2020 was an unprecedented year. We’ve faced global challenges like never before, impacting our activities worldwide. National lockdowns, layoffs and a global transition into remote working have led to unexpected turns.

In this article we will explore how Co-Liv was able to make sense out of this situation and adapt. In fact, 2020 turned out to be the biggest year of growth for our organisation. As a global non-profit association of coliving professionals, we learned how to overcome these challenges, create new services for the coliving industry and help showcase that coliving is still very much alive (and will remain so!).

For example, we have adjusted to changed circumstances by moving our events online. Combined with other activities such as blog posts, podcasts and publications, last year we managed to reach a total of 10,000 professionals within the coliving ecosystem! At the end, we are leaving 2020 with a 400% increase in newsletter subscribers, 50 active members and contributors, 105 virtual and physical events and 1,000+ podcast views.

How did we get there? Below we share the two main changes we implemented in our organisation that helped us reach this level of impact.

Riding the power of the online world through engaging virtual events

As unfortunate as lockdowns have been on the ability for companies to continue working traditionally in offices and as in-person communities, it also opened up new doors and opportunities. For example, I’ve personally hosted a 24-hour dance party (unrelated to Co-Liv) where we had 4,500 attendees join virtually during the event. With Co-Liv, we also realised that virtual events were booming if done right and ended up hosting more than 100 events on diverse coliving topics.

We are now going to share with you our 3 key tips for hosting engaging events. They are the secret sauce of our Co-Liv events, where participants have been able to share their coliving adventures and insights with hundreds of people, business partnerships have formed (including mergers and acquisitions) and people generally have a blast. These three secrets are also applicable to any type of event, whether work meetings, general assemblies or industry events.

1. Have your participants unmute themselves from the very beginning: trust that in case a vacuum cleaner or phone calls appears, they will mute themselves for the time being. This creates an environment with responses, sounds of astonishment, real clapping and the sensation of actually being listened to.
2. Play music at the beginning of your event: you don’t want people to join an empty room. It’s key that people are in a playful, active and awakened state if you want their full attention. Getting the vibes going for a few minutes gives you smiles, moves and good engagement. And you can
   go further: in our end-of-the-year 2020 virtual celebration, we hosted an entire presentation on our achievements with upbeat house beats followed by Christmas songs in the background!
3. Create break-out rooms for group or 1-1 experiences: we always host one or two group sessions, in which participants are put into virtual rooms with two or three other participants (aka break-out rooms). This gives them a few minutes to get to know each other, exchange on professional activities and explore opportunities. You can also create thematic sessions, such as asking everyone to share their number one coliving highlight of the year. Be creative, and let people connect on a personal level!

Note that coliving operators can apply these techniques to their own events.
This is where one can be creative - for example, hosting online parties with a main dancefloor, a social breakout room with jazz music in the background, another with an artistic live visualisation of the music and one for people who are just listening in (without video). The most powerful events are those with a bottom-up approach of community building, meaning involving residents in the creation of such events - for example, involving residents who are DJs in the creation of an online virtual party, which they’ll also heavily promote to the community. For more on this topic, you can consult The Community Facilitation Handbook, created in partnership between Conscious Coliving and Art of Co, two very active Co-Liv organisations in the past year.

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Applying service design to leverage your own activities

This year, Co-Liv realised that while organising plenty of internal activities, we did not have a way to bring all these initiatives into one package. Most coliving professionals were therefore not able to know about all the activities that were going on. Co-Liv was experiencing a momentum of growth but didn’t have the right structure to empower the coliving industry more efficiently.

It was our mission to understand what could best serve coliving professionals, and what initiative can be created to empower them through a new service. We built this new initiative using service design approaches.

For the past few years, design has become a hot topic: UX/UI design, service design, design thinking, life design, etc. But why has it become such a big topic in our society?

For the last decade, companies have increasingly adopted a customer-centric approach. One of the drivers of this movement was Steve Jobs, who claimed that “design is not just what it looks and feels like, design is how it works”. The overall goal is to build products and services that are closely driven and tested by customer needs, instead of creating innovation without product/market fit. We used a service design process to create customer research, learn the key needs of coliving professionals, come up with solutions and design the most optimal service for our members.

We first conducted our research with different types of coliving professionals (operators, real estate developers, investors, etc.). Our investigation revealed that first, as a relatively young industry, coliving would require an external facilitator in order to organise and structure it. Second, it would be more efficient for coliving stakeholders to have one platform to find reliable resources, education and partners.

Furthemore, our investigation outlined that coliving is quite unique. Indeed, this industry is at the crossroads of many others (hospitality, real estate, coworking, etc). As it would be very hard for one person to be an expert in all of those fields, this makes partnerships and platforms such as Co-Liv an essential part of the coliving industry. It is in this context that Co-Liv has an important role to play.

Service design methodologies allowed us to ultimately create a new membership program in only two months, called the Co-Liv Onboarding Program. In this 10 week program, participants receive several resources, connections and access to initiatives that will onboard them within the coliving industry and grow their business potential.

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When doing our research, one thing we learned was that coliving professionals have a hard time understanding the legal aspects of the industry. We therefore created an official partnership document with legal companies and legal experts in different countries, helping coliving professionals to get in touch with legal advisors.

We also categorised coliving professionals into three categories: the newbies, who are aspiring coliving professionals and those at the beginning of their career, mainly looking for inspiration and key partner relationships; the growers, who are professionals
with established businesses, mainly in a phase of international expansion and fundraising; and lastly, the established players, often coming from the real estate or investment sector, who have been in their respective business for five or more years and are mainly looking for qualitative, one-on-one connections (instead of resources which they have internally).

Conducting interviews and empathising with our customers led us to create new initiatives based on the needs we observed within the coliving industry in 2020. And we are going to work on them continuously, with many initiatives to be launched in 2021.

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Helping the industry to scale in 2021

After only two weeks of launching the newly designed service, Co-Liv already doubled its yearly membership revenues and grew memberships 4x faster than in previous months.

So what’s next?

As a global association of professionals, it is our mission to continue helping the industry scale.

For 2021 we have some new and exciting initiatives planned: the first coliving accreditation system, an online coliving university, several books and industry reports as well as our own Tech Community.

We will also be focusing on further professionalising our organisation, as well as the services we are able to provide. We will revamp the membership experience, organise the biggest coliving industry event to date as well as provide further support and industry insights to our rapidly scaling and professionalising field!

If you want to join the journey and partner with Co-Liv, join us at partnerships.co-liv.org and let’s build the coliving movement together.