The story behind Meet Magento UK 2020 – Online for Charity
This year, Meet Magento UK went online for charity. We raised over £83,000 for our selected charities and saw over 1000 attendees join the conference globally!
It was a ‘Meet Magento UK’ like we’ve never experienced before, however, this wasn’t our original plan! #MMUK is traditionally a physical event, and initially we were disheartened by the fact this wouldn’t be possible this year. MMUK attracts many eCommerce professionals with vested interested in the Magento community and their insights. But attendees are predominantly UK based, or travelling from close-by in Europe.
This year however, we went Global by going virtual! We saw people signing on from the US, Singapore and India. It was a truly fantastic experience and one of the many perks we hadn’t fully considered from taking the event online.
We wanted to share our story this year as an example of what can be achieved under otherwise challenging circumstances…
“Cancelling Meet Magento UK 2020 would have been the easy option. But we didn’t want to do the easy thing. We felt we owed it to the Magento Community to deliver a conference against all odds.”
Jamie Huskisson, CEO at JH
As the world as we knew it came to a grinding halt in March – so did conferences, events and networking. We lost the ability to connect and collaborate with like-minded people, pretty much overnight.
Cancelling Meet Magento UK 2020 would have been the easy option. But we didn’t want to do the easy thing. We felt we owed it to the Magento Community to deliver a conference against all odds, even if that meant taking everything online.
So that’s exactly what we did! Meet Magento UK 2020 went live online for charity on 17th June. We only had a couple of months to curate a virtual conference, full to the brim of incredible eCommerce speakers and content we knew would inspire and encourage innovation.
- We split this across four tracks; Merchant, Technical, Platform and Solution – so there was something for everyone
- The tracks featured 30+ best-in-class eCommerce speakers from the likes of Adobe, PayPal, Akoova, IMRG, Google and many more
- Key topics included ‘The new normal of buying experiences’, ‘Optimising Online Retail’ and ‘Google Analytics for eCommerce’
- Attendees could pick and choose which sessions they wanted to attend and build their own personal agenda
- Attendees could network with other eCommerce professionals and submit any questions or challenges they were facing
As well as supporting the wider eCommerce industry and the Magento community, we wanted to do something extra this year, for those disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
That’s why we made the decision to donate 100% of proceeds from the conference to three main charities that were running emergency COVID-19 appeals; Age UK, Mind and Trussell trust. We made tickets free this year, and asked attendees to make a donation if they were able to.
We had a target in mind to raise £50,000 for these charities, a sum we knew would have a big impact and help many people. However, with the support of our amazing sponsors; we surpassed this target and raised an incredible grand total of £83,228!
If you attended #MM20UK this year, we want to say a big thank you for being a part of it! If you didn’t manage to attend, not to worry! We made the decision to make all the talks public this year.