Crownpeak Empower Comes to London!

Recently, I had the pleasure of organizing Crownpeak's Empower user group event. It was the first meeting in the UK in more than a year, so to say we were excited would be an understatement. We had a successful event in NYC in Fall 2016, so I wanted to at least match it in terms of the quality of content and engagement.

We hosted Empower on May 18, 2017 at the Royal Institute of British Architects in Central London. It was the ideal location for an inspiring day of presentations, networking, and product feedback from a group of executives, managers and practitioners responsible for developing and managing digital experiences for some of the world’s biggest brands.

Our goal at all our user group events is to provide our customers personal face-to-face interactions with not only our Crownpeak team, but also with their marketing and IT peers from other companies. The Crownpeak platform is robust in its functionality, so bringing customers together to share their experiences has far-reaching benefits.

17 organizations were represented and users had many chances to exchange information on common challenges, solutions and best practices. The feedback from one attendee well-summed up the day when he concluded, " The user session in London was really applicable, it was eye-opening to see how other companies use Crownpeak."

Some specific highlights included:

• Maya Sellon presented on Shell's journey to achieving digital governance with limited resources and ever changing agencies, a topic many of our enterprise company attendees found relatable.
• Amaze's Amanda Follit's talk on Digital Governance analytics made a big splash, as she made a strong case for the role of monitoring and analytics in digital governance.

• Customers lined up to take advantage of the opportunity for one-on-one time with Aris Ramos, an expert on the Digital Quality Management (DQM) platform, who answered questions on features and configuration.
• Fortuitously, our user group meeting coincided with Global Accessibility Awareness Day #gaad, which made the accessibility briefing was especially timely and relevant. Here's my favorite quote:

• We had an overwhelming response to a new concept our UX designer Nicola Thompson and Evi Fassa introduced to get input from customers on our product roadmap. The engaging New Feature Showcase event featured live user testing of our new accessibility reporting. Attendees used stickers and post-it notes to vote on their favorites, and give candid feedback on features.

I’ve been with Crownpeak for over ten years, and although I’ve played a role in almost every aspect of the organization, this was only my second time creating a user event like this for our customers. It was gratifying to see the day come together, as customers from a variety of industries participated in exchanging information, and forging what I hope will result in some long-lasting professional connections. It was a full and productive day that was perfectly capped off by a lively happy hour.

I look forward to planning our next Empower event and will be looking to add new ideas that help our customers collaborate with other companies, as well as enhance their interactions with Crownpeak experts.

Hope to see you there!