It’s undeniable that coworking spaces, and other multi-business communities, make a huge economic impact on the businesses in their immediate neighbourhoods.
Members are constantly supporting neighbourhood markets, mom-and-pop stores and grabbing many many meals from local eateries, driving revenue into and across local economies every single day. Often, the best of these local vendors love to return their own support in the form of deals or discounts for these increasingly loyal patrons.
This week we began testing Hyperlocal Coworking Perks with amazing community managers across the world, in the hope of multiplying this economic impact in each of their immediate ecosystems.
Whilst the concept is simple (to allow operators of communities to very quickly distribute deals or discounts from their neighbourhood’s best businesses) the planning and stressing around it’s implementation began from even before we negotiated our very first shared multi-coworking-space perk.
It was decided early-on that we wanted to enable spaces to quickly present the local deals available exclusively for their members alongside the 100s of global, regional or multi-community discounts included.co is continuously sourcing & negotiating through the network. This would not only avoid giving members yet-another-platform they need to access, but would save time for both members and community operators.
My hope is that by streamlining the way in which these local deals are collected, promoted, discovered and tracked; we can enable a 10x increase in this direct economic impact over the coming years, enabling these communities to become powerful cornerstones in how local economies are developed, empowered or rebuilt all around the globe.
I do however fear that the exclusive nature of these perks could unintentionally let communities fall victim to the temptation to compete for perks or deals, instead of leaning on the networks’ (both locally and globally) shared buying-power in order to secure the greatest possible deal for all participating communities, with the least amount of effort.
Another fear along the same vein is that some vendors could try leverage Hyperlocal Perks to make divisive and unfair decisions, both consciously and subconsciously, around the size or type of discounts they offer to specific communities.
Via included’s still-unofficial “Inbound Rebound” service (in which we exclusively handle all the inbound perk/sales offers for participating communities) I’ve seen first-hand that some how biz-dev or growth-hacker folks sometimes try to offer different spaces different deals based on their floor size, number of members and their reputation.
Throughout the beta I’ll personally be helping community managers leverage Hyperlocal Perks for their favourite local businesses, whilst also promoting more scalable businesses to included Vendor status. This would allow us to be able to help the vendor reach more communities, in turn offer better deals and improve the intrinsic business value of even more memberships across the coworking sector.
As we expand the beta programme into more and more ecosystems, I am hoping that we can all quickly strive towards the mutually-beneficial goal of supporting local small businesses whilst still ensuring on-demand access to the best-in-market prices from larger product/service vendors.
I’m excited to see what how my hopes fair against my fears as we collectively build out this module, the platform, our proptech infrastructure and our team around the world.
If you’ve got any feedback, advise, concerns or banana bread, do feel free to send me an email or a tweet to say hi.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash