The CMX Summit 2019 Agenda Preview Has Arrived!

CMX Summit 2019 is being held in Redwood City, California (the Bay Area) on September 5-6, and it’s going to be huge! How huge, exactly? We’re talking two full days of conference fun, one full day of workshops, and 1000 other amazing community builders in attendance. Community builders like you!

What’s new this year?

Redwood City, here we come!

We have big dreams here at CMX, and for us to 2.5x audience growth at CMX Summit 2019, we needed to find a new, bigger, and amazing venue. After a bit of a search, we’ve chosen the Fox Theatre. After its grand opening in January of 1929 as a movie theater, it went through renovations to host live events in 1950. Since then, the Fox Theater has hosted artists such as BB King, Neil Young, and Etta James. We’re thrilled to be a part of this legacy!

What we love about the Pullman San Francisco:

Located approximately 11 minutes from the Fox Theatre, you’ll have easy access to the conference venue and a free shuttle to and from San Francisco International Airport. If you need to get away, there is Bair Island State Marine Park and of course, the beautiful and bustling city of San Francisco.Get your sweet hotel deal now — saving you 40-50% on your hotel per night! — and enjoy convenient access to just about all the Bay Area and Silicon Valley can provide. All hotel rooms feature complimentary wifi and parking.

What does the schedule for CMX Summit 2019 look like?

Wednesday, September 4th — Day 1This is our full day of workshops. Yep, I said workshops — as in two!We’re bringing back the ever-popular Fundamentals of Community Strategy, which will be led by our very own David Spinks, Founder of CMX. This has been a wildly popular and successful workshop in the past, with opportunities to have your questions answered by the man himself, as well as other community professionals working on similar challenges.If you’ve taken this workshop at Summit 2018, it will be very similar with some updates and refreshes.What’s the other workshop you ask? Richard Millington will be teaching an Advanced Online Community Engagement and Design Workshop! He’ll help you take your community to the next level by teaching you how to benchmark your current community efforts against best practices and more. This workshop is meant specifically for online community builders looking to invigorate their programs and processes.The workshops are limited to 80 seats each, so don’t miss out on securing your spot!

What are the conference days like?

It’s time to get tactical, it’s time to get real, it’s time to get niche.For us, being able to showcase great practitioners — who are at the forefront of their work — and can share their case studies, struggles, and solutions is the heart of what we’re doing. You don’t want to miss extraordinary folks like Radical Candor author Kim Scott, community expert Jen Lopez, or Mozilla CMO Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.We’ve also heard you loud-and-clear that you wanted to change rooms between talks. For “back-to-back” talks, we’ll give you five minutes of travel time to move between rooms and get yourself resituated as needed. We’ve also offset the timing between the main stage and the other two stages.

Birds-of-a-feather tables

They’re back! Networking and dedicated time to meet and chat with fellow attendees in a thoughtful manner is a frequent request. Seriously, you all can’t get enough of each other - which we love!This year, we’ll be organizing birds-of-a-feather table around general topics with attendees assisting in topic facilitation. Each table will be labeled so you can easily find your favorite topic and start chatting! More details, including your chance to host a table, coming soon.

Our CMX Connect Host VIP Party

For CMX Connect Hosts only, we’re hosting an exclusive party on Thursday evening. This is a special treat for those joining us at Summit.... Details are still being formed, but let's just say there may be a chocolate explosion.

Thank you to our sponsors!

Without our sponsors, we couldn’t do Summit. In addition to bringing their wares and excitement, each sponsor booth will have an interactive element for your enjoyment.Don’t miss out on connecting with Higher Logic, Discourse, Uservoice, Mobilize, and Vanilla.

New this year is the Innovation program. The Innovation program is designed to highlight companies building new technology in the community industry. If accepted, you’ll be able to purchase a highly reduced cost sponsorship that will give you the opportunity to reach 1k community professionals. Our inaugural inductees include: Partnerstack, yen.io, and Breezio.We’ve had a lot of inquiries about this program and because it’s been so popular, we’re extending the opportunity to apply just a bit longer. If you’re interested, just head here and let us know!

Do you really want to attend CMX Summit 2019, but need some assistance?

Convince your bossSometimes, you need an extra boost to make your case to Summit. We’ve got your back! Check out our Convince Your Boss template, and fill in all the goodies you need in order to present your case.Volunteer with us!Can’t afford both travel and your ticket? We need Summit volunteers. As a volunteer, you will get a free ticket to Summit. Volunteers must pay for their own travel, lodging, and other incidentals. Depending on role, our volunteers work roughly half the conference, so you will have time to attend sessions too. Get more information and apply here!Scholarships!CMX is about the people that attend. YOU are what make this event amazing and to help bring more delight to the conference, we launched our scholarship program. Applications are open and will be processed on a rolling basis until conference time. Find out more or apply here.

It’s agenda preview time!

We know how important an agenda is to you and making your case to attend CMX Summit 2019, we’ve released what we’ve tripled confirmed so far.Sessions are still in motion. Any TBA slots are being confirmed on a rolling basis, and we will update the website as soon as we get them. You can get the full agenda on our CMX Summit 2019 page, but here are some highlights:

Thursday (September 5th)

Kim Scott

Co-Founder & Author at Radical Candor LLC, and Ryan Smith, Co-Founder and CEO at Qualtrics

Kim Scott is the author of the NYT and WSJ bestseller Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss without Losing your Humanity. Kim led AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick teams at Google and then joined Apple University to develop and teach “Managing at Apple.” Kim has been a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and several other tech companies, and is the Co-Founder of Radical Candor LLC.Getting to the Heart of Radical Candor with Kim ScottHow can you care personally and challenge directly? Author Kim Scott has changed the landscape for management and expanding how to communicate internally and externally with your community. In this fireside chat, she and Ryan Smith dive into how to put radical candor to work for you.

Jen Sable Lopez

Director of Community at OutSystemsJen Sable Lopez lives and breathes community. When she’s not tweeting about Lin-Manuel Miranda, she’s weaving Grumpy Cat (RIP) into presentations, or misusing a comma. Jen has a unique background that took her from web development to SEO to community management and leading teams. In her current role as Director of Community at OutSystems, she combines all her past passions into one exciting role.Setting up Your Distributed (Global) Community Team for Success! Managing a community is a 24/7 job. To keep things running smoothly (and allow you to sleep), you may need to hire or work with teammates in various timezones, on other sides of the world, and from different cultures. Learn the dos and don’ts of working in a global, distributed group, while still feeling like you’re part of the same team, with the same goals and voice to the community.

Richard Millington

Founder at FeverbeeRichard Millington is the founder of FeverBee and author of both Buzzing Communities and The Indispensable Community. Over the past 13 years, Richard has helped 270+ great brands, including Apple, Facebook, Google, The World Bank, and SAP use powerful psychology to build thriving communities. Through his community management academy, he has also trained 1,250 of the world’s top community pros.Is Your Community Strategy Working?FeverBee’s Richard Millington will explain why most community strategies fail to achieve their goals and share his hard-earned lessons from reviewing hundreds of community strategies. You will learn how to create a world-class strategy, ensure it stays current when things change, and understand the big decisions you need to make to take your community to the next level.

Friday (September 6th)

Denise Henkel

Coach, Speaker, and Consultant at Denise HenkelDenise Henkel has built and managed on-domain communities in online games, telecommunications, product development, and adult dating since 2008. Her community members often referred to her as their “mother”: patient, kind, understanding, empowering, but strict as soon as rules are being violated. Denise would rather see herself as a cat: strong, independent, and a connoisseur of life.From Crisis to ChanceIf you’re tired of feeling overwhelmed when your community experiences a crisis, Denise Henkel will walk you through the steps on how to be well prepared to handle it. Then she will show you how to turn it into a chance to strengthen the bonds within your community, which will make your community more crisis-resilient than ever before.

Jayati Doshi

Co-Founder and CEO at Sensemaking LabJayati Doshi is a facilitator-designer-storycurator-artist and co-founder at Sensemaking Lab. She is building collective sensemaking spaces to construct communities by making sense of collective experiences, at the intersections of psychology, learning, and storytelling. She wants to help people think+feel deeply, embrace complexity, and make the abstract visible by considering and processing it together.Why (And How To) Ask Questions That Don’t Have AnswersQuestions that don’t have immediate answers or solutions (you know, those questions we save for “later,” or those big ideas we’re sussing out) can be great equalizers to bring people together and bridge differences. Collectively making sense of these can help communities unpack their thoughts and feelings, practice vulnerability, and build connections, while learning from and with each other. Jayati Doshi has been using collective sensemaking to turn these questions into a valuable community building opportunity among strangers and teams. She will share lessons and tested ideas to help you bring collective sensemaking into your communities.

Are you Ready for CMX Summit 2019?!

Buy your ticket today!If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We cannot wait to see you in Redwood City this fall!