Wednesday 25 January 2012

CREATIVECOFFEE CLUB


At Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre this morning for CreativeCoffee Club. Another good turnout, with just as many, maybe more, as at the last session a fortnight ago (at least two dozen people today - including, for the first time, a babe in arms). A very positive feeling about the session today, a palpable buzz in the air - and that's not just thanks to the caffeine!

Patrick Welsh (Marketing Manager at Phoenix Square) and I have an interesting discussion about "ownership" of CreativeCoffee Club. What's the relationship between CreativeCoffee Club and Phoenix Square? Is this a loose, informal group of people who met for a while at DMU Graduate Bar, currently meet at Phoenix Square and at some time in the future might meet somewhere else? Is CreativeCoffee Club an integral part of Phoenix Square's programme? Who runs it? Who makes it work? What can be done to make it work better?

We don't reach any conclusion about this, but it's an interesting question to ask, with obvious implications for promotion and publicity, retaining the existing membership (if it can be said to have such a thing) and bring in new people. Take, for instance, blogging. At the moment, that's only done here, by me, attached to the Council of Faiths website. So it reflects my interest and involvement - and that of the organisation for which I work. But there's more to Creative Coffee Club than just what I see in it and what I get out of it. Should it have a blog of its own? If so, who would do that? Can it be done collectively?

One veteran of CreativeCoffee Club (and of the late, lamented - by me, at least - Amplified Leicester) tells me that this shouldn't be thought of as a networking event any more; that we might as well be meeting in the pub. My response to that is that if we were meeting down the pub at 10 o'clock on a Wednesday morning, then it would say something very different about us as a group! My feelings are that CreativeCoffee Club is that it's loose, relaxed and low-key (which, for some people, can mean it's frustratingly baggy, shapeless and unmanageable) and that it doesn't work to try and mould it into some other shape followed by other groups and meetings of which we might have experience or knowledge. There are other networking events happening in and around Leicester - and some of us take part in those too. If CreativeCoffee Club is a square peg, it can't be battered into a round hole.

Since I keep telling anyone who's interested (and plenty who're not) that I'm the longest-serving member of CreativeCoffee Club (having been here since the second-ever meeting at DMU in the autumn of 2007) I think I'm entitled to take the long view. Some folk questioned why I was coming to CreativeCoffee Club at all (including some of my employers), but from my point of view it's paid off, in spades. I don't have a product to promote, or a service of the kind that others have here. It's been a process of building credibility, trust, even friendship - that others attending see my open hand, understand my agenda (and don't think there's a hidden one). In the context of attending and supporting CreativeCoffee Club at Phoenix Square, that paid off for me (and for Leicester Council of Faiths) with the Faiths Film Festival during Inter Faith Week 2011. Getting that put on was the perfect example of pushing at an open door. Phoenix Square even went the extra mile by having one of our banners on display for a whole month leading up to that event and for the week of the festival itself.

I have an interesting chat about social media with one chap, here for the first time today, which reflects on the nature and purpose of CreativeCoffee Club itself. Twitter, for example, could be said to be dynamic, non-hierarchical, to evade standard ideas about management and ownership. Get the picture, faithful reader?

Listed below are some of today's attendees. These are live links; click on them to go straight through to the relevant website or Twitter account.

    No comments:

    Post a Comment