…

Step 1: Review and map out your sessions

What are your greatest community challenges? Getting resources and budget? Creating engaging content and programming for community members? Attracting? Scaling?

Use those challenges as your guide when selecting from the sessions with all speakers that we have lined up for you.

If you need a jump start here, check out our guide for breaking down what type of community you’re building and managing and which sessions might be the most applicable to you.

Now, think like a marketer. Reiterate your top challenges to your boss and position CMX’s annual conference, and the sessions you’ve planned out, as the roadmap to effectively navigating those challenges. Who can say no to someone who comes in prepared?

If your boss has specific questions about ticket costs and what they go toward, we’re completely transparent with our conference budget and have broken down every dime for you.

Step 2: Stress the value of investing in your education

More than most professions, the community industry is constantly evolving into what this profession will look like. “Community” is not something taught in traditional classrooms—you can’t just major in it in college!—making CMX Summit a must-attend for your continuing education. It IS the higher education of our field.

CMX Summit will provide you with professional development opportunities to learn from the best in the industry, agnostic of job title. You’ll be able to share your triumphs and challenges and walk away with new ideas and solutions for your community. Conversations at CMX Summit are setting the trends at the forefront of what great communities for businesses and nonprofits look like.

Step 3: Find your people and solutions

With lots of leading software sponsors, you’ll be able to investigate and meet companies for solutions for your community challenges. We’ll have representation from forum software solutions, event registration software, social media management tools, and more.

Community professionals love to connect with each other. Networking at CMX Summit is no joke. We’ll have folks attending from great brands like National Geographic, Salesforce, Intuit, Stanford University, Hubspot, Airbnb, and more. Add the people you want to meet and connect with to the list you’re sharing with your boss. We even have an exclusive attendee-only Facebook Group you can join after ticket purchase to make sure these connections happen.

Step 4: Complete the request letter

UPDATED FOR 2018 — If your boss prefers a written request for your professional development, we started one for you — CMX Summit 2018 Letter Template (Word format)

Tip: Our group tickets give you a significant discount if you bring 3 teams members or more. Bring your team and your boss!

Feel free to tweak and customize as you see fit, but hopefully you’ll find this will be a great beginning.

Step 5: Bring it all home

You’ll leave CMX Summit empowered, energized, and informed. However, proving the value of your conference experience doesn’t end at booking your travel or even saying goodbye to the new friends you made at CMX Summit.

• Commit to a post-conference briefing for your boss and colleagues so that community best practices, ideas, solutions, and tactics can be shared across your company.
• Implement those ready-to-use strategies and tools you acquired at CMX Summit.
• Solidify your reputation as a community leader.