2008 Creative Freelancer Conference Recap
Courtesy of Marketing Mentor's Ilise Benun

We’re still riding the wave of the Creative Freelancer Conference—the momentum that started on Day 1, when we walked into the room and noticed that people were NOT sitting alone, quietly inspecting the contents of the goodie bag.

No, instead, they were already networking! That’s right. This group of supposedly introverted creatives from far-flung corners of the country (the world, actually), who’d screwed up their courage to attend an event where they didn’t know anyone, were talking animatedly amongst themselves, before it even started! To us, this was very auspicious.

How much can you fit into 3 days? We were on a mission to find out.

If there wasn’t an information session in progress, there was a networking activity happening, sometimes both, including:

• The 6 a.m. Morning Walk along the lakefront that a surprising 12 people joined me for on both days (see photo)
• 2 hours of 8-minute Business Reviews with 10 experts on Thursday night—that’s a total of 120 sessions!
• The Breakfast Roundtables, which were supposed to start at 8 a.m. but actually started around 7:30, because attendees were already sitting at the roundtables, ready to get to work.

That doesn’t even include the ad hoc groups of fast friends that formed for meals (and drinks) so they could keep talking about the last session, or the next one. Some of these groups even formed “tribes” and promised to stay in touch.

And that, in essence, was our goal for the CFC: to bring creatives who work alone into contact with their colleagues so they can see they’re not at all alone.

This is just the beginning of the CFC. We intend to grow this idea into more conferences (watch for details soon on CFC 09) but also more online experiences and community activities that will provide, if not the same sense of community, at least the virtual version of it, which is better than nothing…at least until next year.