It’s with a heavy heart that we’re announcing that the CMX Pro Community will be closing at the end of October, 2021.All our CMX Pro members have been notified. If you have any questions about this, please email Beth!CMX Pro is our paid membership that we launched in 2017. We’ll share more about why we started it and what we learned below. All other CMX community spaces and training programs are not going anywhere. Just this specific space will be shut down.Why are we sunsetting this program?Let’s start with why we started it up in the first place.CMX Pro was launched as a private, paid membership for community professionals back before CMX was acquired by Bevy. In those days we were still bootstrapped and experimenting with different monetization channels.We launched CMX Pro because:

1. Members of the community expressed interest in having a private, curated space with “premium” level content
2. It would drive subscription revenue for the business

The benefits of the membership were a private online discussion space, a curated group of members with the hope of having more in depth conversations about community, access to CMX Summit recordings from years past, access to premium content like our “Action plans”, CMX Frameworks, CMX Academy courses, and discounts for CMX Summit and other events.We’ve worked hard over the years to make CMX Pro a valuable offering but over time, it became clear that while the perks and benefits were valued, the community space wasn’t offering unique enough value from all the free CMX community spaces that are available. Members would share that they were more likely to post questions in our free community spaces because they’d get more answers.Over the years we have introduced different engagement strategies, like weekly Office Hours, special events, new weekly rituals, mentor programs, but nothing really got organic engagement going in the community the way we hoped. Sometimes, experiments just don’t work in a community and that’s okay. We’ve had hundreds of members join the community and engagement would pick up on occasion, before bottoming out again.On the business side, since the acquisition and teaming up with Bevy, we haven’t been reliant on membership revenue and have instead prioritized making all of our resources more freely available and accessible to our entire community. For example, recordings from past CMX Summits and all CMX Frameworks and Research are now free and will be accessible to all CMX’ers.There’s always the temptation to do more when building community. We think it’s really important that community teams regularly check in on all of the programs they’re running to make sure they’re focused on the right things. We’d rather put 100% of our energy into programs that are bringing a lot of value to our members then continue to pour energy into programs that, despite a lot of effort, never found “community-market fit.”Thank you to everyone who signed up for CMX Pro, who engaged in the community, who took a course, and who attended an event. A special thank you to the founding members who took a shot on this new program in its earliest days. While it never really hit its stride, we’ve had a lot of incredible moments in the CMX Pro space, and deeply valued being able to spend time in community with all of you.For anyone looking to stay engaged in the CMX community, we look forward to seeing you in the Slack Community and Facebook Group!At CMX our mission is to help Community Professionals Thrive, and Advance the Community Industry. We will continue to do that through our free online community spaces, our training courses, our virtual and in person events, and our many content channels – Masters of Community podcast, The Community Corner podcast, blog, newsletter, awards program, and job board.And you know we’re going to keep experimenting with new programs and continue to innovate on how we can bring CMX members more value.Please email your questions to Beth at team@cmxhub.comI’ll see you in the Community!❤️ Beth