Sheffield’s Evoluted and Nottingham-based Victress Digital have teamed up to launch Nottingham DM, a new marketing meetup that will expand Evoluted’s successful Sheffield DM events to the East Midlands.

Like the Sheffield version, Nottingham DM meetups will be free-to-attend, featuring a casual atmosphere with a focus on community-building and emphasising diversity of speaking opportunities. Spanning all areas of marketing including PPC, Social, SEO, Digital PR, Content arketing, strategy and more, they’ll also be run on an every-two-months schedule on Thursday evenings.

The first event will be held on Thursday 28th March at city centre pub Barley Twist, just around the corner from Nottingham train station, and will feature expert Digital PR and Paid Social talks from freelance marketer Lau Miguez and Abi Bellion-Carey, Head of Paid Social at Overdrive Digital.

Nottingham DM will be primarily organised by the team at Victress, who support national and international brands with social media marketing, while full-service agency Evoluted will support with event logistics and promotion.

“We’re so excited to be launching this event and teaming up with Sheffield DM,” says Victress founder Emma Glover. “Nottingham is my home city and where I’ve built my agency - there’s so much digital marketing talent here so it’s the perfect place to host a regular event of this kind where we can build a real marketing community.”

“Nottingham DM will be somewhere people can come to share knowledge but also make genuine connections and feel comfortable - having seen the style of Sheffield DM events, I felt that was something we were missing here.”

Organised by the marketing team at Evoluted, Sheffield DM began in November 2018 to build a marketing community in the city and provide a forum for marketers to learn and advance their careers. 

Designed to be an antidote to stuffy networking events with the same line-ups (a Mario Kart competition has been a mainstay), organisers also put a focus on providing opportunities for first-time speakers and underrepresented groups. 

In the five years since, over 1,000 different attendees have passed through the doors to watch talks and panels starring 91 different speakers. 58% of them have been female and non-binary, with first-time speakers making up around 20% of all line-ups.

Sheffield DM’s meetups have remained free, attracting sponsorship from Sitebulb, LensGo Visual Media, Purely.Website and unLTD Magazine, and organisers have also incorporated an annual all-day, paid-for event each summer into its programme. The 2023 event attracted over 230 marketers from all over the UK to Sheffield and won the backing of a clutch of new sponsors including Trustpilot.

Nottingham DM’s colour scheme evokes the city’s Sherwood Forest links, a deliberate nod to local identity.

“It’s only right that a marketing event has strong local branding!” says Dan Rawley, Marketing Manager at Evoluted and a lead organiser of Sheffield DM. “After all, legend has it our own orange colour scheme was informed by Henderson’s Relish, the pride of Sheffield.”

“We’re thrilled to have partnered with Victress to expand our events beyond Sheffield. After last summer’s event we had a number of approaches from companies interested in joining forces on similar events in their cities, which was hugely flattering. 

“While many of those conversations are ongoing, we found our values aligned perfectly with the team at Victress and we agreed Nottingham is a brilliant environment for this kind of event - so it made sense to make this the first location to roll out ‘DM Network’ events.”