**COVID-19 has forced the cancellation of all gatherings of more than a few people and this had a huge impact on those who run events.**
In the global marketing community these events are an essential ingredient in the ongoing personal and professional development of marketers as they provide not only an opportunity to learn from expert marketing practitioners, but also to engage with fellow marketers and learn how those from other sectors, operating in different global regions go about ensuring that the marketing strategies and tactics that they deploy deliver the best return on investment for the organisations they work for.
**The absence of these learning opportunities has the potential to significantly impact on any organisation's ability to successfully navigate the new economic environment that will follow the COVID-19 pandemic.**
This project seeks to address that issue by creating an engaged global marketing community who are able to access key training and development resources as and when they need them.
An additional innovation is to ensure that it is the global marketing community themselves that help to shape the content on the new platform. This ensures that the platform will meet current needs but is also capable of pivoting to meet the future needs of the community.
This project has a number of key themes at its core:
1. **Provide the global marketing community with a fresh, continually updated library of training resources** that allows them to continue to meet their personal and professional development needs.
2. **Allow the global marketing community to shape the platform from the outset and on an ongoing basis.**
3. **Ensure the development of a continually updated library of marketing resources for the global marketing community** that maximises the opportunity for peer-to-peer learning through a focus on best practice case studies covering a broad range of businesses - from micro business through SME's and large organisations, a comprehensive number of industry sectors and focusing on both online and offline marketing tactics.