@channel Chat, it's December. Pour one out for daylight, may it find us once again, soon. This year has gone by too fast, and while I say that every year around the solstice this time I really mean it. This year was a slog of transformation, intentional and unasked for, but all the while productive. As we ramp up for yet another new year, I want to think forward about our plans for the future of ElevateCX. Spoiler alert: We're going to build committees.
We've spent this year actively trying to make this space totally community led for a number of reasons. Firstly, it feels weird to profit off other people's contributions to our discussions here or our events. (No I don't accept payment for sponsorships in brand equity and no I never will.) Secondly, my love and commitment to this community made me too accessible to too many people, and it was getting way too difficult to keep up with all the pings and requests and asks. Thirdly, so many people want a stake in things and I want to use this community and platform to give them a chance to step up and shine. This year was our test kitchen in how to do that. Next year will be our true litmus test of community effort.
We're going to do a few major things in 2026 that you can start preparing for:
We will launch committees that will be responsible for our Events, Partnerships, Content, and Admin. These will all be voluntary positions led by myself, Erica, Ashley, Trevor Hanson and mercer for the first year, after which we hope we can formalize leadership positions by vote.
We will be launching a paid membership tier to help us rely less on sponsorship dollars and make us more driven by our actual community. This will mean we're also no longer allowing just anyone to join ElevateCX, and will be focusing on making sure we aren't an open sales channel for the next big AI chatbot agent that's like Uber for your group chats. We want this to be an invested community that gets out more than they put in and want to make all contributions matter. If you've been a part of this community for more than 5 years, your membership will be discounted, and we'll even give you a referral code for new members.
As we work on raising funds through membership, we'll be offering more regular local meetups, more instructional masterclasses, and events that are more intimate and intensive (think retreat style weekends for groups of under 20). We'll have more mentorship focused on career development and better discussion based problem solving for topical groups.
What about events? Will we still have those big 2 day events on rooftops in Denver? If you join the Events committee, you can be a part of planning this, and if you join the Partnerships committee, you can be a part of helping us raise the $75k it takes to put on those events. Yes, that's how much they cost! (Our first goal is to raise $800 to cover our Zoom account for the year through memberships...running this ship is not cheap!)
What about content? We're hoping to launch a content collective where ElevateCX members can post their original work, or repost or link to work they want to get some more exposure to. We'll be doing some more live webinars but will mostly focus on video content to play at your leisure, from instructional series to fireside chats (think out very own Between Two Ferns). You can be a part of this by joining the Content committee!
That was a lot, but this year has been a lot. Keep your eyes peeled for January when we launch our membership program and committees and start to shift things here for the better. In the meantime I hope everyone here has a restful, calm, peace-filled rest of this year, as much as you possibly can have.
