Gather Community Consulting is a Seattle-based consulting firm that specializes in community building.
Your Partner in Community Building
About Gather
Gather Community Consulting is lead by 15-year community veteran Carrie Melissa Jones.
We provide community consulting services and push community consulting projects forward. Our customers come from all industries and organization types: from Fortune 50 firms to non-profits to political campaigns and fast-moving startups or small businesses. All communities share the same underlying structure; we guide you through that structure no matter what your community needs.
What is important is that you are doing work to positively impact the people you serve.
It is our mission to create more successful brand communities that drive real business results and create deep meaning in members' lives. Be part of that mission with us.
About Gather Founder Carrie Melissa Jones
After discovering music forums in the early 2000s, Carrie was hooked on the promise and power of online communities. Originally from the south, her family moved to the edge of Silicon Valley amid the first dot-com boom and bust. Her father, pursuing his dream of reporting on the rise of internet, microprocessor, and AI technology, plugged a computer into their home that changed her life. During this time, she turned to online communities to find connection and stability. The friendships she forged during that time got her through awkward and often-painful teen years. Little did she know this would become her entire career, sending her around the world to help others forge relationships like the ones she had created.
Today, Carrie is a consultant, author, strategist, and entrepreneur. She is the co-author of Building Brand Communities with Charles Vogl, a book that synthesizes the work necessary for community success. Her work influences the world’s leading brand communities including the American Medical Association, Buffer, Patreon, Google, and DoSomething.org. Together these brands connect well over 100 million people worldwide.
Carrie served as Founding Partner and COO of CMX until 2017. CMX (acquired by Bevy Labs in 2019) provides training, events, and programs for community builders around the world. It now boasts a 20,000-person and growing membership. With CMX, Jones trained teams at Google, Facebook, and community leaders within Salesforce, Airbnb, ADP, Discovery Channel, and other firms.
Her writing on communities has appeared in Venture Beat, The Next Web, and First Round Review. She also writes a monthly column for CMS Wire and contributed regularly to CMX’s online publication from 2014-2017. She has a B.A. from UCLA in both English and Mass Communication. She is currently pursuing her M.A. in Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she studies online leadership communication.
Notable SPEAKING and WRITING:
"Top Expert to Follow in Community Management" 2017 by Salesforce
Speaker, Seattle Interactive Conference and Facebook Communities Summit 2017
Author, The CMX Guide to Community Platforms, 1st and 2nd Edition
Published Research, The 2017 Guide to Community Value and Metrics
Columnist, CMS Wire: Community Management