Slack for Coworking

[Gregory St. Fort]

Hey everyone! My name is Greg, I am the executive director of 100state, a 200+ member coworking community in Madison, WI. Has anyone used slack for internal communications with members? 

Also I have been following these discussions and wondered if anyone would be interested in joining a slack group about coworking. similar to this google group. 

- 

Gregory St. Fort

www.100state.com

[Cédric Bousmanne]

Hi Greg

Le mardi 15 sept. 2015 à 19:32, Gregory St. Fort <teck...@gmail.com> a écrit :

Hey everyone! My name is Greg, I am the executive director of 100state, a 200+ member coworking community in Madison, WI. Has anyone used slack for internal communications with members? 

​

​I'm planning to use it too, but our coworking space is not open yet. I'd be interested in having feedback too.

Also I have been following these discussions and wondered if anyone would be interested in joining a slack group about coworking. similar to this google group. 

​

​I would ! Please keep me informed 

- 

Gregory St. Fort

www.100state.com

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[Alex Hillman]

Slack has been a huge boon for our community. We've used online chat at various stages of our community, including before we had our own dedicated space. Slack is, hands down, the best we've ever had. 

With that said, it's important to remember that you're not going to get 100% participation. In my experience - not just with Indy Hall but other spaces I've worked with - you can expect 10-25% of your community to be active in Slack at any give time. 

It's a great way for members to connect, especially ones who aren't in the space every day. 60% of our members are in our space less than once a month, and Slack helps with that a LOT. 

We have over 60 member-generated channels, from #overheardatthehall to #music to #design to #devs to #happy-hour to #indyhall-arts to #photshopfriday. 

Last year we started an #indyhallops channel to open up some of the space-related operations discussion, and it's been an amazing way to show members what goes on "under the hood" and a great onramp for people who want to pitch in a little bit more. We still have a private #staffroom, too, but an incredible amount of things get handled in #indyhallops by members without our team even needing to get involved other than to say thank you.

At the end of the day, we think of Slack as a first class "gathering place", just like our coworking space. A lot of our members primarily interact with each other online. 

But since Slack only reaches a small % of the community, be careful about forgetting the people who aren't in Slack. Lots of messages get missed. Treating it like a formal announcement channel can lead to major miscommunications. We especially make it a point to remind members to share and connect outside of Slack as well, lest it become a disconnected silo from the rest of the community.

For what it's worth, Slack might be our most "active" place for conversations online but our email discussion list, powered by GroupBuzz, has 75%+ active participation. We combine the two - new GB posts actually get posted automatically into Slack - and have been able to keep the vast majority of our community in touch regardless of where they are. 

 Also I have been following these discussions and wondered if anyone would be interested in joining a slack group about coworking. similar to this google group. 

Some folks on this list have already started one of these! I've copied in Melissa Geissinger, who I think is modding among others. :)

-Alex

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The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.

Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com

Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast

[Tony Bacigalupo]

Hi Gregory & all! Invite yourself to the Coworking Leadership Slack group here: http://opencoworking.org/slack

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Projects: Open Coworking • Cotivation (read about it in Shareable!)

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[r...@workthefactory.com]

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3050294/innovation-by-design/slacks-workplace-revolution

[Gregory St. Fort]

thanks. This is awesome info. We did a launch for it an so far 50% of our members signed in 

[Sebastian Vela]

Gregory, 

We implemented SLack over a year ago here at Axis Space and it's actually one of the most used tools for community building as well as it has become for us a huge selling point. I definately recommend it. It has built an awesome digital community as well. 

[Elizabeth Trice]

We're just about to set up slack. I'd like to know how many channels/ what types people have found optimal.
Our current plan is:
1. General conversation
2. Official announcements
3. A private group for ambassadors (front desk volunteers) and managers with a central email that members can send issues to that would show up on the managers group.

We're also wondering if this will replace our private facebook group, which has fairly good usage (often 25 views/post)

We have 80 members, but only about half of those ate actively engaged.

[Alex Hillman]

I'd stay away from trying to use Slack as an announcement tool. It's more ephemeral and messages fly by and get buried pretty quickly. 

Email is still the best place for official announcements, we often mention a slack channel related to the announcement in the email for people who want to talk about it (#general by default, otherwise one of the specialized channels). 

I'd also recommend a casual channel or two, based around some known shared interests of your members. Once people see those kinds of channels they start to come up with more ideas of their own. Some great starter channels that lots of people can get involved in are #music (our channel ends up being a lot of YouTube music videos and soundcloud tracks), #podcasts (again, episode recommendations and episode discussions), #bookworms...and that's just a couple of them. Don't over plan it, the whole idea is to create places where people can talk about their non-work interests, and find out who shares them because that's where TRUST is built among community members. And if you over plan it, people don't get a chance to feel a sense of ownership over creating and moderating the rooms, which leads to the rooms dying quickly. 

Just a couple of casual seeds though and things can really start to take off!

Oh, and don't forget to update the slack settings for "default rooms when new members join" to include a couple of these special interest rooms. People can leave them if they end up not being interested but think of it a bit like a tour through a virtual space. Show them it's there, and then let them decide if they want to stay!

Good luck,

-Alex

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[Jacob Sayles]

I have a question about how this gets implemented.  Are people using the free version and adding everyone manually, or using a paid version and integrating the API with some automation tools?

[Alex Hillman]

The free version has worked great for us for over a year and a half.

Our team manually adds/removes people as part of our onboarding/cancellation workflows so it doesn't get forgotten. You don't need a paid version to get API access, but it's worth nothing that the invite API is "unofficial" so it could be removed at anytime. 

-Alex

------------------

The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.

Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com

Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast

[Bernhard Mehl]

Gregory,

We at KISI work a lot with coworking spaces. We recently published an instruction on how to build a Slack Doorbell for your shared space. Could be really helpful especially when you look into Slack anyways.

[Alex Ahom]

Hi everyone! thanks for the heads up on Slack. I'm totally new to this group as of yesterday (and slack) so I took your advice and signed up last night. I joined the Coworking Leadership Slack group and started one for my coworking space Shhared.

Hope to see more of you here and on in the slackosphere.

Alex

[Mohamed nawito]

Hi, 

I was looking for a list of websites that are listing coworking spaces all over the world as a directory, can anyone help ?

Best regards

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Mohamed Nawito 

Business Development Specialist 

+2-01000308541

[Aloma Loren]

We LOVE Slack, but like Alex mentioned, not everyone uses it so good to keep that in mind.

[Adolfo Taylhardat]

Hi all,

We are TamboWorks a Miami based corworking that opened a month ago. We have been using slack as a collaboration tool for admin purposes. We are not clear yet how to implement it for members as we have not yet mastered the tool but we are moving in that direction,  So any recommendation is more than welcome. 

Adolfo

[Jennifer Kready]

Perfect timing.  I have a 160+ member Facebook group re: coworking in our area. I know most don't use Slack and it's good to know that transitioning to a total Slack is not the best method. (I'm still a novice on it myself)

Jen

[Brian Childs]

5 Things we learned from implementing Slack:

1. When creating channels, let it happen organically at first
2. Too many channels can be overwhelming, just because of the current UI
3. If you are unsure, always verify who is in a channel before talking about them
4. It is a great place to collaborate with other service providers who handle the same contract
5. Everyone is using it

On Tuesday, September 15, 2015 at 10:32:11 AM UTC-7, Gregory St. Fort wrote:

[Elizabeth Trice]

Hi,

We just invited everyone to Slack a little over a month ago. We have 60 of 80 members on Slack, but we don't have a sense of how many people are actually using it, and I'm not sure if it's the right platform, or if so how to get it used.

Ideally, an internal communication system would:

1. Provide links to email, phone, photo and bios for each member

2. Have threads, so someone can follow specific topics without needing a new channel

3. Be seen by everyone (we're still resorting to emails for important announcements)

4. Make it easy for me to post new topics of interest or in-person discussions and know everyone has seen it without bombarding them with emails. 

Thoughts?

 

[Jonathan Markwell]

Hi Elizabeth,

It's brilliant that you've managed to get that many of your members into Slack already. It's not easy getting a 75% success rate on sending invitations out.

It's also really interesting to see your thoughts on what an ideal system would include. I see the challenge of getting people to use any new online system as very similar to that of getting people to use our coworking spaces in the first place. It can be quite a slow process. It took about a year for Slack to become the primary means of communication at The Skiff. And it still doesn't suite everyone.

GroupBuzz continues to be the best service we've ever used for threaded email based discussions: http://groupbuzz.io I can't imagine Slack ever getting to the stage where we don't need GroupBuzz too. GroupBuzz has created a brilliant on boarding process that anyone who is familiar with email can understand. It's much less of a leap for our less technically savvy members than Slack is. I also feel much more comfortable with all our community's most important discussions taking place there. Since GroupBuzz is bootstrapped (no evil venture capital funding) and owned by Alex Hillman we can trust that our data and our users are safe.

It would be fantastic for us as community founders to be able to communicate with all of our members via a single system with a single message. But I don't believe that's ever going to be possible. Our communities aren't drawn together by a common interest in a single way to communicate online. It feels like a bit too much to ask to expect them to all change all of their communication preferences to match each other. When we want to reach as many of our members as possible we send email broadcasts using tools like MailChimp, alongside announcements in Slack and GroupBuzz. Sometimes we'll even use posters in the space, SMS and/or a telephone call to make sure.

Here's a process I'd recommend for getting members into a new online system (I'm probably stealing some of this from GroupBuzz's onboarding process):

1) Identify 10 people who are super keen. Maybe they already use the system with another community.

2) Invite each of them into the new online system.

3) Ask them (one at a time) something specific that they could each do to introduce themselves or start a conversation.

4) Once some habits have formed with the first 10 using it regularly you'll probably have more people asking about joining it.

5) Brief the founding members to be particularly helpful to new joiners.

6) Invite the next 10 people in and give it a week or two for everyone adjust to the growing community.

7) Continue the process until you've added all your members.

Taking this approach means that most people joining will immediately see some activity that they can get involved with. But it should also make sure that you don't have a sudden spike in an off putting amount of activity that then fizzles out.

Once you have an active community in Slack it makes so many aspects of running a coworking space easier. Having a way to instantly message members turns out to be far more effective than email for many little things that can add up to be annoying.

Slack's integrations make it particularly useful. We're using one (that we made ourselves) to start solving the member directory problem you described: http://theskiff.coworker.directory/ It stays up to date with the profiles members maintain in Slack.

Hope this helps,

Jon

[Brian Crotty]

We at have a space co-up.de that spans two floors, so for us Slack serves as a way to to keep the communication stream flowing between the two floors. We also have a few integrations that work with Cobot.me.  First we use Cobot's add-on to automatically invite new members to our slack channel so that it isn't a second process.  Second, we give a little questionaire (including favorite funny gif) to our new members and that information is then funneled onto the Slack channel.  This gives an immediate welcome and entry for new members coming into the space.

Brian

[Alex Hillman]

<3 thanks for the GroupBuzz love, Jon. 

That onboarding process is right on the money, it's worked beautifully well for our communities that have transitioned from Facebook Groups, Google Groups, and other various platforms that weren't working for them. We've also worked with lots of our communities to help them get new online communities off the ground. 

I got a lot of questions at the Coworking Europe conf about how an online community fits into the picture of a coworking space, so if anyone else has questions about GroupBuzz, either shifting from another platform or starting an online community from scratch, let me know :)

-Alex

------------------

The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.

Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com

Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast

[Alex Linsker]

We just started a Slack channel. How do you set guidelines, and what do you do if one person is trying to make rules (or is coming across as a downer) that other people aren't into? Do you and members facilitate Slack online similarly to how you facilitate the physical coworking place? It sounds like it's primarily social chatty and that's the goal, or is it something else?

On Tuesday, September 15, 2015 at 10:32:11 AM UTC-7, Gregory St. Fort wrote:

[ucherry...@gmail.com]

Hi Alex,

There are introduction tutorial put up on the youtube channel of Slack. Spending about 15-20mins on that and I had all the info I needed. Beside that the UI is so user friendly, that you learn to navigate easily.

Regards,

Martins 
(upcoming Co-Working Project in GOA, India)