Rejigging Open Evenings

The Hackspace
1

Hi All,

The open evening on Wednesday was a bit hectic, the doorbell was going off every 5 minutes. Though I don’t think they’re normally as busy, I’m wondering whether we could lighten the load on our members who attend on Wednesday by advertising the tours of the space as happening at half past each hour.

Pros

  • Means there are only 3ish tours a night - 18:30, 19:30 and 20:30.
  • Only requires 3 slots of members time.
  • Makes it less intimidating to prospective members by having a defined time for them to arrive.
  • (Down the line…) Could advertise on Eventbright with ‘Free tour tickets’ which could give us a better idea of how many people were going to show up. Would also be another place to market the space.
  • Makes it easier to create a voluntary tour guide timetable, so we know who might be around to show people around.

Cons

  • Prospective members might have to wait in plant space for a short while until the tour starts.
  • Some prospective members will show up late, potentially missing bits of the tour.
  • There might be some confusion for the first few months while people who enquired a while ago were told show up whenever.

In the longer term, I would like to see us move towards having an open evening every other week (say 1st and 3rd wednesdays) and then a general induction on the other week (say 2nd and 4th wednesdays).

This would not need much more membership time, but would mean the tour could be more efficient, and then on the general inductions we can go more in depth about bins, fire, storage, cleaning, inductions, etc. All the stuff people just looking around the first time aren’t that interested in. Members could then collect a fob after the general induction.

Personally I can’t actually attend on wednesdays that much to give tours so the former bit doesn’t affect me that much, but I am the one who answers a lot of prospective member emails/messages and so am the one telling everyone to come down on a wednesdays.

Please do let me know your thoughts, particularly if you do come to the open evenings!

Cheers,

Joe

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2

Sounds good, I think a more formal tour would work well. It can be hard to cover everything when doing it off the cuff, for me.

just as long as waiting around is minimised for tours

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3

I’m largely in support of this proposal.

Only concern I have is potential scheduling clashes with football games. I reckon on match days you’d have a lot of people arrive late or back out as the area can be unpleasant to navigate with fans around.

With the casual ‘turn up whenever’ approach events like football match have less of an impact on this, though I suspect people still avoid open evening on match days regardless, we just have no way of telling.

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5

I think this is probably a good idea if we can automate it all, but I also think we should rota the open evening from our side. It tends to be the same people doing it, and I can’t believe we’ve never had a situation where it’s been unstaffed on a Wednesday before now.

Last week when the weather was terrible, I came in and basically forgot open evening was on. I was the only person there, but we still had guests arrive. If I’d not been there (I was 50/50 in the first place) we’d have missed out on 3 sign-ups. Not saying I’m the saviour in particular here, just that it was utter chance that I happened to be there.

If we had 20 people on the rota, you’d only have to do open evening 3/4 times a year.

So yes to the above, plus rota’d staffing.

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6

We should just say if there is a match on then no open evening, as it’s just a pain getting in and out.

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