Who is in your target market?
Unlike most business we’re focusing on a psychographic angle rather than a demographic angle. We seek to attract a diverse range of regulars.
However, because shaping a brand and a marketing strategy benefits from narrowing the demographic focus, we’ve decided to focus on urban adults, 40 and below, college educated, without kids, making less than $100,000 per year.
How do you plan to measure your impact?
Our work will directly impact four major groups. Guests benefit from a gathering place to learn and connect. Community organizations benefit from access to a free space and broader visibility within their community. Our employees benefit from progressive compensation and a service industry job with professional development and deeper purpose. Indirectly, the increases in civic health and social capital we generate will benefit neighborhood residents and local stakeholders.
We will use valid and reliable measures of social capital already deployed at the federal level in the US and UK to collect data related to our impact. These surveys include measures of community and interracial trust, civic participation, association and group involvement, informal socializing, reciprocity, awareness of current events, and more. Our outreach, service design and program model are all engineered to generate measurable impact in all of these areas.
We will use this data to track the effectiveness of our offerings through a rigorous performance measurement and management system and periodic third-party program evaluation. This system will include regular pre-post testing to measure the effectiveness of our individual programs. We will review this data regularly and track trends.
Outside of our primary impact areas, we believe that we can hasten positive social change by making it easier for people to learn, connect and gather. We hope to use our place and the community we develop to seed innovation and to support the efforts that community members are already taking to drive their change as well as achieving ours.