In week 30 of 2020, I sent out my very first This Week In Coworking (TWIC) email newsletter.
The objective was twofold:
- To help busy workspace operators and industry professionals keep a finger on the pulse, by sending them summaries of the important stories they may have missed that week.
- But most importantly, I wanted to see if I could help elevate the stories, voices, faces, insights or regions of the world that are sometimes overlooked by the traditional channels and algorithms that can sometimes put a little too much focus on who raised the most money, instead of say... who's making real long-lasting moves or creating a tonne of local impact.
How it started.
The very first email went out to a whole FIVE friends around the coworking world, each of whom opted in to receive my weekly summaries of industry news. Thanks Bernie, Joy, Jax, Becky and Elizabeth!
It shared 7 stories including one celebration, and an invite to get involved with International Coworking Day 2020.
How it’s going.
This week, the 30th week of 2021, I will have sent out 49 (almost) weekly summaries.
Weekly summaries have covered over 1,000 stories – from great examples of marketing, to upcoming trends, data/reports worth reading, new jobs, upcoming events, podcast episodes, market moves, workspace tech updates and everything in between.
Over the last year we, the community of newsletter readers and I, also experimented with a few different ways to dive deeper into the stories, and to explore the underlying trends they represent.
We’ve tried creating asynchronous discussions on the Coworking Forum, we’ve tried hosting a Clubhouse room for weekly discussions, we’ve tried sharing & chatting within various Slack channels, we’ve tried twitter threads, posting in Facebook groups and crafting LinkedIn summary posts.
Some worked OK. Others would’ve been deafened by the silence. But a few…well… they blew my frigging mind.
Firstly, the email newsletter readers themselves have been super impressive. Thanks to their forwarding of the summary emails, and inviting friends, the newsletter’s seen a respectable average of 5% week-on-week growth in subscriber numbers, whilst also maintaining an average open rate of 58%.
According to mailchimp, in 2019 the average open rate for real estate newsletters is just 19.17% and the average for all industries was 21.33%, so a huge thanks to everyone who’s subscribed, read my summaries, and continues to invite their colleagues and frenemies to subscribe via ThisWeekInCoworking.com!
Then, there’s our weekly Clubhouse room (often hosted within the Coworking Club) that brings together an amazing group of industry leaders, tinkerers and most importantly doers to discuss the news and trends each Friday at 10:30am Eastern time.
I’m extremely grateful to everyone who’s ever joined one of these audio-only TWIC discussions to share or just listen in, and to Mike LaRosa for diving in to help co-host a whole bunch of the calls. You can grab the link to each week’s audio-only discussion via the email version of the newsletter, or by following me on Clubhouse here.
A surprising channel for TWIC was actually LinkedIn, even if they switched their algorithm on us in the middle of the year.
Whilst each post only reached 1,320 views (on average) the cumulative reach of all TWIC LinkedIn posts recently surpassed 60,000 views, with the threads being seen by thousands of coworking enthusiasts. These posts seem to have reached both independent community leaders and some top-level execs at almost all of the world’s largest commercial real estate companies, brokerages and investment firms.
It has been fascinating to hear from, and connect with, folks from all across of the ever-growing flex workspace sector.
Check out my profile, and/or connect with me on LinkedIn here, to see how these weekly threads often bring together so many of our industry’s doers into one place.
What’s next for TWIC?
The community that’s grown around this ‘thing’, the feedback I’ve received, the trends we uncover, and the connections I’ve made with so many inspiring people has made me certain that I should definitely keep TWIC going.
And so, I will. I’m going to keep experimenting with different ways to engage with the summaries, connecting the communities featured and providing bite-size content to as many of the tens of thousands of workspace operators and flex space professionals as possible. I’m especially interested in exploring new (to me) mediums that are scalable or low-bandwidth, so that these news summaries and trends can reach even further.
I’d also like to take deeper looks into the major trends we’ve explored in the last 49 newsletters and see if there’s any interesting insights to draw from the huge underlying shifts in everything from childcare as infrastructure, to the modularization of workspace tech, to underreported M&A trends, to what comes next for suburban- and corporate-coworking.
From a tech perspective, there may be a few changes in the coming weeks as the web and email versions are migrated to allow for me to continue curating news and supporting this awesome community of community leaders.
For the foreseeable future This Week In Coworking will remain a volunteer project, curated as a labor of 
for busy workspace professionals everywhere.
How can you help?
If you’ve enjoyed receiving the newsletters, taking part in the Clubhouse calls, do let me (and all your friends) know.
Got ideas, suggestions, questions or thoughts to share?
Get in touch, I’ll do my best to get back to you as soon as humanly possible.
Aren’t getting TWIC emails yet? It’s almost September and things are about to get very interesting.
So definitely sign up at ThisWeekInCoworking.com for free.
Thanks to all of y’all for coming on yet another community-empowering journey with me!