Actions to grow our community and membership

Product circle Business development
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as a collective we are working hard to improve meet.coop in terms of the services we offer and the way we organise ourselves. That’s discussed elsewhere in this forum :wink: Fact is that this work makes sense only if we manage to do this for sufficient people. User members bring in memberships fees that help us to pay compensations to the operational members in the circles. While we made a big step forward in these first 1,5 years, we still have to improve and grow a lot. Let’s say that we should grow tenfold to be both better in what we do and be able to pay fair wages. It’s just a rough estimate, but it gives us some orientation, yes?

So how could we do that? I think together we have loads of good ideas and maybe we could share and prioritise a few good ones to get to work on together. Here come a few ideas that have been mentioned over time or we could learn from other collectives - please add and comment.

  1. each one of us bring in some friends and contacts
    tell people around you about meetcoop and ask them who to talk to in their organisation or collective so they try out and hopefully move towards our ethical service for online meetings. It’ll cost some energy but it’s a great help. Try it once a week for a a few weeks? What can we as a collective do to recognise your effort?

  2. write a post, publish on your blog or website and mention it on social networks, tag it #meetcoop
    with the twitter account @MeetDotCoop we’ll retweet for sure!
    @osb wrote a great piece at the Open.coop blog; myself I wrote a post at the Free Knowledge Institute’s website. I’m sure I forgot a few others.

  3. get an external writer or journalist to write about us
    Of the global internet population, only a tiny tiny fraction knows of our existence. That’s a shame! Ray from @Shareable wrote a great piece about us. Rebecca Harvey wrote a great piece in the Coop News: “Democracy you’re on mute: a coop alternative to Zoom”

  4. curate a “newsletter” or community update
    not everybody here in our community is following everything that is happening on the forum. People are busy and simply not following all category spaces. What if we curated this and would select a subset of the most interesting posts/threads and publish them in the (or a new) announcement channel (that everyone is by default subscribed to)? That’d be some kind of newsletter, through the forum. As long as we have interesting stuff going on here, it should be little work to curate that and make such summary post every now and then.

5 prepare outreach material for the community to post and reuse
this could be written articles, banners, presentation slides, … We have some stuff, could improve it.

  1. present meetcoop at events
    everyone can do this in his/her circles, networks. Many of us have done so. For example @dvdjaco presented meetcoop at the matrix.org “open tech will save us” event in October 2020, @osb and @benhylau presented “Software as a Service as a Cooperative” with great insights about the challenges to build an initiative like ours.

  2. organise events that use meetcoop as a service for the online part.
    For example Amsterdam City did a great conference programme in 2021 hosted at dedicated meetcoop servers. That helped to get many people aware of meetcoop. Many others did, like Biook with the Open Science conference, The Photography Gallery and Winterthur Museum etc. This adds both revenue to pay for work and has a great viral effect. Should we restart listing events that might want to go ethical?

  3. organise community sessions
    We could organise community meetings where members and newcomers can join in, get to know the project and engage in peer learning, with an important offers and wants part. Inside our community is great knowledge about meetcoop and many members have developed their ways of using the BigBlueBlutton rooms, like Resonate’s impressive methodology for running online assemblies, as if sitting around a camp fire and have participants self-organise efficiently. In any case, as long as we have at least a few people willing to engage, a session could go through. Low overhead, say every second Thursday of the month at 15h CET, in an open community room, with some basic methodologies for self-organisation. @mikemh and myself sign up for sure.

These ideas aren’t at all new, some require more effort than others. Thoughts? What can we and what could you do? We have work to do :wink:

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has there been any mention in Stir to Action? Just wondering - i’m unlikely to write anything myself, but good to identify opportunities.

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good idea, @leedscath! I love Stir, am a subscriber myself. Should we contact Jonny Gordon-Farleigh or do you have other contacts there? Any help is appreciated.

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I’m in touch with Jonny, so I can check in whether there’s a theme in the next issues to frame whatever gets written. But I want to reiterate that article-writing isn’t my strong point, so I’d want to know that someone was taking it on (also that there are folks willing to copy edit or comment on any draft) before having that conversation.

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In my experience running a small e-commerce platform, one of the most effective strategies has been leveraging the power of word-of-mouth and community engagement. Encouraging existing members to bring in their contacts and share their positive experiences can be very powerful. Also, writing posts and leveraging social media is a great way to increase visibility.

Another critical aspect is understanding the market and your competitors. I’ve used AdSpy software to analyze my competitors’ advertising strategies in my business. This has given me valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t, allowing me to adapt and improve my advertising campaigns. It helps research and discover what your competitors are doing, which can be a game-changer for a growing business or community. They even offer a free trial, so it’s accessible for those just starting to explore these strategies.