Working Groups

Dear Members,

I hope you are doing well and are enjoying our content. As discussed in our last meeting with members, we want to enact several changes to help the cooperative grow and improve. We have noticed we have reached a somewhat natural stagnation and we will be enacting a few changes aimed at re-energising our growth.

One such change is the establishment of working groups. These will be small groups of members who want to assist the publication with tasks in a particular area. We believe three key areas that members can assist with are Website improvement, social media outreach and cooperation with other cooperatives.

We have a small amount of money set aside for each group that could be used for purchases and/or to compensate members for their valuable time.

Website Improvement

This working group would improve the look and functionality of our website so that the publication appears more professional and improves metrics such as bounce rate and getting more readers joining as members. 

We want these groups to be mainly self-organising though we have some initial suggestions that Leo and I believe would improve the site. These are as follows: 

• Banner on article pages advertising joining the cooperative

• Lightbox asking readers to Subscribe to the email list/join

• Fix URL preview issue on the homepage

• Improve SEO

• Improve overall site design (Especially homepage and other backroom pages)

• Any other suggestions the working group decide would improve our website

Any member can join this working group, though we are particularly interested in any with experience with website design.

Social Media Support

Our members are already a huge help with social media, especially on Twitter, where our group chat has helped boost our reach, so we outperform many larger outlets. We would like to build on this success by creating a working group that helps push our articles across all social media platforms, maximising our reach and engagement. This would include sharing to groups, subreddits and pages and profiles with reach, as well as, helping design a better social media strategy to help grow the readership and membership of the publication.

Co-operation between Co-operatives

Many of you might be aware Leo and I are heavily involved in a group called Members for Cooperation, which aims to build cooperation between co-operatives in alignment with Principle 6 of the cooperative movement. We would like to set up a working group to embody this and help our cooperative network in the wider cooperative movement. 

From our reserves we have assigned these groups budgets of around £500 each, those this could change, to help them thrive in their roles. We hope some of you will join one or more of these groups and give a small amount of time each month to help build and grow the co-operative. 

If you want to join or have any questions please reply to this thread or message Leo or myself.

I look forward to working with you and thank you for your continuing support for Mutual Interest Media.

In Cooperation

Iwan Doherty

Editor