By now, you can see how much I am invested in community building and bringing people together through events. And the people I would personally serve the most are community builders and event organizers because they took upon themselves to bring people together.
The event industry is hitting a wall right now. We are all pretending that things are back to normal but the reality is that most organizers are running on fumes. The demand for people to get together is higher than ever but the money and the help to make it happen have basically vanished. We are stuck in a cycle where we are expected to pull off miracles with half the budget and a fraction of the team we had five years ago.
The old way of just throwing a big party and hoping for the best is dead. Today if you cannot prove exactly why an event was worth the money you are probably going to lose your budget next year. It is a stressful time to be a builder because the stakes have never been higher while the support has never been lower. We have to stop treating events like one-off projects and start looking at the bigger picture of how we keep people together.
I have spent a lot of time lately looking at why some groups are thriving while others are falling apart. The ones winning are not the ones with the biggest venues. They are the ones who have stopped trying to do everything manually and started focusing on deep engagement. We need a way to make the technical side of this job invisible so we can get back to the actual work of connecting people.