Zora’s House in the House!
It only took 5 minutes on our Zoom call with LC and J’Hanna for us to realize that we wanted to spend our first week on Open Road working with and for Zora’s House in Columbus, Ohio. The energy and passion they had for building a space for women and gender expansive people of color only multiplied after meeting them a month later when we finally started our actual road trip!
A little bit about Zora’s House and its founder LC:
LC moved to Columbus, OH and was looking for a place to be her authentic self, a place for sisterhood, and for lack of better words a place “to establish meaningful, supportive relationships with other women in their community; develop a deeper practice of self-care, resiliency, and emotional intelligence; and successfully incubate their creativity, scholarship, entrepreneurship, activism, service, and leadership” (as it says on their website). This place didn’t exist yet, so LC made it happen herself. YGG!
As soon as you walk into Zora’s house — named after author and activist, Zora Neale Hurston — you can FEEL the power of the community and the comforting energy of sisterhood as people work together, introduce themselves to new faces, and mingle in the kitchen as they transition from morning coffee to happy hour wine. It’s a co-working space, but also a place for game night, with comfy beds in the basement for naps or cuddling up as soon as season 2 of Bridgerton drops.
Anyway, back to our Open Road experience. We spent the first day and a half learning as much as we could about Zora’s House and narrowing down our project scope. After several discovery conversations, we honed in on “How might we get members to deepen their investment by communicating Zora’s House’s value / benefits and increasing member engagement?” Members of Zora’s house currently have 3 options to pay for membership, under a “pay what you want/can” model. The organization wanted to increase the average amount paid by members, so our team spent the week trying to figure out how to better define the value of Zora’s House and ways to nudge members to increase their contributions.
From several member journey discussions, research on the psychology of referral programs and other membership models, and deep dives on their internal marketing strategies, we created a menu of options for Zora’s House.
It was so cool to hear how the leadership team responded immediately to our ideas, and thought about ways they could prototype some of our recommendations immediately. As someone who worked at a huge company prior to Ross, where systemic change takes forever to occur, it was amazing to see how fast things work in a startup.
We can’t thank Zora’s House enough for inviting us into their space and being receptive to our ideas. We look forward to staying in touch with the team and visiting Columbus again in the future!
