Hello wonderful people,
What a better way to get recharged for going back to work than to reflect on the past year and plan for the next one?
In this short edition, I'd like to share with you some of the key milestones for our community in 2024, and a sneak peak into how I hope we grow together in 2025.
Here's what we achieved in 2024 🤩
Community milestones:
- We opened up the community sign up form for new members and launched our website in May 2024 🌱
- We also started our Slack community in May, exchanged over 4,915 messages, and grew to 205 Slack members
- We officially registered the organisation as a Bulgarian Foundation in July
- We launched our newsletter edition at the end of July. Since then, we've sent 1,287 emails to our 220 subscribers
- We hosted our first webinar in November
Event milestones:
- We organised 2 official networking dinners - in Sofia in July, and in Plovdiv in September,
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We organised 3 casual networking events:
- a casual networking dinner in Varna
- organised community attendance to BrightonSEO in the UK
- community attendance at Begach's Morning run
- We organised our first mini-conference in Sofia in November
In total, in 2024 our in-person events have attracted more than 70 people!
Partnership milestones:
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We were sponsored by 7 companies in 2024 as either scholarship sponsors, networking dinner sponsors, or mini-conference sponsors. Those companies are:
- Google Search Central Team,
- Women Techmakers community by Google,
- Advanced Web Ranking
- Hyperscience
- Screaming Frog (x2)
- Majestic
- Women in Tech SEO community
- We welcomed 9 incredible women as speakers to our in-person events and 5 women as speakers to our webinars.
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We collaborated with countless external partners and organisations but some notable mentions include our women-supporting-women collaborations with:
- Randum Goodies for creating our community merch
- CoKitchen as our speaker dinner hosts
- Olya Grigorova as our photographer for Plovdiv networking dinner and Sofia mini-conference
In 2024, we also:
- Negotiated scholarship opportunities for more than 30 marketers from our community for our event tickets, lecture recordings, course seats, and even conference tickets to BrightonSEO
- Appeared in people's LinkedIn feeds more than 32,000 times
- Created a really, really solid foundation for growth in 2025 🌟
Thank you for your support in 2024
I'd like to humbly thank each and every one of you for being part of this community, and/or for supporting our growth via business partnerships or donations.
Importantly, I'd like to thank everyone that has reached out to me, personally, in 2024 offering advice on how to grow this space - I really appreciate you for doing that!
Massive shout out to the women that supported both the community's growth and my own personal growth during the past year - the 2024 board of advisors: Vassilena Valchanova, Larisa Ivanova, Hristina Mangelova, Victoria Dodeva, Stefka Georgieva; and, of course, big thanks to Vasilena Vasileva, who was the first to take on the role of Community Catalyst in 2024.
Special shout out also to Dimitria Petrova, Luska Kokotanekova, and Iva Rankovska, without which the mini-conference would not have been the same!
If you'd like to take on a more active role in the community in 2025, please reach out! I'll be actively looking for help with growing our presence on Facebook, support with our newsletter and website, as well as help with amplifying our digital community and activities. I'll share more details about this in our community soon. ✨
How I hope we grow together in 2025
For 2025, I have several goals for this community that will serve as the cornerstone for my community leadership throughout the year:
- Strengthen the value of the digital community on Slack - more posts, more unique insights, more engagement
- Strengthen the relationships with key community partners - sponsors, speakers, advisors, catalysts, and event volunteers
- Provide more opportunities for member visibility - freelance hub, knowledge hub, speaker opportunities
- Launch our mentorship program
- Regularly host events - networking dinners, casual networking events, and a mini-conference
- Improve the community's visibility across relevant social media platforms
I'm hoping that in 2025 this community will start feeling like a place to regularly visit and share with for even more women in this industry. ❤️
In the upcoming days, I'll share a bit more on what to expect from Women in Marketing - Bulgaria in 2025. 🌱
Thank you all for the wonderful year we've shared, and hopefully 2025 is an even more fulfilling year for this community.
Thank you for once again for subscribing, becoming part of our community, supporting or otherwise engaging with our mission.
~ Lazarina & Women in Marketing - Bulgaria 🇧🇬 Team
