She Does… Meet Up #1

It’s been a good four months since our last event ‘#wheredidyoustart’ in April where we hosted talks showcasing five different professional role models and their routes into the digital industry. Our September’s event was about doing something less formal and more social. One of the main aims of She Does Digital is to develop and grow a community of like-minded digital professionals where we can all learn and share ideas, so putting on a networking event was the perfect opportunity to do just that.

Networking events can be terrifying experience especially if you are brave enough to turn up on your own. So we added a little ‘She Does Digital’ twist on the conventional networking event. Like all our events (and our ethos as a whole) we want to break down the barriers and make everything about us and our events as inclusive and accessible as possible.

To mitigate the awkward networking vibes we split the 50 people who descended on Manahatta last Wednesday into groups facilitated by a member of the She Does Digital team. Networking in groups allowed people from all walks of the digital industry speak to others they may not have met otherwise. We deliberately wanted to shake up groups and ensure everyone could get involved, meet someone new, join in and feel comfortable doing so.

There was a huge variety of different job roles, skills and talent in one room from businesses all over Leeds, from app developers to social media experts, from graduates to career changers, from freelancers to Directors and COO’s, the breadth of skills, experience and talent under one was astounding.

So many ideas and conversations were flowing from group to group. Groups tackled and discussed many different topics including how they got into the industry, the issues and challenges they face in their day-to-day roles, who their role models are, why they love working in digital and most importantly how we can actively encourage more women to apply for roles in digital and what opportunities they see in their area of expertise.

We want to develop and grow our community and this was our first trial of a different kind of networking event. If you went, we really hope you enjoyed it and we would welcome any feedback you have here. We’d love to do more and work with our community to develop and progress some of the conversations started last week. We left Manahatta with so many new ideas and inspiration, thank you to all those who attended and we really hope to see you at our next event — details to come very soon! Stay in touch.

Huge thank you to Manahatta, Merrion Street who kindly gave us our venue free of charge.

Epiphany for letting us knock off work a little earlier to set up

Jacob Harrison @JTHarrison92 who gave up his Wednesday evening to help us photograph the event.