Using actions, not words, to build a workspace community

• Community is far too nuanced a concept to simply use checklists to create. No two workspaces are the same, and no two workspace communities would ever require the same set of features. 
• Events, perks, newsletters, surveys, forms and much more need to be part of your community management software, and be tailored to your community.
• Members directories offer the best way for like-minded individuals to come together and forge strong connections that constitute the backbone of any good community.
  

When it comes to community building, there’s no shortage of theory within the workspace industry — from reports to guides and even whitepapers — that discuss the best approaches to bringing people together.

While this is certainly academically useful and helps establish the far-reaching benefits of strengthening ties between individuals, workspaces rarely get the balance right in practice. 

For example, one recent article by a property management system goes over all the basic steps, as follows:

• Community building is important because it allows like-minded people to come together to share ideas and experiences for their professional growth – CHECK ✅
• Engage your community effectively and create an effective culture for your workspace that helps facilitate connections – CHECK ✅
• Get a community manager to curate, attract, retain and grow your community – CHECK ✅
• Create events to bring people together, talk to them with MailChimp, run your social media on Hootsuite, do your marketing with Hubspot, and design your campaigns with Canva – CHECK, Check and check ✅

When you get to the end of this list, will you have established a thriving workspace community? The chances are, some aspects that you imagined working successfully will not have materialised as expected. Others will have worked too well, but only for a handful of members, leaving out the rest.

And that’s alright – community is far too nuanced a concept to simply use checklists to create. It works much better in person, than on paper, and has to be designed as such.

No two spaces are the same.

When Nexudus started, it very became obvious to us that no two workspaces would ever be the same, and no two workspace communities would ever require the same set of features.

Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, we set out to build as much customisation into our community features as possible. The first, and perhaps the most essential, place to confirm this was with events.

Hyper-personalised events.

We tailored our platform to allow for two or more ticket types to be created for the same event. Think of this as an early bird versus regular attendee distinction. It allowed us to give space operators the chance to determine event engagement from the very beginning and get a chance to learn about what types of events would resonate best with the community they were trying to build at their workspace.

Set up physical and virtual events with personalised ticketing.

Ticketing features aren’t the only important way to add nuance to your community events. Being able to open events up to all contacts within your CRM, or make them exclusive for members, is another useful element to understanding the pockets of like-minded individuals that come together in your spaces, and helping establish stronger ties between them.

Being able to push these events straight onto your members’ phones, set up QR codes for them for streamlined entry and even organise event-follow-up communications from within the same system? Well, that’s just good community-building practice. During the lockdown, we were able to move all these event functionality to a virtual format, without losing any nuance, with a native Zoom integration.

Perks to perk up engagement. 

Loyalty should not go unnoticed. When members engage with your space, that engagement data should become one of the most valuable tools within your space management arsenal.

This data can be used not just to understand how customers engage with your services, but to build exclusive perks for them within your operational software. Since 2012, we’ve carefully utilised space usage data to develop a perks feature that you can customise to include all customers, specific members, or even members on specific types of plans.

When it comes to creating these perks – whether its discounts within your store, a free mochi with their morning coffee, or even the chance to attend a new art installation within your space for free – we’ve set up tools that ensure your imagination is the limit!

Customise perks and perk availability from start to finish.

Enhanced engagement  (feat. discussions, articles and newsletters).

A community must, by its very nature, communicate. An efficient communication strategy is one thing, but if you don’t provide a set of communication tools to each member within your space, you’re missing out on enabling the engagement necessary to build ties.

It’s not enough to simply send articles to members keeping them updated on changes to their space. Yes, this is essential, but any space worth its salt should go above and beyond to add member discussion boards, newsletter features and even allow access to member directories across all its locations, to help individuals come together with as little friction as possible.

Our platform offers all the features mentioned above, but again, adds a layer of hyper-personalisation to each. Members can book calls and meetings with each other from within the directories they access. They can come together on discussion boards (and even customise them).

This customisation cannot be limited to just members or operators – it must extend across both. For example, when setting up newsletters, operators can select from several templates built right into the platform, or create their own templates from scratch with a wide range of tools at their disposal.

Create newsletters with pre-defined templates or build your own.

We’ve only just scratched the surface of our community features in this piece. Space owners and operators can create custom forms, surveys, virtual rooms, discussion boards, FAQ sections and courses – each of which has enough customisation to warrant a blog of its own.

Explore our solutions page for a full list of community-driven functionality we offer on our platform. You can also dive into our knowledge base to better understand the research and development we put into every community feature. Thanks for reading.