Greetings fellow coworkers,
As a result of the coworking space owners meetup in LA in October, a small group of folks volunteered to work on efforts surrounding the topic of “Awareness.” The small group grew bigger thanks to many of you who stepped up to volunteer as a part of the Coworking Awareness Team.
In LA, we determined that our first task as a group would be to work on building a great contact database that can help tell the best stories about coworking. So often the attention of the media is drawn to the boring aspects of what we do: the stuff, the physical space, or the number of spaces around the world. We want to help the press tell the awesome stories about coworking: how members interact, how coworking improves quality of life, and the cultural impacts of coworking communities. We want to help talk about how coworking makes an impact, not how awesome it is that we share a WiFi connection.
In order to do this, we need all coworking spaces to start sharing their best stories! We’ve created a very basic form to get started sharing. You’ll be asked to categorize your story, give us a very brief synopsis, and let us know who to contact for more information. Your stories will then be shared in two helpful ways:
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Passing your stories along to inquiries that come through a press contact form, which we’re getting up on coworking.com pronto. The idea is simple: someone wants to write a story about coworking, drops us a message, and we direct them to talk to the storytellers. We don’t tell your story for you, we just connect the storytellers to YOU.
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Posting the “freshest” synopses publicly as an organized PDF on the front of coworking.com for anyone to see and follow-up on. As long as the stories keep coming in, we’ll keep rotating the stories shared with you all. So if you’re looking to post a great story on the coworking blog, you immediately have a few folks you can follow-up with to enhance what you’re writing about. We hope it will be inspiration for all of us to keep telling our stories with the world (such as via the global coworking blog!!)
To clarify, the goal of this form is not to collect FULL stories, it’s to give a quick synopsis so that someone will be inspired to follow-up with you and hear the full story. We do not want to be the keepers of the stories - we want to help connect the writers with the best stories out there. Please know that the Awareness Team will be sure to keep fairness, fun, and thoughtfulness in mind when handling all of the info shared.
Ready to share something awesome that happened in your coworking space? Head HERE to the form.
If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me personally. We’re just getting started and I’m sure we’ll be learning a ton along the way. If you want to help out at all, please head to the Coworking Awareness Team google group and join in the conversation. Our next exciting steps are going to be to work on keeping this great databased organized, as well as to create a “tips sheet” for how to talk with the press. It’s not always as easy as it sounds (speaking from a LOT of experiences I wish I could have prevented!).
Thanks, everyone!
Susan
PS - Awareness team, if I missed anything, please chime in!
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Office Nomads
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