Rising Together
How HoneyBook’s Community Created Meaningful Impact for Its Members During Covid-19
Solopreneurship can be a lonely road.
A solopreneur carries both the successes and burdens of managing a business on his or her own. There is no management team, board or advisor behind the scenes, providing opportunities to vent when things go wrong, celebrate when things go right and consult when things are overwhelming or confusing.
That’s why community has been a critical part of HoneyBook from day one.
HoneyBook provides service-based small businesses with a comprehensive management system for everything technical — from meetings to proposals to contracts, all in one platform.
A Community is Born
We founded the HoneyBook community to be a safe space where our members can be part of a collective, consult with other solopreneurs and feel supported.
By January 2020, we had 6,000 members in the HoneyBook Community Facebook Group, sharing their input about our product, learning from each other and participating in the educational programs we facilitated, from webinars to trainings to in-person meetups.
And Then Came Covid-19
The Covid-19 outbreak in March 2020 created an economic and social earthquake which affected our members and their businesses profoundly. They had to learn to quickly adapt their businesses. We had to learn to quickly adapt our support for their changing needs.
Many of the HoneyBook community members were solopreneurs who worked in the events sector, such as photographers and hair and makeup artists. Covid-19 effectively neutralized the entire industry, and all these solopreneurs took a hit.
At HoneyBook, we realized that we needed to change the community’s main objective from driving product usage to helping our members keep their businesses afloat.
What did our community members need most?
To find out, we listened to the community.
Expanding the Toolbox
In spring 2020, the discussions in the community revolved around reacting to the changes Covid forced upon our members: rescheduling, cancellations and refund policies. The impossibility of face-to-face sales meetings. The subsequent necessity of an online sales process.
The HoneyBook product team quickly implemented this feedback from our community members and rolled out new functionality to answer these new needs. Video integrations, one step rescheduling and contract amendment templates were all part of the new features released in order to help our members through the crisis.
We were thrilled and gratified when we saw reactions like this one:
Expanding Support
New tools were just the first step.
We realized that we needed to support our members far beyond the scope of our product. They were facing an unprecedented challenge and we wanted to help them get through these stressful times while realizing that even as they are (as always) navigating their businesses alone, they have people behind them, working for them and cheering them on.
Our first goal was to help our members reduce the loss of income they were experiencing from multiple cancellations. To that end, we started the #RescheduleDontCancel movement. This nationwide campaign raised awareness for the challenges that small business owners were facing and empowered consumers with ways to support them: rescheduling and postponing events instead of canceling them, buying gift cards or pre-paying for future services.
Our Coronavirus and Small Businesses Resource Hub contained everything from customer communication templates and swipe copy to free tools and discounts for small business owners to financial relief resource information.
Expanding Horizons
Was there a silver lining in the dark stormcloud of Covid-19? We were sure there was.
Every crisis contains opportunities for innovation. We wanted our members to be able to identify their own opportunities and take advantage of them.
To this end, we scaled up our education initiatives. From webinars on finding alternative revenue sources during Covid to our flagship business accelerator program, UPWRD, we provided our members with tools for not only weathering this storm but for challenging their strategies and strengthening their business frameworks.
UPWRD, our flagship education program, is a 6-week cohort-based program for established businesses that are looking to take things to the next level. It includes mentorship, connections, and educational sessions on topics like Digital Marketing, Optimization of the Sales Process, Automation Tools, Brand Storytelling and creating additional revenue streams through education projects.
Expanding Community
As social distancing became the new normal, we encouraged our members to use the HoneyBook community as a platform for venting, sharing their challenges and receiving encouragement from one another. We initiated several projects to support our members as individuals and as business owners:
Watch Parties
Combining peer education with peer interaction, HoneyBook watch parties featured daily video sessions by our members, for our members, to share tips, encouragement and resources. The range of topics was wide — from meditation to cooking to DIY Renovation: Sanity Kit for the Quarantined.
The Gratitude Challenge
The first step to experiencing silver linings is identifying them. Our Gratitude Challenge provided a framework for our members to practice finding the positives in their personal and professional lives, and to experience the resulting psychological and practical benefits.
Wednesday Brag
At a time when drops in incoming work threatened to take a toll on solopreneurs’ self esteem, this weekly segment of sharing small wins, both professional and personal, gave community members a platform to feel respected and appreciated among their peers.
Connecting Through Covid
While 2020 was the year of social distancing; it was also the year in which the need for human contact became more evident than ever.
The HoneyBook community not only benefited our members, but it also benefited our team. Seeing the positive impact our product and initiatives have on our clients in real time has been satisfying, inspiring and motivating.
In the stormcloud of Covid-19, working for a company that gave us the opportunity to help small business owners thrive was our silver lining.
