The highlights of being a UK Mailchimp Pro Partner in 2023
Well here’s a thing. I decided it was high time I wrote a new blog on my website, came on here with an idea and discovered I’d started drafting this one a whole year ago (it’s now 2 Jan 2024) - oops. So, to back-track to the original blog…
I’m fortunate to be one of only a very small handful of Mailchimp Pro Partners in the UK. There are some 800+ Partners and Pro Partners in the world, but only about 7 of us in the UK, with a very unique perspective on things. But despite being tiny, we’re very much connected both with Mailchimp globally, and with one another.
As someone who works independently and does ‘her own thing’ instead of being part of a big agency, this feels even more significant.
And 2023 was an exciting year when it came to building on that. Here are some of the highlights…
/1 Mailchimp invited me to be on their 2023 Customer Advisory Board (CAB)
2023 was only the second year Mailchimp hosted a CAB. But what was it? Well:
A small team of 15 people from across the world, made up of 7 Mailchimp experts and 8 of Mailchimp’s customers who were using it in unique ways.
We spent the year working directly with Mailchimp’s senior leadership team: being the first to hear what’s coming down the line, feeding back on their product ideas and developments and sharing our thoughts and experiences directly with them.
A lot of that was on Zoom but for the first time ever it also included a trip to their head office in Atlanta. There really is absolutely no substitute for meeting the people you deal with every day in person - from formal meetings, round-tables and chatting over dinner and drinks with everyone.
I also had my brains well and truly picked - there’s something slightly daunting about people sitting around you with notepads asking you questions and jotting down your random thoughts, and then being interviewed in a panel on stage and having it televised to the whole company!
And on top of that I got to hang out with a select group of other Mailchimp experts from around the world - we were in geek heaven.
/2 I was interviewed on a televised broadcast by Mailchimp’s CEO about a client project
For the last 2 years I’ve worked with a wonderful national charity called Home-Start UK, helping them recruit thousands of volunteers via Good Morning Britain’s 1 Million Minutes campaign. My role was the tech side - helping people register through forms with clever functions that collected the data to send onto their local centres and triggered information emails.
Mailchimp caught wind of the success of the campaign and wanted to use the case study to share with their global staff of how Mailchimp is being used in action. As a result their CEO Rania Succar interviewed me, Matt Hann and Tanya Freedman of Home-Start in a televised interview.
3/ Mailchimp also asked me to hang out with some of their US team at Brighton SEO 2023.
I got to spend the day chatting with agencies about why they might want to be a part of Mailchimp & Co.
4/ I was quoted as an expert in a London museum about the future of email
I was quoted on “what the experts say” on the wall of the British Design Museum’s exhibition Email is DEAD. It’s rather strange going to an exhibition (which was fascinating and really fun by the way) and discovering your name on the wall - I had no idea it was going to be there (and if I’d realised that’s what my prediction was wanted for I’d definitely have thought about it a bit more!).
/5 I participated in Mailchimp’s first ever marketing conference in the UK From: Here To: There
A series of fascinating and inspiring talks from the likes of Stephen Bartlett, Louis Theroux and Martina Navratalova, time with the rest of the UK Partner gang, seeing some of the US team again and helping UK businesses with Mailchimp questions. I also spent the day feeling weirdly short (I’m not):
