AN UPDATE ON OUR COFFEEHOUSE

You may already have seen the announcement from Guild that unfortunately, they closed on 1st October: Guild Announcement. 

This means that our digital Coffeehouse has also closed, after 3 happy years on the platform. 

We recently launched a community survey to help shape what comes next. Thank you so much to everyone who shared your thoughts and feedback. Your support is much appreciated.

It’s great to read from the results that it is important to you to be able to connect with other Members through your membership, with strong themes coming through of a supportive network, shared goals, connections, learning and knowledge sharing. 

It also came across strongly that there was a still desire for a Member-only digital platform, to facilitate connections with other Members, ask for support and advice, contribute knowledge and keep up to date with content and updates.

With these results in mind, here are some community actions we are taking:

1. We have created a Member-only global group on LinkedIn. We know that many of you are already on LinkedIn and are very active. The group will be a closed and safe space for those posts you might not wish to share so widely - to ask for support, share a challenge or put forward an opinion on a marketing matter for others to debate. It's also a great facilitator for connections with other Members, on a global scale. This is a Made by Members group, meaning Members are expected to actively participate in the spirit of creating a thriving digital community. Join the group here.

2. We are revamping our community webpage. This will be an area for Members to find out more about how to participate in the community, for example, via our upcoming mentoring initiative, or by contributing content. On the latter, you can find out more via our latest content guidelines here. 

3. Members will soon be able to interact with and comment on articles featured on our website. This will encourage conversations on the important topics. 

Community sits at the core of who we are and we will continue to listen to our Members and nurture our community in the everyday. 

Thank you for being part of it. 

Stacey Telford-Grimmer

Senior Community Manager