Coworking Space Social Design | Impact Hub Philadelphia

Challenge:

Impact Hub is a global association of coworking spaces that support cause-oriented organizations and businesses. Impact Hub in San Francisco sought to open new U.S. locations on the East Coast, its first ever expansion. It needed systems to be developed and put into place, community and partnerships to be build, and programming to support its community and operations.

Approach:

Having been deeply involved with Impact Hub in San Francisco, it relocated me to Philadelphia for four months as one of four people operationalizing its expansion. We identified two priorities: community building and establishing the funnel towards membership, or the onboarding experience.

Community building: As a small team with a human-centered approach, we approached community building through co-design. By organizing roundtables, we engaged existing connections to understand what our strengths and weaknesses would be in the eyes of their communities and what need they saw that we could help answer. We then set the stage for these connections to bring in people from their networks to attend events, informational evenings, and even launch their own events. These events were observed for strengths and weaknesses in the topic, structure, size, programming, offerings, and more. One of the earliest and most successful events, Pitch and Brew, was launched in partnership with a nonprofit wanting to provide local entrepreneurship support to as many members of the community as possible. Clearly desirable from the first event, we focused efforts to make it stronger. Leveraging an informal participatory action research approach, the timing, format and focus of the event was iterative, taking into consideration the feedback from the participants. After its first year, it worked with 375+ entrepreneurs, start-ups, & organizations in Philadelphia.

Membership onboarding experience: Design of the membership onboarding process consisted of two phases, prototyping and iteration. Target customers were identified through competitor analysis and contextual observation on community forums around entrepreneurship and community spaces. We conducted basic community interviews to understand key value propositions for each target customers. Leveraging these two primary values, we drafted four key customer journeys depending on their starting point or the value point that they would be interested in leveraging. The result was a large analog journey map and blue print on a piece of paper, where we were able to progress users through the process using their business cards or membership cards and physically denote pain points or obstacles in which we found to be critical. For the initial launch, we used this large paper prototype as a tracking tool for advance member sign-ups. Iterations of the journey was then rolled out on a single users at a time to inform as an A/B test.

Result:

Impact Hub developed a diverse and robust community and strong partnerships over the course of over a year. However, the coworking space had originally launched in partnership with the 3rdWard makerspace in a remote but up and coming neighborhood. 3rdWard liquidated not long after the partnership, leaving Impact Hub with a building that exceeded its needs and capacity. Ultimately, the location closed.