Seth Godin recently challenged the idea of big events and said,
“If you’re going to have an event, better make it big. Or even bigger than that. It needs to be awe-inspiring, frightening, on deadline and worth losing sleep over.”
That’s quite a charge.
I have to admit, as “professional conferencegoer,” I’ve grown a little bit weary at the incredible amount of conferences that have dotted the landscape of the past few years. It seems to me like we’ve fallen into a pattern and relying on old ideas, methods, and ways of generating hype.
The result has been some dull events with the same speakers saying the same thing.
When the idea for Cultivate was born last year it was because we felt there was a legitimate need to create a non-event that would focus on providing space for a conversation… nothing fancy, nothing polished, no presentations. We didn’t pay any of the presenters, had no budget for marketing, and what profit we did make was donated to two charities.
It was a great event. People loved it. The Chicago Tribune and NBC Chicago even took note of it… so the obvious response would be, “well let’s do it again!”
Earlier this year a core group of us sat with our calendars and the list of Christian conferences and set a date for Cultivate 2010, amping up to rock it out again. But after some prayerful consideration have decided we’re going to pull the plug on it… at least for this year.
The reasons are simple: we want to ensure the same level of quality and attention are invested to make this gathering worthwhile for you and that it’s serving a unique need.
So, instead, we’re going to take the year off to evaluate and plan a bit more. And if it makes sense to move forward, then we’ll line up some of the BEST speakers we can find and strategize how we can make an even GREATER impact while still being unscripted, unpolished and focused on conversation and collaboration.
We know many of you were looking forward to it but can assure you that it will be worth the wait. And in the meantime, there are some awesome conferences coming up this year that are totally worth checking out:
- Catalyst West – April 21-23
- Q Chicago – April 28-30
- Echo Church Media Conference – July 28-30
- Global Leadership Summit – August 5-6
- Story – September 23-24
- Catalyst East – October 6-8
- MinistryCOM – October 20-22
