Elementor is a popular WordPress website builder platform that calls upon web creators from all over the world to unite, meet, share, learn, and support one another, according to their network landing page. We spoke with Tali Vasilevsky, Community Meetup Lead at Elementor since 2019.
Can you tell us a little bit about community at Elementor?
- Elementor is a community-based product, based around people building and designing professional websites. Our continuous mission is to empower web creators. Our community members contribute to one another and share knowledge that lends to the continued improvement of Elementor for web professionals.
- I started as a community volunteer for several communities in Tel Aviv, working with freelancers and organizing Meetup events, and from there I became Community Lead. I’m responsible for growing our local communities, identifying their needs and challenges, and supporting our Meetup leaders.
In less than 2 years, Elementor has grown to over 60 chapters around the globe. How did you start this process?
- In 2019, we began receiving requests from community Elementor leaders from around the world to have in-person events. We started with a pilot chapter with our community in Tel Aviv which had a successful first event.
- We decided to plant the seeds for the global community by starting a Meetup Pro network and engaged members through an application on our website. We now have Meetup chapters all over the world–26 countries–including Australia, the United States, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, India, and Hong Kong. By starting this global network, we created a real community for Creators to meet in person.
How do you empower your local organizers?
- Our Meetup organizers are part of Elementor’s Community Leaders Program. Organizers can apply to the program directly through the website. All of our leaders are volunteers, passionate about Elementor. The program enables our leaders to initiate, lead, and support other Elementor users through both online and in-person communities to share their voice, support one another, and develop as professional web creators.
- Additionally, we have a dedicated Slack workspace for daily communication with our organizers including webinars with stakeholders in the company.
What’s the story behind Elementor’s Virtual Road Trip?
- The Elementor Virtual Road Trip was our way to support our local communities during the COVID-19 crisis. We already had plans to visit some of our local communities physically. Then the pandemic struck, and all in-person events were converted to online events.
- We realized that this experience actually opened up an opportunity for a more extensive world tour. We understood that we have the ability to support our local leaders and communities with unique content from Elementor employees, created especially for the Road Trip.
- All in all, the Virtual Road Trip series was a great learning experience allowing us to meet our users using an online format and get direct feedback about our community events, while working closely with our local meetup organizers.
Success snapshot: Elementor Chapters in Spain
- As soon as the global sheltering began, the Elementor chapters in Spain quickly got to work planning a series of online events with the goal of supporting the whole Spanish-speaking Elementor community. They set out to give their members all of the possible tools to expand their opportunities to interact from home and collaborate with others from different cities.
- These efforts resulted in 15 exciting, vibrant, warm, and intense events with talks, workshops, real-time networking, and breakout rooms of 6-8 people. Members had an opportunity to introduce themselves and talk intimately about their current project challenges and successes. Each event had an average attendance of over 200 Elementor user community members which—in addition to Spain and Europe—included sizable representation from the Americas, especially the U.S., Canada, Argentina, and Chile.
- It was a unique experience seeing the chapters working together to coordinate content on a global scale. Thirteen organizers from Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza, Seville, Marina Alta, and Coruña communicated daily by chat and coordinated each Meetup event to ensure each chapter was offering unique content. These efforts deepened professional relationships and camaraderie among the global Elementor community.
Elementor has been doing some cool things with the Meetup API. Can you tell us more?
- As our Meetup program is constantly growing, the ability to have live events update on our website helps our community to be more engaged and informed about chapter events. I also love the ability to view all of the Meetup groups on our community page – similar to the Pro network page.
- In the future, we want to show a full list of the groups so community members can filter them by country. Transitioning into virtual events changed the way our Meetup members engage with chapter events on a global scale. Participation is no longer restricted by location, meaning everyone can simply connect online. With this change comes the need to display all our events to members from all over the world, not just based on location, but by language, topics, etc. I look forward to discovering how the API can help us achieve that goal.
Last modified on June 23, 2021
