For the third year in a row, Coworks will sponsor the Community Manager Awards at the Global Workspace Association FlexForward conference. This year will be in Phoenix, Arizona.
And I cannot wait to stand on stage and announce the finalists — one from the US and one from an international organization.
As with year’s past, the team at the GWA put out a call for member organizations to nominate the managers who went above and beyond.
The nomination process is tricky: is your manager a host first and foremost, who makes each member feel seen and appreciated? An operations wizard who keeps things running smoothly and handles surprises with grace and competency? Is your manager both?
It’s hard to compare, but we got to talk with each semi-finalist, and one thing stands out to me: each manager loves their community.
Sure, they could each talk about their day to day, how unpredictable their job is, and how they’ve handled crazy situations from floods to forgotten children (really!). But each person we talked to visibly lit up when talking about their community.
It’s a word we throw around with great frequency. But community is a big concept, no matter how big your member count. It's why our software is, first and foremost, a good experience for members and a delightful experience for managers — they are often the folks who log in everyday and run invoices, set up plans, update resources, create events, check on bookings and more. And it would be great if that was the only thing they had to do, but it isn’t.
These interviews are more proof they are human multi-tools, with a stretch to fit capacity that makes a community manager so integral and so important to every coworking and flex space. The community manager is often the factor that differentiates a coworking space from executive suites.
So here they are: the semi-finalists for Community Manager of Year 2024. And I know it’s cheesy to say, but they are all already winners to me. I can’t wait to meet them in person.