The inner workings of the world’s largest IRL creative community 🌈 Lisa Cifuentes and Kyle Baptista of CreativeMornings
Episode at a glance:
GUEST: Lisa Cifuentes and Kyle Baptista
COMMUNITY: CreativeMornings
HOSTS: Bailey Richardson & Kevin Huynh
“At headquarters, you are in service of the community.” - CreativeMornings Chief Community Officer Kyle Baptista
Show Notes
Some of the folks tuning into our podcast and writing know that People & Company founding partner Kevin Huynh was the first employee at CreativeMornings.
Back in 2011, a 23-year-old baby Kev, fresh off a mechanical engineering degree from Berkeley, passed on a fancy Google job, packed his bags, and moved across the country.
On his first day of work at CreativeMornings, Kevin was greeted by an inbox full of emails from people asking to start their own CM chapters. At the time there were only four cities with CreativeMornings — New York, Zurich, San Francisco, and LA. By the time Kevin left three and a half years later, there were 104 cities.
Photo by Tora Chirila for CreativeMornings/Montréal.
For those that don’t know what CreativeMornings is, the concept is simple: breakfast and a short talk one Friday morning a month. Every event is free of charge and open to anyone. Lecturers include founders like David Kelley and Jason Fried, artists like Jonathan Harris and Lisa Congdon, and writers like Maria Popova and Priya Parker.
Today, the grassroots events have spread to more than 200 chapters around the world — everywhere from Louisville to Tehran. In fact, it’s the biggest in-person creative community in the world.
How did CreativeMornings onboard more than 1,500 volunteer organizers and reach 200 chapters all around the world? What’s changed since Kevin’s early days at CM?
Kevin and Bailey sat down with current Chief Community Officer Kyle Baptista and Head of Community Lisa Cifuentes to learn more.
Kevin Huynh poses at the first CreativeMornings Summit alongside founder Tina Roth Eisenberg (photobombing on the left) and organizers from Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Singapore. Photo by Bekka Palmer for CreativeMornings.
Photo by Brittany Cunningham-Scott for CreativeMornings/Johannesburg.
Photo by Majid Sadr for CreativeMornings/Tehran.
While you’re listening to the interview, key in on some of our favorite insights:
At headquarters, “you are in service to the community.”
The CreativeMornings team has produced a wealth of resources for the chapter leaders, from sample marketing materials to partnership pitch decks. But the support that Lisa takes the most pride in is the emotional support. To her, “anyone can provide decks and PDFs and tutorials. What makes CreativeMornings different is that we’re a very empathetic group of people that work here. When we hear stories from the community, we feel it.”
Look to leaders to help each other.
Today, CreativeMornings HQ has advanced to the point that they don’t spend much time building resources for their community. Instead, HQ team members wield their spotlight. They now source and reflect back the best practices and resources developed by leaders on the ground.
Vetting new leaders takes time, and it’s crucial.
CreativeMornings puts potential new hosts through an application process that’s intentionally difficult. Their logic? If you can’t make it through their application process, you also won’t be able to manage hosting one event each month for hundreds of people.
Lisa then phone screens promising applicants. Only after passing both of those rigorous stages are you welcomed to the community. CreativeMornings HQ can keep their standards high because they don’t have yearly chapter-based growth goals (e.g. we need to add 10 chapters this year). They only add a chapter when they receive an application from an exceptional new leader in a new city.
👋🏻Say hi to Lisa and Kyle and Learn more about CreativeMornings.
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