Being the staff member who works closely with CXPA's roster of dedicated local volunteers that plan networking opportunities for their local communities is such a pleasure. I am continually wow'd and grateful for everything these volunteers do to spread the word of our association and find innovative ways to build a feeling of connection among local CX'ers. This year, it's my pleasure to award the San Francisco volunteers as "Network of the Year" due to the novelty of their events' content, format, and contributions to CXPA's networking program as a whole! I had a Q&A with Gary Batroff, CCXP and Alex Stoeffl, the San Fran Network co-leads who spearhead the network's activities:
How do you assess the needs of your local members and plan events with content to satisfy those needs?We could do a better job of connecting with our attendees to really identify their content needs. It's always on the to-do list, but volunteer hours are unfortunately a scarce resource, as is an effective mechanism to collect that information. The leadership team is a sample of the community and many of us read lots of CX articles, blogs, CXPA Open Forum, and attend CX conferences, so we rely heavily on our own instincts, experience, and interests and bounce them off each other to develop ideas that we believe will be both interesting to the community and executable in terms of finding speakers/panelists. Alex also scans the internet to see what's trending on the fringes of CX, watching what other networks do and the response they get, and attending events of other industries/disciplines to observe different formats and audience engagement. Sometimes, topic and format ideas bubble up over the course of a year (or more) and people are approached informally to get their reaction to the idea. We've probably also asked attendees once or twice to give a show of hands regarding their interest in a potential future event. Finally, we've just started holding quarterly calls with Nick Glimsdahl and Jason Anderson of the Columbus Local Networking Group to exchange ideas across many CXPA topics, including event topics.
Most of your events have a keynote presentation or panel discussion—how do you lock in such incredible presenters for each of your events?Luckily, several members of our leadership team have strong networks made up of former clients, people they coach, people they've helped find jobs, etc. and whenever we have a topic we ask the leaders to name people who they think might fit. Also, at the beginning of every event, during our CXPA introduction pre-amble, we ask the audience to come forth with speaker ideas (and venues) that they think would be good. Typically, these are people they know and are almost always interested. I'm surprised how often people are willing to speak or be a panelist. We get almost no rejections with this method. We also keep a funnel of both speakers and venues that we can call upon for future events if they aren't a good fit for our next event.
Last year, we researched a number of potential high-level speakers in the Bay Area and compiled a list with topic ideas for them. Unfortunately, none of our outreach to them has panned out to date. Although, having a list of shelved topics in your mind helps with recognizing potential speakers you may randomly meet. One speaker resulted from attending a fireside chat for marketing. While the topic was about growth marketing, the speaker passionately spoke about his employees being a key advantage in supporting his growth strategy. Alex approached him after the event and asked if he would be interested in doing an employee experience event with CXPA, to which he enthusiastically responded "Yes!" It took six months, but we finally pulled together an employee experience event for him to partake in as a panelist and he was excellent.
Volunteers of the San Francisco Network have graciously volunteered many hours of their time to CXPA HQ as we continue to make the program more impactful for our volunteers and event attendees—what is your motivation to work with HQ on these improvements to the networking program?It's possible that, as CX practitioners, we can't help ourselves when it comes to organizational CX improvement. Seriously though, we gain an incredible amount of insight from HQ and the leaders of other networks. The system of sharing knowledge and ideas only works if there are contributors, so we try to do our part to keep it moving forward. CXPA HQ does a great job in receptivity and follow-up with ideas presented and when ideas get implemented we benefit and achieve satisfaction from seeing our ideas come to fruition. We also want to see the CX profession thrive and anything we can do to ensure that happens is something worth putting in the time.
Join me in thanking Gary and Alex for all of their hard work by attending the local events they plan in the Bay area.
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