I'll spare you the oft-repeated but alas, tried and true "ask the community, build the community stuff" and try to give you some solid answers instead. My space is doing so well that sometimes I want to cry from the sheer joy of it. I have 30 members after 8 months in our itty bitty 1,100 sq. ft space.
Membership did not grow over the summer which was a little terrifying but once the temp dropped below 70 we got 11 new members in one week bringing us up to 30. I've been trying to analyze what caused the giant influx of new members and it has something to do with: -Recently, I announced at a big meeting of entrepreneurs that membership at Cohere is "exclusive." This wasn't something I ever thought I would announce but it's well known within our community that I "screen" new members before they are allowed to join. The screening is loose at best and based on intuition and feedback from the other members. Before, people would just pop in off the street so we had about a 40% success rate of them becoming members. Now it's closer to 65%. Nothing about how I do business has changed but the perception of the community has--for the better. Another successful event is combined with a recurring monthly art walk in our Old Town area where Cohere is located. We stay late, drink beer, eat pizza and listen to 80s music (we even got a sponsor to buy the food), socialize and then go out and look at art after. It works especially well when we debut a new local artist's work in our space. The events draw both members and non-members and even members of the other coworking space in town! Free coworking days or nights. These have been tremendous successful. I do them quarterly and they roughly coincide with Cohere's anniversary dates and I try to invite a micro-celebrity to each one in addition to asking them to speak with us informally about their businesses over lunch. We've had RedHeadWriting http://redheadwriting.com , Caligater http://caligater.com and Gwen Bell http://www.gwenbell.com/ (although, no one knew she was coming but they were excited that she was here!). Again and kind of surprisingly, these events have attracted coworkers from the other shared office space in town. Early on, I sponsored lots of different activities like LaidOffCamp, PodCamp (hosted in our space) and IgniteSpatial to help spread the word to my target markets. There's so much more than this but I hope these examples help! Angel On Nov 8, 12:17 pm, Chris <[email protected]> wrote: > I am currently an Intern at the Coin Loft a coworking space in > Wilmington, Delaware. I was just wondering if I could learn more > about how your business is doing. I was wondering if your business > was seasonal or you have a steady flow of coworkers all year round. > Also i was wondering if you have a marketing strategy for bringing in > new coworkers or how you market to the community in which you provide > for. I was wondering if you had any events in which you had a big > turn out for or events in which many people in your community enjoy. > Here at the Coin loft we are trying to re brand and make this place a > great community center for the city of Wilmington, De so any > information would help. Thank you very much for your time and i am > interested in hearing back from you. > Thanks -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.
