IndyHall 201: How IndyHall Communicates with it’s Community
Filed under: coworking, FAQs, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201
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!
IndyHall gets a Weekly E-Mail Newsletter
Filed under: Announcements, coworking, Events, From the Business Side, Independents Hall
After nearly 2 years of being open, IndyHall finally has a regular e-mail newsletter.
We haven’t really actively communicated in public via e-mail since the earliest days of IndyHall’s community building, when we had a rather active google group. Over time, that e-mail list fell into the typical form of most of the regional e-mail lists, being primarily job-postings.
Multi-way communication improved within the community despite the loss of the Google group, mostly thanks to Twitter. We no longer had the need to clutter up each others’ inboxes. We extended that with the relaunch of the IndyHall website, including an aggregate Twitter feed of IndyHall members on the home page.
Internally, the IndyHall community continues to use e-mail as an extension to BaseCamp, which we use for community discussions, to-d0s, sharing, ideas, announcements, etc. The problem with Basecamp is that it’s private, only available to IndyHall members.
And so, we move back to e-mail for announcements of weekly activity in the local tech, creative, independent, and entrepreneurial community. We’re using Newsberry, an email newsletter application built by Wildbit, who are active members of the IndyHall community. Our mailings will be weekly (well, that’s the idea anyway) and will include things like:
- Weekly Events. Events coming up soon, both IndyHall and throughout the Philly creative, tech, and entrepreneurial landscape. We can’t link to everything, that’s why we have a calendar (and anything we miss, Technically Phillyand Philly New Media Hub catch). Consider this your weekly “here’s what you’ll find IndyHall folks doing” redux.
- Event Tips. Events you should “save the date” for. Maybe not coming up this week, but coming up soon. Watch this spot if you like to be in the know BEFORE Technically Philly.
- New Member Welcomes! We’ve got new folks coming by every week, and sometimes it can be a few times to IndyHall before you catch someone’s name. We’re gonna try to put the kibosh on that problem by welcoming new community members every week in our newsletter.
- Event Recaps. Missed an event? Feeling guilty? Went to an event, think it was awesome? We’re going to start taking community submissions of short event recaps of local events so you can feel, or at least act, like you are in the know.
- In the News. Any mentions of IndyHall activities, or mentions of our community members, in press. Local or national. You’re getting ink, and we wanna spread the word.
The newsletter itself is meant to be collaborative from the perspective of content, meaning we are welcoming community contributions, tips, articles, ideas….really anything. We’re not pumping out newsletters for the sake of pumping out newsletters, we want to continue being a conduit for useful information for the community, and e-mail lets us reach a whole group of people who aren’t active participants in the social networks we usually use to share.
We’ll be posting a link on the blog to each weekly newsletter as well, for those of you who are more into RSS than you are into e-mail.
Check out this week’s inaugural newsletter!
So any thoughts, tips, article ideas, or even just kudos and high fives…drop us a line.
Oh, interested in subscribing? It couldn’t be easier. Toss your name and email into the form on the left column of any page of this site, or just visit the simple sign up form.
Hat tip to our friends at Caroline Collective in Houston, Texas for the inspiration on the execution of the newsletter.
