Like a pub crawl. But with more paint and fewer hangovers.
I'd built a virtual hangout for creative entrepreneurs. A place to swap ideas, learn a few things, work alongside other creatives, or just show up when they needed a little company and a kick in the creative pants.
There was just one problem. I needed more people to know it existed.
Sure, I could have hosted an open house. Maybe another webinar. Yawn.
Then I got thinking about pub crawls. You know, wandering from place to place, discovering something new at every stop, and meeting a few interesting characters along the way?
What if I could do that for creative entrepreneurs? Swap the beer for big ideas, the pubs for virtual rooms, and the bar snacks for a little creative inspiration.
And just like that, The Creative Crawl was born. A free, come-and-go adventure where people could explore at their own pace, pick up some new skills, and hopefully find a creative community they'd want to stick around in.
Less Webinar. More Wanderland.
I didn't want people sitting through another online presentation, watching the clock and waiting for the good stuff.
I wanted them to explore.
So I turned my existing GoBrunch community into a seven-day creative adventure. Different rooms, different personalities, different things to discover. Visitors could wander between spaces, watch presentations, download resources, and follow whatever caught their curiosity.
No rigid schedule. No mandatory live sessions. No pressure to show up at a particular time.
Just a virtual playground for creative entrepreneurs, with a few surprises behind every new door.
Good People. Big Ideas. A Little Creative Herding.
A creative crawl needs interesting places to visit. And interesting people to make those stops worth visiting.
I started by deciding what each room should offer, then went looking for creative entrepreneurs who could bring those ideas to life. I used carefully crafted AI prompts to brainstorm potential contributors, as I wanted to bring together people from all corners of the globe. Armed with that list, I did my own digging before deciding who to approach.
Once I'd assembled the crew, I assigned each presenter a room and a general topic. Then I "left the room" for them to put their own spin on it. Their expertise, their personalities, their ideas.
Behind the scenes, I was juggling invitations, deadlines, video submissions, downloadable resources, technical hiccups, and all the little details that make an experience feel effortless to the people enjoying it.
Organized chaos? Maybe. But the organized part was very much intentional.
The crew had their toolkit. The crawlers had their passports.
Getting the presenters on board was one thing. Getting the word out was another.
With no paid advertising, I needed a little teamwork. So I put together a collection of ready-to-use promotional materials for the presenters, including branded graphics, suggested social media captions, email copy, registration information, and one little extra: the Creative Crawl Passport.
The Passport had a bigger job than simply keeping track of the stops along the way.
I wanted each presenter's audience to become part of something larger. Participants were encouraged to check off the rooms they'd visited, share their progress on social media, and tag Tinted & Minted. Every shared Passport was an opportunity for people from different creative circles to discover one another, interact publicly, and introduce the event to even more potential participants.
It was a simple idea with a much bigger purpose: turn individual audiences into a connected community, with the potential for every share to extend the event's reach well beyond the original invitation.
A little gamification. A little community building. And a whole lot more mileage out of one creative idea.
THE ROAD (TRIP) ENDED. THE CONNECTIONS DIDN'T.
All that planning paid off.
The four-week promotional campaign rolled out as planned. The virtual rooms worked exactly as intended, without a technical hiccup in sight. And the presenters? Their feedback was glowing. They loved the concept, appreciated how easy I'd made it to participate, and were especially happy that all the little details had already been taken care of.
But the real win wasn't a smooth event. It was what happened afterward.
The number of creatives regularly using the virtual community tripled.