Valentina Ruffoni joins the podcast from Madrid. She is the Founder and Host of the CMX Connect Madrid chapter as well as the Founder of Eat Out Madrid, a 7000 member community of foodies. We talk about Valentina’s unique strategies for growing a team of community leaders, how to approach event sponsorships, along with how she has adapted her events during the pandemic.
Valentina Ruffoni joins the podcast from Madrid. She is the Founder and Host of the CMX Connect Madrid chapter as well as the Founder of Eat Out Madrid, a 7000 member community of foodies. We talk about Valentina’s unique strategies for growing a team of community leaders, how to approach event sponsorships, along with how she has adapted her events during the pandemic.
Who is this episode great for?
Community team builders, Virtual event managers, In-person communities
What’s the biggest takeaway?
Valentina elaborates on how she’s grown her chapter exponentially by putting in the time, dedication and hard work to individually connect with local industry leaders and invite them to attend her events. She also illustrates how important it is to continue to reinforce the benefits of the community to ensure members feel empowered to evangelize it themselves.
Derek Andersen:
In 2010, I co-founded a company called Startup Grind with one goal; inspiring, educating, and connecting every entrepreneur on the planet. Today, Startup Grind is now in 125 countries and has millions of members. Along the way, I found the most powerful marketing tool of all time, customer to customer marketing. C to C marketing empowers your greatest ambassadors, your customers, to evangelize your brand and grow your community. This is a podcast we wished we'd had when we started building our community a decade ago. Each episode, we talk to the brightest minds and companies on the planet to learn how they build their community and empower their customers. I'm your host, Derek Andersen, and this is the C2C Podcast. Valentina, for those who don't know, could you briefly share what happens at your CMX Connect events?
Valentina:
Yeah. We have very fun CMX Connect events to start. We have a lot of networking. When in person, we always have food and drinks because we believe that that really brings people together. Then we have different events each time, whether it's a speaker, a panel discussion, or sometimes we're doing an un-networking event where people are pitching the topics for the event. Then we spend about 30 minutes on that. We do a Q and A after, and then we go back into networking and drink more drinks and eat more food, and it's that simple. We've actually done that in person, and we've tried to emulate to our online events as well.
Derek Andersen:
Is that right? Does everyone just bring their own drinks or do you recommend a certain kind of drink? How do you facilitate that?
Valentina:
What we do is we encourage people to grab a drink, grab some snacks as if they were with us in our normal Madrid events in person, and that way people can decide what drinks they want to have and what snacks they want to have, and everyone can have different ones.
Derek Andersen:
Amazing. That's obviously a clear change that you've made in light of COVID-19. What has the reaction been from your members to mix things up in that way?
Valentina:
Actually, it's really strange, because once we moved to online, we found that a lot of our Madrid-based members weren't showing up to the online events compared to when they were coming to our in-person events. But since that has happened, we've then managed to grow our community with a lot more international people, because of course you're doing things online and more people are able to join. It's been a weird shift, but balanced out somewhat with the growing of the community. But we're hoping to go back actually to smaller in-person events very soon. Here in Madrid, we are starting to open up, so as we move to that in-person atmosphere again, we hope to do in-person and online at the same time so we can have two worlds in one almost.
Derek Andersen:
You're doing these events pretty frequently. How do you keep coming up with different content and topics that can be useful for the events or that you find that people still continue to engage in month after month?
Valentina:
What we've been doing is at the end of each event, we've been asking people, "What kind of events would you be interested in attending in the future?" We also have a Facebook group where we've been communicating our different events and just finding out what people want to learn about, and then if there's anybody in the community that would be willing to speak on that topic. Or if they're not so confident in speaking, we can put them in a panel so they're with other people, and that way we're taking our speakers and our panelists from the community. If we can't find those people, then we reach out on places like LinkedIn, on Facebook, and our networks to try and find those experts that are willing to come and share with us the information that they know.
Derek Andersen:
Now, you have multiple people running the chapter with you. I wonder, how did you recruit these people, and then how did you figure out what roles they should do or what was best for them in terms of being involved?
Valentina:
The co-host, Cepee, who's actually one of my good friends, she actually reached out to me and said, "Hey, I really love what you're doing. I would love to come on board." She was actually the person that introduced me to CMX in the first place. I had no idea what it was until she said, "There's this Facebook group where thousands of community professionals are around the world just giving advice and supporting each other." We came full circle almost, that she introduced me and then she was part of the team. At first, I was a little bit protective of the chapter, because I am very protective over things in general, but in hindsight looking back, she's helped me so much.
Valentina:
The way we've divided up what we do is I'm very much behind the scenes, so I deal with organizing everything on Bevy and getting people to RSVP, and she's the person who gets in touch with the speakers or the panelists. Then at the event, if we do have a point where she needs to moderate a panel or facilitate a Q and A, she's the one who does that. I figure out everything in-between, make sure all the drinks are topped up, make sure the food is there, and everyone feels comfortable. Then we have a third person, Nicoletta, who is our check-in person. When we have our in-person events, we have her on the door checking people as they come in.
Valentina:
She also helps us set up, because each event we try and do a different kind of seating plan to mix it up a little bit. She is one of the key people to have on our team, because without that extra help, we would have to arrive at venues hour, two hours before, and it's really important to have that help. Now, online events, of course there isn't much setup, but what we've been doing is she's been checking people in on the Bevy organizer as people have been joining our events so me and Cepee can focus on welcoming people when they join us online.
Derek Andersen:
I wonder if you could just explain, especially to people that maybe aren't doing this themselves, maybe they're running programs that are trying to do this or are doing this, but love to just understand why do you spend your time and energy doing this? Obviously, you're a really smart person. You have other things going on. You are building your own community with Eat Out Madrid. What about running a CMX Connect chapter? What about that is helpful to you in your own career and your professional ambitions, and makes it worth the time and investment from you to be involved in it?
Valentina:
I do two things. I'm a community builder and I'm also an events manager, so when this opportunity came to me and it was all about having events for community professionals, I thought this is perfect for me. For me, it's being able to build my experience organizing events for larger groups. We've had up to 70 people at our in-person events, and that's really helped me learn how to plan each individual piece of the equation for the event to happen. Aside to that, it's been great to network with other community builders. A lot of the time we sometimes feel that we're building communities alone, when really there's just thousands of other people out there. It's been great to meet people and share the same challenges, the same successes also. Yeah, I've met so many of my now close friends through CMX Connect Madrid. I really don't know what I would do without it, to be honest.
Derek Andersen:
Can you break down some of the metrics that you use to track and grow the community, and how that's changed with virtual versus in-person?
Valentina:
Some of the things that we've been using before on the Bevy platform, you have your RSVPs and then as you check people in, it shows you how many people were at your event. Each event, we compare who RSVPd and who actually attended, and then who is coming back. Because really, you want people to come to your events not just once, but more than once, and we do have people that have come almost every single time. Last month, we celebrated one year, and we gave a prize out to the person who had attended the most. She'd been to 10 out of 13 events that we've done over the year, which is just incredible. Having those numbers available to us so easily through the platform has really helped us grow. It's also been able to see what kind of topics haven't been so popular, and then think about, "Okay, do we want to do that kind of style of event or something around that topic next time?"
Valentina:
Now, online events it's been a little bit difficult because we've been thrown into this without much preparation, and things have really shot up. As I said, being able to do online events means lots more people can join us from everywhere else in the world. We've really been relying again on the Bevy platform for those checking in, seeing who is joining us on the platforms we've been using. We've been using Zoom mostly and also Icebreaker as well, and just seeing who's coming, who's sharing, who's taking photos as well at our events to then promote out into different avenues. And yeah, hoping next time that we increase our audience or our RSVPs, first of all, and also increasing the amount of people that actually show.
Valentina:
I'm sure you will agree there's so many virtual events right now, and it's hard for people to choose which ones to go to, especially if you're in front of a computer all day long working on whatever you do. Those numbers have really helped us to decide what we're going to do in the future.
Derek Andersen:
I think as somebody that has run their own local community for many, many years with the Startup Grind Silicon Valley group, and having talked to hundreds of organizers over the years, I think people, most organizers would really kill to have the kind of traction and success that you've had. Can you give us some examples of just how you, or reasons why you've been successful growing your chapter so well in such a short period of time? What's made your community work where so many others aren't?
Valentina:
I think the first thing that comes to mind is being visible everywhere. I really took advantage of LinkedIn. I decided to connect with hundreds of community builders within Madrid, and personally reached out to every single one of them at the beginning. Explained who I was, what we were doing, and how the CMX Connect Madrid chapter could benefit them in building their communities and meeting people. Now, I anticipate that a lot of people may not have as much time as I had, but that really has helped us gain traction on our community and grow it. It's got to the point now where people are now sharing our community in other places without us having to do it ourselves, which is something that we're really thankful for.
Valentina:
Really, the big thing, the big takeaway from this is just getting out there, telling people, telling people, and telling them again. That's what I say when you're building a community, when you're organizing events, you need to remind people of who you are and why they should be a part of you, part of your community or attend your event, and I continue to do that now.
Derek Andersen:
Yeah, I love hearing that. It sounds like the work you get up in the morning, you're like, "Oh, I can't wait to message a hundred people individually and personally on LinkedIn." Who wants to do that? But that's actually what it takes to build a genuine and authentic community. It's somebody to go out and actually hit the pavement and bring these people together. I think so few people are willing to do that work that when those hundred people get that message from you and they see that is a personal message and they feel the passion of what you're doing, and I'm sure people can feel it just listening to you, it really stands out and it gets people to say, "Wow, this actually could be very successful, and this is different from other communities that I've seen."
Derek Andersen:
I really applaud you for doing the hard work. In some ways, people just I think a lot of times sit around and are just frustrated by it, when it's like, "Hey, it's not really fun, but the results that can come from that kind of detailed, hard work can be super, super positive."
Valentina:
Yeah, no, I completely agree. There's so much work that goes behind building a community, and I think a lot of people when they're starting out or even sometimes halfway through, they just don't realize how much goes on behind the scenes. You can imagine putting that with organizing an event as well. I'm so grateful to have Cepee and Nicoletta on our team and all of our members who are now advocates for the community, because they enjoy being a part of it and they are getting value from attending our events and they want other people to. It's a big group effort, really. It just took a little bit of work to get it going. Yeah, we are one of the talked about communities here in Madrid. People, if they don't come to our events because they have other things going on, they're really jealous when we start sharing pictures and tell people what's going on. Yeah, it's a good, good feeling.
Derek Andersen:
That's amazing. What strategies do you use for getting partners or sponsors, or when you're in person, maybe venues onboard in supporting your community?
Valentina:
Really, the one strategy that I've followed, and this has only been something that I've realized in Madrid, we are doing our events in English, and what I've done is I've just reached out to people that I think would be a good fit and just ask them. I believe the theory of you don't ask, you don't get, so I just reach out to them, explain who I am again, what we're doing, how this can benefit them. For example, a venue that we usually use is a co-working space, and this is a great opportunity for them to get potential new people to come and stay at their co-working and co-living. They have co-living areas as well.
Valentina:
Having my own personal community which is Eat Out Madrid, I have a lot of connections within the food and drink industry here, a lot of people that are starting out or needing more promotion, so I partner with them. They provide a little bit of food and some drinks, and that way people get to try it. We encourage them to share it on their social media, and then hopefully that then creates more traction for the companies and they get more customers, more clients, and yeah, everybody wins.
Derek Andersen:
As we wrap up, I'd love to hear about what is a community that you love and why do you love it? Outside of your own, of course.
Valentina:
Yeah, this was actually a really difficult question. I think the one that comes to mind is a community called She Hit Refresh, and I'm not saying this because Cepee is my co-host. She is the founder of this community. I'll tell you the reason why I love this community. She puts in so much effort to making this community keep going. There's so much value. She has online events where people come on and speak about their experiences. It's a community for women over 30 who want to change their life through travel, and basically hit refresh. Being over 30 myself, there has been times where I wanted to hit refresh, and it's just been so good to have a group of women who are the same age, who are kind of in the same part of their life as me, and we're just sharing experiences and supporting each other, especially during these times where things aren't as great as we would hope it to be.
Valentina:
Yeah, it's just been a really great place to connect and unwind. When we are able to meet in person, she organizes these in-person events, and it's great for me as an events manager to go to an event where I'm not the one organizing it. I can just sit there and enjoy it as a participant. I'm so grateful for her and what she's achieved in such a short space of time, and just having an area where we can all come and just be with each other virtually for now, and just support each other during the journeys that we're going on to refreshing our lives to where we want to be in the future.
Derek Andersen:
Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you'd like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod. That's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com/pod.