In this article, we'll be giving away some of our secret sauce for member spotlights.

These are an awesome tool. They help you to:

• Generate valuable social proof for your coworking space
• Create shareability that puts your space in front of new audiences
• Build closer personal connections between your members
• Show potential members who their coworking community could be
• Boost retention by showing your members some love

The problem is that most member spotlights are:

• About the coworking space rather than the member
• Way too long
• Impersonal and don’t tell you much that’s in-depth or real about the person
• Missing any sort of value or takeaway for the reader
• Inconsistent in format and approach

And that’s not all.

Member spotlights can also be cumbersome both to you and your team as well as to your members if the process is too complicated.

So, I wanted to share a few tips for how to:

1. Create engaging member spotlights
2. Systemize your process to make member spotlights easier for you to manage and simpler for your members to complete

Here’s how we do member spotlights for our clients at Talemaker.

Creating engaging member spotlights

Content is only valuable if people engage with it.

And the truth is that most people will only engage with it if they get some value from it.

Member spotlights are no exception.

So, while it’s important to discuss both your member’s business and your space in your spotlight, that shouldn’t be all you do.

In addition to those details, ask your members to share a bit about their business, their role, how they came to work at your space, and what their experience has been like so far.

Then, add an element of personalization to your spotlights by asking your members to share intersting personal insights, such as:

• A book worth reading
• An Instagram account worth following
• A piece of advice worth passing on
• A quote worth repeating
• A recipe worth trying
• A video worth watching
• A question worth asking
• A concept worth understanding
• A book worth reading
• An activity worth doing
• The best lesson they’ve learned or the best advice they’ve received
• How they like to unwind after a long day
• What their morning routine is like
• How they unwind after a long day
  

Get creative with this, and tailor it to your brand and your membership base.

Doing so is great because it:

• Ensures every answer is interesting and offers a unique, valuable, and personal takeaway
• Shows a lot about the person you’re profiling beyond just their job
• Makes your member spotlights efficient and structured

I’d also recommend that you:

• Brand your member spotlights with a unique name that you can use month over month
• Keep your spotlights short and sweet

Systemizing your member spotlight process

Here’s the challenge with member spotlights:

• They can be a bit of a pain to manage if your team has to put a lot of legwork into them
• If they’re inconvenient for your members, it’ll be tough to get people to participate

The solution? Having a system in place that makes the process simple.

Here’s how we manage this for our clients:

1. Create a Google Form with all of our member spotlight questions, including fields for uploading images, social media handles and website links, etc.
2. Create an outreach email template that includes our ask, what our members will get in exchange (links to their website, promotion on our blog and in our newsletter, promotion of their business, etc.), and the link to our survey form
3. Distribute this email template to the members we want to spotlight (or all of your members, if you want)
4. Allow people to submit their responses which automatically populate into a master Google Sheet via our Google Form
5. Write up our member spotlights
6. Publish them on our blog
7. Distribute them in our newsletter
8. Promote them on our social media channels
9. Proactively reach out to everyone featured, share the link, and request that they share the write-up with their own audience, putting your space in front of net-new eyes (we build a templated email for this too)

This allows us to:

A) Reduce the barrier for our members, in turn increasing our participation volume  

B) Remove as much of the manual work as possible from our clients

C) Create engaging, interesting, and unique member spotlights in an easy, repeatable way

You’re busy. So are your members. But that doesn’t mean you can’t easily and efficiently craft incredible member spotlights.

This is just one way in which you can put your content marketing on autopilot.

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