We try to reach win-win scenarios

A few questions to Carlos Callejo on what it means to be the Outreach & Partnerships Officer of the Board.

What do you work on as the Outreach & Partnerships Officer ? What skills are required in these works?

Some of my tasks include attending partnership and sponsorship proposals by the companies and organizations of our fellow alumni, or actively looking for new ones understanding which ones make more sense to collaborate with. In essence, we try to reach win-win scenarios with third parties in which our alumni can benefit from these partnerships. It can be discounts to app subscriptions or services, free tickets to events, give more visibility to our community, etc.

One of the major responsibilities of this position is to find sponsors for our flagship event, the EIT Digital Annual Meeting. These sponsors, which can be companies or organizations, can help to make the event and our organization more financially sustainable. In exchange, we promote their brands and allow them to access to our large pool of talent, which is basically you.

What have you achieved in your mandate 2021-2023 as the Outreach & Partnerships Officer?

Make new partnerships with Enhancv, Croissant coworkings, Jungle Retrats and The Nomad Scape, and renew our partnership with Flixbus. We also collaborated with the EIT Digital Master School to promote their Professional School offering. We also had some conversations with other organizations and companies, but not always we ended up closing a collaboration.

Even though it’s not an Outreach & Partnerships Officer task perse, I organized the first edition of the EIT Digital Alumni Coliving in the island of Fuerteventura, which was a huge success. During the coliving we held a joint event with the SPEGC, which is a public organization in Gran Canaria that takes care of finding new business opportunities in the island, and they fully sponsored this event. So, as you can see, there is also space in this position to try new things.

I also take care of the benefits section on our website, updating its content when is needed.

What could you have done better or differently during your mandate?

We honestly failed to get sponsors for the two previous annual meetings for a bunch of reasons, including a rather late organization of the events and the lack of knowledge of the local IT ecosystems in the cities where we held the events. We did put many efforts into this task (we sent large amount of emails to potential sponsors, contacted companies through LinkedIn, reached local IT communities, etc.), but something was clearly missing.

Also, adding more benefits for our alumni would have been nice, but getting partnerships is not always easy. Even though we are 2500+ members in our community, for some companies we are simply not large enough to collabore with us, so we need to be more creative and ‘sell’ very well what our community offers. I think that if you are very good at selling (or you want to grow in this area) this is a very interesting position to volunteer at. 

Interested in this position? Apply now to be the next Outreach and Partnerships Officer or ask Carlos Callejo  for more information!