1 Year Reflection

Author:

Areej AbuAli

Last updated:

31/05/2020

May 28th 2020 marked our community's

one year anniversary

! I didn't imagine we'd grow so much in a year, when I first tweeted this out:

I started Women in Tech SEO a year ago because I've always wanted to be a part of a community where:

I don't overthink and over-phrase
every question I have before asking it
I don't worry about being judged
that I'm not good enough at my job
I feel motivated and inspired
to become better and enjoy the work I do every day

So I created my own and it's done all the above and more! Here is where we currently are: - The Global Facebook group now has

1,250+ members

- We know everyone isn't a Facebook fan, so we launched our Slack group which now has

750+ members

- We organised monthly London meetups from July till Feb that welcomed a total of 21 speakers and had a monthly average of 60 attendees - We hosted our first full day conference, Women in Tech SEO Festival, in honour of International Women's Day, that sold out at 250 attendees and had 11 speakers - We were shortlisted for the National Diversity Awards, our very own member Natalie Arney surprised us by nominating us! - And with the current pandemic, we launched WTSVirtual, weekly 1 hour live webinars for our global community

With so much to celebrate, we knew that we had to share with the world our awesome community members for

our first anniversary

. We decided to do that in a number of ways:

We asked our members to share their testimonials on what the community means to them
We kick-started WTSInterviews, where we'll interview brilliant women in our industry and share their stories with the world
On May 28th, we launched our Community Speakers hub. This initiative is built to give exposure to brilliant women in the industry who can share their knowledge in events. This is not only limited to Tech SEO and any brilliant woman can submit her profile. This is to encourage event organisers to diversify their speaker line-up by reaching out directly to speakers from our community. Our hope is to make it easier for industry events to achieve
50/50 gender split
in their speaker line-ups (if not better!) We encouraged our community members to submit their speaker profiles, regardless of speaking experience, and in less than 48 hours, we had
120+ speaker profiles
!

In terms of what's next for us, we want to give more exposure to our community members and help empower them. We have a few initiatives planned that we can't wait to share with you all!

We welcome Tech SEOs from all walks of life, whether that's your speciality or not.

As long as it's something you're interested in learning more about and you'd like to be part of a community of brilliant empowered women, then please join us!

Our values are:

To Be Kind
To Be Helpful
To Be Respectful
To Be a Safe & Judgement-Free Community

As always, if you have any suggestions or feedback on how to make this community better and stronger, let me know – I’m all ears! Feel free to DM me directly.