Cowork Frederick has been considering adding a community membership - one that does not include any use of our coworking space, but are struggling with why someone would want such a thing. We want to position the membership correctly and make sure there is real value there before we starting signing people up.
Members of Cowork Frederick like the friendships they’ve built here and most of our members freely talk about how they are more successful, more productive, or just plain happier because of the other members in the community. That’s pretty cool, but it currently happens because they come here to work and are running into each other, getting to know each other. Because our members haven’t been interested, we don’t have a lot going on outside of people coming together to work. 80% of our members are married with children and, when they are not working, they want to be home with their families.
To those who have community (only) memberships - what sorts of things do you do to help those who don’t come into your space to work connect and get value from their membership?
We’ve just relaunched a lunch & learn series (members teaching members) and do a something social (networking without networking) each month. We’re also on the verge of launching a program that aims to bring leads to our freelance members. We have a Slack group, but it’s not very active. There are many, many Meetup groups and other ways people can find others of like-mind and connect free of charge. I can’t get my head around why someone pay us for a community membership.
Why would you say your community members pay you for their membership? What value do they get?
We are considering the same thing right now. I would be interested in hearing any results you learn of!
Thanks,
Liz
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On Friday, January 27, 2017 at 5:15:16 PM UTC-5, Julia Ferguson wrote:
Cowork Frederick has been considering adding a community membership - one that does not include any use of our coworking space, but are struggling with why someone would want such a thing. We want to position the membership correctly and make sure there is real value there before we starting signing people up.
Members of Cowork Frederick like the friendships they’ve built here and most of our members freely talk about how they are more successful, more productive, or just plain happier because of the other members in the community. That’s pretty cool, but it currently happens because they come here to work and are running into each other, getting to know each other. Because our members haven’t been interested, we don’t have a lot going on outside of people coming together to work. 80% of our members are married with children and, when they are not working, they want to be home with their families.
To those who have community (only) memberships - what sorts of things do you do to help those who don’t come into your space to work connect and get value from their membership?
We’ve just relaunched a lunch & learn series (members teaching members) and do a something social (networking without networking) each month. We’re also on the verge of launching a program that aims to bring leads to our freelance members. We have a Slack group, but it’s not very active. There are many, many Meetup groups and other ways people can find others of like-mind and connect free of charge. I can’t get my head around why someone pay us for a community membership.
Why would you say your community members pay you for their membership? What value do they get?
We have a very similar demographic to you in that most of our members are older, married with kids, and few can afford to live in the centre of Bath, so people commute in and out. This means that there is limited demand for memberships outside the 9-5. We looked at doing community memberships, partly because we do have people asking about the benefits we offer (discounts at local cafes and events etc) but we decided that it would end up diluting our community not enhancing it. I think an important thing to remember is that all communities are different, and we all approach coworking in the way that suits our community (both inside and outside the physical space) best. We were worried that we’d lose what makes our space special. However, we so worry about being seen as cliquey or elitist.
So, what we’ve done is turn the situation around. We’ve taken the approach that we should make ourselves more attractive for those who could enhance the community, and who can actually come here, but who aren’t able to do so (mostly due to cost). So we’ve done three things to address this
About a year ago we launched our ‘Friends of The Guild’ programme where we invited 20 local not for profits/charities to take us up on the offer of a free membership. This has been a huge success- not only do these organisations really benefit in terms of practical things like fast internet access, but they’ve embraced being members and have gained a new platform to share what they do with our other (paying) members. It’s really enriched our community, and we’ve found more events happening, more goodwill and an overall better sense of mission. The NFP’s also spend lots of money on room hire, which we didn’t plan, but they tell us they’d rather spend it with us than anywhere else (obv we give them max discount)
We realised that we have a very small but loyal subculture here of people working late, many of whom are second jobbers or on the side startups. We’ve decided to formalise this and are about to offer night owl memberships, at a very affordable price, so we can attract people who otherwise couldn’t afford to be here- particularly younger people, students, older people. We are discussing how much day time use to include as well, because we don’t want these night time members to be strangers.
We’ve identified some areas of diversity where we are lacking (and we’re a city of 80,000 mostly wealthy, mostly middle class, mostly white people so it’s not easy). We’re going to offer really juicy ‘getting started’ discounts to younger people, people who have just started a business, and return to work parents
We hope that this is a constructive way of enriching our community. I always have in the back of my mind Alex H’s words of wisdom- it’s all about net givers not net takers. We’re looking for more net givers, who will take a free/discount membership and give something back. That’s our best approach to building community outside our core rack rate paying members
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On Friday, 27 January 2017 22:15:16 UTC, Julia Ferguson wrote:
Cowork Frederick has been considering adding a community membership - one that does not include any use of our coworking space, but are struggling with why someone would want such a thing. We want to position the membership correctly and make sure there is real value there before we starting signing people up.
Members of Cowork Frederick like the friendships they’ve built here and most of our members freely talk about how they are more successful, more productive, or just plain happier because of the other members in the community. That’s pretty cool, but it currently happens because they come here to work and are running into each other, getting to know each other. Because our members haven’t been interested, we don’t have a lot going on outside of people coming together to work. 80% of our members are married with children and, when they are not working, they want to be home with their families.
To those who have community (only) memberships - what sorts of things do you do to help those who don’t come into your space to work connect and get value from their membership?
We’ve just relaunched a lunch & learn series (members teaching members) and do a something social (networking without networking) each month. We’re also on the verge of launching a program that aims to bring leads to our freelance members. We have a Slack group, but it’s not very active. There are many, many Meetup groups and other ways people can find others of like-mind and connect free of charge. I can’t get my head around why someone pay us for a community membership.
Why would you say your community members pay you for their membership? What value do they get?
Love the “Friends of” model, I might borrow some ideas from that! Do you have anything else about how you share that, or how you choose/reach out to the NFPs?
In addition to your point about net givers vs net takers, every time I’ve written or talked about our membership models, I’ve reminded people that we didn’t pull these numbers and models out of thin air…they were based on actual activity happening in our community where we saw potential (like your night owl membership).
All of our biggest successes came from letting things happen based on what we notice, rather than trying to force things to happen.
We have a very similar demographic to you in that most of our members are older, married with kids, and few can afford to live in the centre of Bath, so people commute in and out. This means that there is limited demand for memberships outside the 9-5. We looked at doing community memberships, partly because we do have people asking about the benefits we offer (discounts at local cafes and events etc) but we decided that it would end up diluting our community not enhancing it. I think an important thing to remember is that all communities are different, and we all approach coworking in the way that suits our community (both inside and outside the physical space) best. We were worried that we’d lose what makes our space special. However, we so worry about being seen as cliquey or elitist.
So, what we’ve done is turn the situation around. We’ve taken the approach that we should make ourselves more attractive for those who could enhance the community, and who can actually come here, but who aren’t able to do so (mostly due to cost). So we’ve done three things to address this
About a year ago we launched our ‘Friends of The Guild’ programme where we invited 20 local not for profits/charities to take us up on the offer of a free membership. This has been a huge success- not only do these organisations really benefit in terms of practical things like fast internet access, but they’ve embraced being members and have gained a new platform to share what they do with our other (paying) members. It’s really enriched our community, and we’ve found more events happening, more goodwill and an overall better sense of mission. The NFP’s also spend lots of money on room hire, which we didn’t plan, but they tell us they’d rather spend it with us than anywhere else (obv we give them max discount)
We realised that we have a very small but loyal subculture here of people working late, many of whom are second jobbers or on the side startups. We’ve decided to formalise this and are about to offer night owl memberships, at a very affordable price, so we can attract people who otherwise couldn’t afford to be here- particularly younger people, students, older people. We are discussing how much day time use to include as well, because we don’t want these night time members to be strangers.
We’ve identified some areas of diversity where we are lacking (and we’re a city of 80,000 mostly wealthy, mostly middle class, mostly white people so it’s not easy). We’re going to offer really juicy ‘getting started’ discounts to younger people, people who have just started a business, and return to work parents
We hope that this is a constructive way of enriching our community. I always have in the back of my mind Alex H’s words of wisdom- it’s all about net givers not net takers. We’re looking for more net givers, who will take a free/discount membership and give something back. That’s our best approach to building community outside our core rack rate paying members
On Friday, 27 January 2017 22:15:16 UTC, Julia Ferguson wrote:
Cowork Frederick has been considering adding a community membership - one that does not include any use of our coworking space, but are struggling with why someone would want such a thing. We want to position the membership correctly and make sure there is real value there before we starting signing people up.
Members of Cowork Frederick like the friendships they’ve built here and most of our members freely talk about how they are more successful, more productive, or just plain happier because of the other members in the community. That’s pretty cool, but it currently happens because they come here to work and are running into each other, getting to know each other. Because our members haven’t been interested, we don’t have a lot going on outside of people coming together to work. 80% of our members are married with children and, when they are not working, they want to be home with their families.
To those who have community (only) memberships - what sorts of things do you do to help those who don’t come into your space to work connect and get value from their membership?
We’ve just relaunched a lunch & learn series (members teaching members) and do a something social (networking without networking) each month. We’re also on the verge of launching a program that aims to bring leads to our freelance members. We have a Slack group, but it’s not very active. There are many, many Meetup groups and other ways people can find others of like-mind and connect free of charge. I can’t get my head around why someone pay us for a community membership.
Why would you say your community members pay you for their membership? What value do they get?
I too would be very interested in learning about how you identified and invited the 20 non-profits for you “Friends of” program. I look forward to learning more.
On Tuesday, January 31, 2017 at 2:50:07 AM UTC-8, Tom Lewis wrote:
We have a very similar demographic to you in that most of our members are older, married with kids, and few can afford to live in the centre of Bath, so people commute in and out. This means that there is limited demand for memberships outside the 9-5. We looked at doing community memberships, partly because we do have people asking about the benefits we offer (discounts at local cafes and events etc) but we decided that it would end up diluting our community not enhancing it. I think an important thing to remember is that all communities are different, and we all approach coworking in the way that suits our community (both inside and outside the physical space) best. We were worried that we’d lose what makes our space special. However, we so worry about being seen as cliquey or elitist.
So, what we’ve done is turn the situation around. We’ve taken the approach that we should make ourselves more attractive for those who could enhance the community, and who can actually come here, but who aren’t able to do so (mostly due to cost). So we’ve done three things to address this
About a year ago we launched our ‘Friends of The Guild’ programme where we invited 20 local not for profits/charities to take us up on the offer of a free membership. This has been a huge success- not only do these organisations really benefit in terms of practical things like fast internet access, but they’ve embraced being members and have gained a new platform to share what they do with our other (paying) members. It’s really enriched our community, and we’ve found more events happening, more goodwill and an overall better sense of mission. The NFP’s also spend lots of money on room hire, which we didn’t plan, but they tell us they’d rather spend it with us than anywhere else (obv we give them max discount)
We realised that we have a very small but loyal subculture here of people working late, many of whom are second jobbers or on the side startups. We’ve decided to formalise this and are about to offer night owl memberships, at a very affordable price, so we can attract people who otherwise couldn’t afford to be here- particularly younger people, students, older people. We are discussing how much day time use to include as well, because we don’t want these night time members to be strangers.
We’ve identified some areas of diversity where we are lacking (and we’re a city of 80,000 mostly wealthy, mostly middle class, mostly white people so it’s not easy). We’re going to offer really juicy ‘getting started’ discounts to younger people, people who have just started a business, and return to work parents
We hope that this is a constructive way of enriching our community. I always have in the back of my mind Alex H’s words of wisdom- it’s all about net givers not net takers. We’re looking for more net givers, who will take a free/discount membership and give something back. That’s our best approach to building community outside our core rack rate paying members
On Friday, 27 January 2017 22:15:16 UTC, Julia Ferguson wrote:
Cowork Frederick has been considering adding a community membership - one that does not include any use of our coworking space, but are struggling with why someone would want such a thing. We want to position the membership correctly and make sure there is real value there before we starting signing people up.
Members of Cowork Frederick like the friendships they’ve built here and most of our members freely talk about how they are more successful, more productive, or just plain happier because of the other members in the community. That’s pretty cool, but it currently happens because they come here to work and are running into each other, getting to know each other. Because our members haven’t been interested, we don’t have a lot going on outside of people coming together to work. 80% of our members are married with children and, when they are not working, they want to be home with their families.
To those who have community (only) memberships - what sorts of things do you do to help those who don’t come into your space to work connect and get value from their membership?
We’ve just relaunched a lunch & learn series (members teaching members) and do a something social (networking without networking) each month. We’re also on the verge of launching a program that aims to bring leads to our freelance members. We have a Slack group, but it’s not very active. There are many, many Meetup groups and other ways people can find others of like-mind and connect free of charge. I can’t get my head around why someone pay us for a community membership.
Why would you say your community members pay you for their membership? What value do they get?
