Independents Hall Philadelphia

IndyHall 201: How IndyHall Communicates with it’s Community

Filed under: FAQs, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201, coworking

This week, I got an e-mail from Julie Z. Rosenberg of the Brooklyn Creative League in Park Slope, asking about our newsletter. First off, I always appreciate when people reach out to others for a hand as well as Julie did, as she a great job by asking specific questions and keeping her message brief.

I decided that it could be valuable to share what I shared with her on the blog for others, for future reference and posterity.

Specifically, Julie was asking about format, frequency, content, and distribution.

The rest of this post contains a modified version of my response to her.

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When IndyHall began as a community, and didn’t have a space yet, we operated almost entirely out of a public google group (now defunct), and on Twitter. Once we had a space though (beginning in mid-late 2007), there became a need for public, and semi-private correspondence to happen on different channels. It didn’t make sense to bother everyone with office goings-on, but we also didn’t want people left out!

Right now, our communication stack looks like this, but we’re still experimenting and things change all the time.

Internal:

• We use Basecamp as a message board for all members. Everyone who’s on the roster can post messages to everyone else who is a member.
• We use Campfire as a real-time chat that’s mostly populated by members, but is also open to the public (http://campfire.indyhall.org)
• We still use Twitter a lot

External:

• Our blog (this thing you’re reading) has always been our first line of defense, along with Twitter.
• We’ve used Facebook and AnyVite for event RSVPs, and link them from blog posts and twitter. AnyVite rocks because it doesn’t require a login to RSVP, which Facebook does.
• At some point, we realized that not everyone is following Twitter (or their RSS reader) as religiously as they do e-mail, so a traditional e-mail redux would be valuable.

At this point, we’ve had to work ourselves into a bit of a production schedule to get one e-mail out every other week. One of our full time members, Stephen Winkler, has taken the reigns of the project and is in charge of organizing stories for the newsletter, rallying/drafting content. Dana, our office manager, supplies a couple of specific segments. Other community members have taken ownership of specific segments of the newsletter.

It’s finally gotten into a groove (I think we’re 4 editions in with an actual production timeline), and we’ve only missed the ship date once .

Bottom line is that we’ve found that no single channel is effective enough. We’re always morphing along with our community and trying to find the balance, and expect that the balance will always be changing!

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By the way, are you subscribed to our bi-weekly newsletter yet? It’s easy, just head to IndyHall.org if you’re not already on the site, and the sign up is on the left hand side of every page!