Standard Membership Types

[Jonathan Yankovich]

Hi All,

I'm working on adding more metadata to coworkingregistry.org and one of
the things we identified was having rates information for various
membership levels. Now, I KNOW that each facility has different
membership levels that offer different levels of service, access, etc,
but for the purposes of standardization and communication, I'd like to
identify some common membership levels.

Currently, when I look at most spaces' web sites, I see the following
levels:

1) Drop-In - A one-day pass to work while the space is open, like a
9-5 Hotdesk member but for one day. (No storage.)

2) Hotdesk 9-5 - Access to a desk/chair/resources every day that
the space has open hours. No key. Bring your laptop, take it when you
leave. "Leave no trace" coworking, unless a project locker is provided.

3) Hotdesk 24/7 - Access to a desk/chair/resources as well as a
key/card/code so you can access the space whenever you want.

4) Permadesk - Your own established desk with whatever storage is
provided. Commonly you might leave a laptop or desktop computer at your
desk. Permadesk generally includes 24/7 access (key/card/code).

There are generally higher "tenant" or "anchor tenant" types of members,
but these are usually custom/contract relationships and not something
that needs advertising. It might be valuable to have a "Looking for
anchor tenant" option on coworkingregistry, but saying more than that is
probably not necessary.

So what does everyone think of these 4 general levels of membership?

Are these good names, or are there better names for these things? Do
these names translate well into other languages?

Remember that the exact offering will vary from space to space in terms
of the hours of availability, additional amenities, access to
meetup/conference room spaces, and so on. I dont propose that we try to
agree on those, or get spaces to change what they offer. What I'm
trying to establish is a few general/base levels of membership that we
can use to talk about membership across spaces in a general way. For
example, everyone generally knows what a day-pass or drop-in is. Does
this make sense?

See you in Austin,

--
-Jonathan Yankovich @tronathan
Community Advocate, Madison Coworking
Preferred contact:
1. skype: jonathanyankovich
2. twitter: tronathan
3. gtalk/email: jonathan....@gmail.com
4. phone: (608) 513 2012
more info: http://coworkingregistry.org
more info: http://madisoncoworking.com
please follow @tronathan @coworkregistry @coworkmadison

[Joshua Marpet]

Jonathan, nice!

I do not run a coworking space currently.  :(  (It will kind of depend on where my next job/income stream is coming from, as where I open a co-working space.  Either Philly or DC area)

But I would like to offer a suggestion on names, if I may?

1 Drop-in - cool.

2. Daily Hotdesk - (hotdesk 9-5)

3. All Access Hotdesk

4. Permadesk or All Access Desk or somesuch.

Just my .02

Joshua Marpet

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[Jonathan Yankovich]

Great feedback, thanks.  I'm hoping that this covers the basics.. Here's an example of how these data will be used:

    https://img.skitch.com/20110227-maiyb8emhrtaebrea3c4nnfrms.png

We'll also need membership levels for hacker spaces.  I dont know much about general membership types for hacker spaces, so would love some feedback - What are one or two common membership types for these types of spaces? 

-Jonathan

[Jonathan Yankovich]

After some discussion with Chris from Sector67, we determiend that
coworkingregistry.org should probably not try to supoort hacker
spaces, since hacker spaces have a great directory at http://hackerspaces.org
. Here are a few sample listings of the big ones:

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/HacDC
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Noisebridge
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/I3_Detroit
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/NYC_Resistor

If a hacker space wants to get involved with or provide coworking,
they can add membership levels that match the generally accepted
standards for coworking membership levels. Keepting coreg simple and
focused on coworking will make it a more effective tool for our
primary audience, for now. (If/when coreg grows into the Open
Coworking Library, we may want to add support for hacker spaces.)

Still need to define good general membership level names for
coworking.

-J

[Joshua Marpet]

If you need any other info on hackerspaces, let me know.  I'm connected with several, and active in the hacker community.  I speak at events, organize events, attend metric crap-tons of them, etc  :)

Joshua Marpet

@quadling

908-916-7764

[Angel Kwiatkowski]

Looks like great progress is being made. That's awesome! I'd actually
prefer to not have options from which to pick for membership levels.
These types of check boxes are what frustrate the heck out of me with
current desk sharing sites. It might make more sense to let people
input $ranges or similar OR just have that field link out to the
space's rates page. Most sites I've seen have a page that lists their
different membership levels. Also, it's one fewer place that space
owners have to maintain their data. I think I've changed my membership
offerings at least 3 times in the past year (not saying that's a great
biz practice) but it was my reality as I tried to respond to market
needs.

I'd concentrate data collection around the types of people/
personalities in the community and less on the price. People hardly
ever inquire first about price. They inquire about people and
community first----almost always....even if they aren't aware that's
what they're doing. Just looking at my analytics tells me that people
hit and stay longer on the pages that have faces on them. They almost
always spend the least amount of time on and bounce off the membership
rate page as if it's the last page they visit on the site.
-Angel

On Feb 26, 5:12 pm, Jonathan Yankovich <jonathan.yankov...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 3. gtalk/email: jonathan.yankov...@gmail.com

[Jeannine]

+1 to Angel, I have recently taken my standard pricing down from my
website as nobody actually wants the "standard package" except drop
ins. I stil have membership levels, but they are more about what the
options are than about how much it costs.

And I do indeed have more than enough pages to change if the pricing
changes. Lately unless it's mandatory I just say "call me".

Jeannine

[Alex Hillman]

This is an interesting conversation - I've seen a lot of pricepoint replication as new spaces emerge. That is to say, people pick price points based on what other spaces charge rather than what their members (or potential members) value. This affects price points, functional offerings, locations, and more.

I'm very interested in how people are coming to develop their membership models and their price points. 

For reference, we developed ours based on a blend of inspiration from a variety of sources, but almost all were introspected from our community's interests. We continued to offer the same 3 levels - basic, lite, and full time - along with drop-in (which almost always turns into a basic membership for us) for the last 3 and a half years, only recently adding one more level called a "Six Pack" after a number of our basic members were coming in ~6 times a month and we wanted to cut down on paperwork for them and for us. 

I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago on finding markets/audiences before building a business (the "build the community first" approach for other businesses, essentially). 

It covers a lot of ground but it also covers where price points come from when there isn't a relevant point of reference to copy.

Obviously the slides miss out on the rest of the content context, but if anyone sees anything particularly interesting and wants to know more about what it means, I'd be happy to answer any questions.

http://www.slideshare.net/alexknowshtml/competitive-analysis-finding-a-market-fit-from-the-start

-Alex

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

[Jeannine]

Alex, I may be forced to put this in my LinkedIn profile and my web
page just to share with the world your slide # 36 and 40.

Maybe I will have a poster made of # 36 and put it up when I go speak
to starter's groups.

I agree with you, there is a remarkable coincidence of pricing right
across the Netherlands. However I will say that the pricing -- if you
bring it down to square meterage and cost per member -- is pretty much
spot on, nobody's pulling down a huge profit margin or anything. I
figured my pricing four different ways to get the spread and the
spread was not all that big. Which made it easier, of course.

But as people are coming in here -- and as you know I am a total tyro
-- I find that they are far more creative than I am. I recently had a
discussion with a web shop owner, they want to have a physical shop
once a quarter or so, a sort of bytes back to bricks thing. But not
all the time, just occasionally. And the open markets here are not
the right fit for them, which leaves them me or a shop-in-shop concept
somewhere as options.

Well, where does that fit in?

I have a group of alternative medicing folks who want to book the
space together, so they can do acupressure and massage and so forth in
a group once a week and bring their clients together. Going to talk
with them after carnaval (no one is doing business in the south of
Holland right now, everybody is getting ready for carnaval), it's
surely community but they want to reserve the space.

Not really fitting into the options described above, nope.

I even heard recently from a bunch of people -- the only thing they
have in common is that they want to have their dogs at work. I said
as long as the dogs get on it's okay with me. So we may be declaring
dog day afternoon every Thursday pretty soon.

Haven't decided quite what to do if the hookers show up wanting to
cowork, lol. But the regs on that front will probably make it
impossible and nobody has asked me yet, alas. Always wanted to run a
brothrel to be honest.

I have a small space in a small town and so I expected to be
flexible. But these guys are a lot cleverer than me, here I was
thinking about desks and things.

Anyway, on pricing: First I looked at what everybody else was doing.
Then I looked at a per square meter thingie based on the spreadsheet
which is floating around here somewhere. Then I looked at relative
value to the members based on what was available in the market,
including working at home. And finally, well, the truth is, I have to
visualize everything because I am slow on the uptake. So I got poker
chips which represented the smallest unit of service I could provide
and figured out how many of those I needed to run the space. Then I
worked out the exchange of chips just as you do when playing poker.

Those prices came out very close to each other.

But now what I do is meet with people, and chat with them, talk to
them about what they want and how they want it and how long they want
it and then I send them a quote. Usually it is based on the poker
chip model.

Jeannine

On Feb 27, 9:32 pm, Alex Hillman <dangerouslyawes...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is an interesting conversation - I've seen a lot of pricepoint
> replication as new spaces emerge. That is to say, people pick price points
> based on what other spaces charge rather than what their members (or
> potential members) value. This affects price points, functional offerings,
> locations, and more.
>
> I'm very interested in how people are coming to develop their membership
> models and their price points.
>
> For reference, we developed ours based on a blend of inspiration from a
> variety of sources, but almost all were introspected from our community's
> interests. We continued to offer the same 3 levels - basic, lite, and full
> time - along with drop-in (which almost always turns into a basic membership
> for us) for the last 3 and a half years, only recently adding one more level
> called a "Six Pack" after a number of our basic members were coming in ~6
> times a month and we wanted to cut down on paperwork for them and for us.
>
> I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago on finding markets/audiences
> before building a business (the "build the community first" approach for
> other businesses, essentially).
>
> It covers a lot of ground but it also covers where price points come from
> when there isn't a relevant point of reference to copy.
>
> Obviously the slides miss out on the rest of the content context, but if
> anyone sees anything particularly interesting and wants to know more about
> what it means, I'd be happy to answer any questions.
>

> http://www.slideshare.net/alexknowshtml/competitive-analysis-finding-...

>
> -Alex
>
> /ah
> indyhall.org
> coworking in philadelphia
>

[Jacob Sayles]

Jonathan,

I caution against any form of standardization.  I know it makes it easier for the software, but this is a community of individuals that can't even decide on the definition of coworking.  We each know it in our hearts, and that is enough.  I'm trying to summarize quickly for the sake of fitting this into an email but that right there is a crucial factor in how this community sticks together.  It's a subtle nuance that can be really difficult to wrap your head around but it's critically important.  That might sound like something that is difficult to work with but it is also really easy to make solutions with this in mind if you don't try to fight it.  Our current tools, the google group and the wiki page, are all-inclusive and neutral and no one has to conform to any standard to participate.  I've spent a lot of time studying why these tools work for us, despite all the drawbacks people love to debate.  

Again, it's really tricky for me to explain this via email and I look forward to talking about this more over beers in Austin.  Am I just being cryptic here or does this make sense to people?  Anyone care to paraphrase what I'm trying to get at here?  

Jacob

---
Office Nomads - Individuality without Isolation
http://www.officenomads.com -  (206) 323-6500

[ch...@thecreativespace.ca]

Our 2cents. One size fits all does not fit coworking. When it comes to
membership costs there are Different models, different overheads,
different cultures, different economy, diffferent values, etc. Even when
it comes to naming levels. Hotdesk vs Flexdex, and so on. Make the
fields fillinable and you'll find more adapters.

Chad
The Creative Space
Barrie, Ontario, Canada
Www.thecreativespace.ca

[Moseley Exchange]

Hi All

for what its worth - here is a link to our membership types and
charges :-

http://moseleyexchange.com/membership_options/

We have the following mix: 10% Friends; 30% drop-in; 20% regular; 40%
Max

James Rock


On Feb 27, 12:12 am, Jonathan Yankovich <jonathan.yankov...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 3. gtalk/email: jonathan.yankov...@gmail.com

[Joel Haasnoot]

> "Make the fields fillinable and you'll find more adapters."

I'm all with you on that from the perspective of coworking spaces.
However, it's painfully hard software-wise to compare dissimilar
options.

I'm developer for a booking portal for coworking spaces, and we
decided to standardise on workspace categories (i.e "open
workspace"/desk, "closed workspace"/an office, or "meeting rooms" of
various sizes). This makes price comparisons between different spaces
much much easier, and per category spaces can still specify the
facilities that are available to that category of workspace. If you
allow spaces to provide their own categories it becomes very
complicated very quickly, and it's almost impossible to compare price
because of the dissimilarity of what's offered.

I'd stick with a couple of standardized options for the
coworkregistry, or risk not having a good comparison tool.

Joel Haasnoot
Developer

[Jeannine]

I was about to mention Deskbookers.nl, and you beat me to it. Here's
the thing: there are several different groups looking for a coworking
space. One, and the one that is the easiest to serve from a portal
perspective, is the mobile worker who wants a drop in desk or the
folks who want a room for a meeting or a workshop. They are the early
adopters and they are the ones most likely to use a portal. But
unless you are Seats2meet (which incidentally mostly does not use
portals) or easyoffice (ditto) they are not the majority of most
coworking spaces' business.

I like Frank a lot and I like Desbookers a lot also. But other than
as a way to get the name of your space under the eyes of many people,
such a portal isn't particularly helpful in terms of long term
relationships (which is what the core business is, at least for a lot
of us). It encourages the perception of coworking as a place where
people drop in for one day, pay as little as possible, and then go
away. This in turn encourages a race to the bottom in which everybody
is trying to exploit everybody else as much as possible. This would
be something closer to De Oude Onzin than it is to Het Nieuwe Werken.

Worksnug, on the other hand (the webpage and the app) has scales for
number of power outlets, number of dataports, refreshements available,
community, noise level, and formal areas, as well as whether
membership is required. Now, worksnug is not about booking, it is
about locating. But the Coworking Registry is also not about booking
but about locating. So I don't think I (myself) would be willing to
subsume it all to a question of price per desk, which is what I think
the proposed grid does. It's not a booking site.

Jeannine

> >>http://www.officenomads.com-  (206) 323-6500

> >>> 3. gtalk/email: jonathan.yankov...@gmail.com

[Alex Hillman]

Agreed.

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

[Angel Kwiatkowski]

Oddly enough, I based a lot of my membership pricing on the typical
amount of money people were spending on food/drink to be at a cafe all
day. Generally, if they were responsible cafe patrons, they would
spend $10 for 4 hours and $20 to sit there all day. I also did a
regressive (is that even a word?) where membership would become less
and less expensive per day the more and more days you are here in a
month.
-Angel

On Feb 28, 8:26 am, Alex Hillman <dangerouslyawes...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Agreed.
>
> /ah
> indyhall.org
> coworking in philadelphia
>

[Alex Hillman]

This is a great technique for pricing in general: look at what your desired customers already spend money on, reverse engineer that to understand how they perceive value, and base your price points on that.

There's nothing worse than having something great to sell to an audience who isn't interested in spending money in the first place. 

-Alex

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

[Jacob Sayles]

Precisely.  It's easy to get lost in what the software can do, but it's important to carefully consider what the software should, or shouldn't do.  And let's not all conform to the software and lose all our beautiful differences. 

Jacob

---
Office Nomads - Individuality without Isolation
http://www.officenomads.com -  (206) 323-6500

[Jessica Hulse]

That's how I approached it as well Angel, though I think your prices are a bit more generous than mine. I also made it so that either two of my lowest memberships or one of my 10days/month (the two most popular memberships I'm assuming) would cover my monthly expenses so I wouldn't feel stressed to fill the space and have to focus on members, but can take my time and build that community as I did not "build the community" first and I wanted to give myself time to focus on that. I'm open to adjusting prices as the community forms and we figure out what memberships people find the most beneficial. 

Jessica

networkcoworkingspot

[Angel Kwiatkowski]

Earlier I mentioned that I adjusted some prices after opening. I
mainly culled some of the memberships that people NEVER bought. No
reason to clutter up the rates page if no one is interested. I'm also
open to custom pricing. For example, I don't offer any 3 day/week
plans but a new member really, really wanted that so I made it happen.
After a quick entry in Quickbooks, it's no trouble at all. I still
won't advertise that plan though b/c she's the only person in year who
has requested it. My point is, this kind of flexibility is impossible
to impart to potential coworkers on data entry driven websites...

> ...
>
> read more »

[Joel Haasnoot]

So maybe I was a little off on my first post. It really does matter
what your goal is: whether you primary focus is differentiating based
on price, or those looking for a community.
If you're after people who differentiate based on price, it's a lot
easier to define set plans. It makes the whole interface side simpler
for visitors, but does indeed not reflect the spread of coworking
facilities. Also as Jacob mentions: I too hate software that dictates
workflow versus the other way round. Plans are definitely a more
complicated thing business wise that types of workplaces or meeting
rooms
If you're just offering a table of plans for people to compare, for
people looking for somewhere to work and a community the approach
you're taking should be fine OP, but you might want to add
functionality in the future and create some sort of "search wizard",
a more detailed comparison, similar to for instance telecom plan
comparison sites out there, that compares several plans based on your
wishes (needs for certain facilities, days per month you'll need the
space, etc). One thing I'm always looking at is "will someone new to
the concept understand this table", it's a user experience exercise.

To give a bit of background to Jeanine's post, I'll just give the
quick spiel: I'm the developer and one of the partners at
Deskbookers.com, a (currently) Dutch portal connecting people looking
for a place to work with providers. We partner with coworking spaces
to rent out their workspaces and meeting rooms as they want, and
provide an easy way for people who are looking for a place to work to
book. The spaces get access to a booking system (for bookings from the
site, or not), can enter all their details, upload pictures, etc, and
handle payments and billing.

That said, the market for flexible office solutions in it's breadth is
quite large and fragmented: there's pure coworking communities, yet
also more commercial entities, to the large enterprise-focused firms
with large networks of offices. It's definitely a constant balance we
try to keep and look at. We launched in November, and we've got lots
of plans that we're working out. We are looking at ways to incorporate
memberships and make the site more community-oriented: there are
things in the pipeline.

Joel Haasnoot

[Jeannine]

Hi, Joel,

I don't think you were off, I think you were right: based on the grid
as proposed, the site is a way of comparing spaces in a location based
on price. That was my objection: I think there are enough of
those.

I do take your point; I have a great deal of sympathy for you and for
Jonathan, and for anybody who tries to develop an API of this nature.
It is indeed like trying to herd cats. Users want to compare things,
and spaces want to be compared but the comparison has to be based on
what people think is important. That is for the mobile workers mostly
the price of a drop in.

And possibly we should take this part of the conversation off list,
some parts of it may be unique to Holland. If so, somebody send up a
flare and I'll quit hijacking. But Holland is in many ways a great
place to try all this stuff out, there is a lot of experimentation
going on for many reasons not unique to it but more densely
experienced because of its nature.

At this moment if somebody sees my space on Deskbookers and opens a
new tab to find my webpage, contacts me directly and becomes a member
for life I have no practical way to pay you for that nor to even find
it out. If I ask them they will say they came through my web page.
They did, from their perspective. And I want to, I have zero interest
in participating in an economy of mutual exploitation. Not even when
it works out in my favor. Because the end does not justify the means;
in fact, the means chosen changes the result. The population of
mobile workers is it seems to me well served; the other populations
interested in shared office space solutions are very nearly not
served. There's no Funda for that.

Jeannine

> ...
>
> read more »

[Will Bennis]

I think Joel's point below is really important as it highlights two
opposing approaches that each have strong, but opposing, costs and
benefits: (1) From a data collection/systematic comparison point of
view, it's hard to beat set categories for coworking spaces. And as
there are more and more spaces, being able to systematically compare
them will become more and more valuable. (2) On the other hand, with
coworking spaces offering perhaps hundreds of different kinds of
memberships, to limit the categories to just a handful will clearly
limit the ability to compare in an unacceptable. There's no point in
limiting the categories if the majority of spaces won't be
represented. My space's membership options wouldn't fit into any I've
seen on any of the space listing sites (and that's understandable,
some of them might be a feature of less than 1% of coworking spaces;
but this might be the rule rather than the exception).

My thought is there might be a creative solution to both problems, not
to dissimilar from current calendar software that provides incredible
flexibility about recurring events and dates that meet almost
everyone's needs. Could we do something like that, where the user
defines each of their membership options, but with a set of pre-
existing fields that together allow us to cover all the variety? For
example:

Membership type 1:
Name
Cost
Days 1: Here with the option to either choose a certain number of
days or to choose particular days of the week

On Feb 28, 1:26 pm, Joel Haasnoot <joelhaasn...@gmail.com> wrote:

> >>http://www.officenomads.com-  (206) 323-6500

> >>> 3. gtalk/email: jonathan.yankov...@gmail.com

[Jerome Chang]

I've been offering custom packages since day 1. I set up my "data-entry driven [booking] website" into hourly increments. You see, if your assumption was a monthly membership, then your base unit would be a month. If weekly, then a week. So to increase flexibility, establish a smaller base unit than your assumption.

Setting up a 3 days/wk package is a simple conversion of 3 days into # of hours. Totally flexible.

Jerome
______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

www.blankspaces.com
5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea)
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323.330.9505 (office)

[Jonathan Yankovich]

Since there are a lot of people working on placing people in spaces
(deskbookers, loosecubes, etc), I think it makes sense for
coworkingregistry to serve as a portal that showcases the
"personality" and "vibrance" of coworking spaces and communities.
Also, coworkingregistry is not a for-profit project, and its goal is
to remain neutral. It might make sense to have a field or set of
fields for "membership types" but based on all the input I've seen
from people who actually run spaces, presenting these data in a
structured way that supports all the possible membership types sounds
daunting and like a problem that we shouldn't necessarily set out to
solve. So, +1 for an optional, freeform membership field (similar to
what the hackspace wiki does).