My Community Made has announced an exciting new extension to the features on their platform. The platform’s philosophy has always been to support business in local communities. Their new features support the addition of community events. I asked Edward Fisher about the new additions to the platform. Here is what he had to share.
Can you share more about the new events features to your platform?
Our new events feature is part of a larger push to increase how sellers on our platform can connect with those who enjoy purchasing local and handmade products. Included with the events update is a blogging feature that allows vendors to write and post blog posts right from their vendor dashboards. We do not want our site to be just another place where customers can buy handmade products. We want to provide as many tools as possible for sellers to connect with their customers in interesting ways that would not be possible on sites like Amazon. Our sellers’ distinctive character, engaging stories, and active involvement in their local communities are the unique selling points that set them apart from large offshore companies. Any platform that does not utilize these strengths and relies solely on pushing free shipping, sales, and other price-point mechanisms, is not optimized for helping crafters and artisans.
The goal of our events feature is to encourage customers and vendors alike to attend these local events. These events are typically run by non-profit art groups that typically don’t have a large budget for marketing or have an existing audience on only one social media platform like Facebook or Instagram. When a new event is added to our site, it becomes visible to the entire MCM community and is shared on each of our social pages. Additionally, these events will start to be included in our weekly newsletter, with subscribers to the newsletter receiving a list of the events taking place within their state, in addition to the regular slate of newly uploaded products.
Who is able to use this feature to share events?
This feature is free to anyone, but submitting an event does require the user to have either a customer or vendor account with us and be logged in to submit the event form.
How does the events submissions process work? Is there a cost?
To submit an event, the user just fills out this form here: https://mycommunitymade.com/
After submitting an event, I will review the event, ensure the information is correct, and post it to the site and our social media. For an event to be accepted, it does need to meet some criteria.
For example, due to the large amount of vendor application scams out there, we will only accept events that have a link to a separate event page like a Facebook Events page or the organizer’s website. We review the organizer’s website or Facebook page to ensure they are running the event that was submitted to us and that they are a reputable organization.
There is no cost to submitting an event.
What's coming next for these features?
Soon, vendors will be able to mark whether they plan on attending specific events. After doing so, these events will appear on the vendor’s store page, and the event page may include a list of participating vendors as well.
