Project Description:
Seattle Free School is a place to exchange knowledge for free.  Not unlike community education programs Seattle Free School offers classes in a wide range of subjects.  However unlike these other programs Seattle Free School (SFS) does this without taking cash donations of any kind from anyone ever.  This is not because there is some sort of other funding (a rich founder or a trust fund somewhere) but because we have determined that not only is money not necessary for what we do but that indeed it may well be a hindrance to the community we’re trying to grow.

Basically the School started at the beginning of 2008 with the help of several collaborators and others interested in starting a free community education program.  At first we had not decided not to take money but we did know that raising money is difficult (more so in the current economy) and that it would take some of our time away from teaching classes and spreading the word.  It would create legal issues that would require our time to learn about and comply with.  So basically we decided that we’d deal with that when we needed to, when we finally got to the point where we just had to have money.  As you can guess that time never came.

Being that we operate without money we had to get creative with our marketing and this is where social networking has played a HUGE role.  We don’t have the ability to place an ad in a paper, to print up fancy flyers or posters or to have a marketing company advise us.  What we do have is the people we know, and that’s exactly where it started.  Once we had a basic website and email we forwarded that information to our friends, family and coworkers and asked them to forward it on to anyone in their community that might like to learn or teach.  We then started holding classes and spreading the word by emailing different press outlets.

There isn’t a way to talk about the finish of this project because SFS is still going strong and still growing and because we still don’t take cash and still can’t afford traditional marketing we are still using different social media tools to spread the word about what we do.


Project Goal:
In the beginning we didn’t actually have any written goals.  The beauty about being a citizen, volunteer-organized group is that we don’t have a board to report to or an ROI to prove.  That said we did have ourselves to report to and spending large amounts of time on something that didn’t obviously produce was a waste of time, something we didn’t have a ton of as we were all doing this as a second (or fifth!) job. So we set out to get more people to join our email list, to hopefully get some press about what we were doing and to get people to show up to classes.  We wanted to have a wide range of classes and a growing list of people who would teach, which we knew would be the hardest part as it involves public speaking, something people fear more then death. All of these things were far more possible then we had ever imagined.

 What Tools Did You Use?:
- Blogs
- Facebook
- Twitter

What Happened?:
To accomplish our goals we sent out information to press outlets, finding emails on websites and in the written publications themselves. We asked with each email for people to spread the word by forwarding the email to a friend or talking about us.  We asked people to join our Facebook group once one was formed and went about getting the word out about what we do on twitter.

Press:  We have been in almost every print publication in Seattle including two big magazines and the cover of the local section of the Sunday paper.  We’ve also been featured on the cover of several other smaller neighborhood publications.  We honestly didn’t have any idea that this was even possible and were constantly amazed as even more requests for interviews came in.  We were also on the local NPR station talking about what we do.  In this case we were approached by the station.

Email:  Within one year our email subscriber list went from 20 people to over 1100 people.  Again we weren’t even aware that this was possible and learned quite a bit from this rapid growth.

Class size:  Another way for us to really know our spread is through the classes we have.  We recently had our largest class at 125 people (the largest we will be able to have in the spaces we have access to as that class was standing room only).  At that class only about 25 students had been to a Seattle Free School class before so we know that we are consistently reaching new people.

Tweets:  By reaching out specifically to a few people and making sure to post new information we’ve received some great tweets about us on both the national and local level:

dafna_m Check out the amazing @seafreeschool No money. Free. Education. NO Money! Way to go Seattle community! http://seattlefreeschool.org

urbantweeter
Seattle Free School - has got to be one of the best things about#Seattle so spread the word #School http://www.seattlefreeschool.org

Classes:  In our first year we had over 70 different classes ranging from "Making your own Cheese" to "Improv".  We continue to have people signing up for our facilitator class which is the first step towards teaching a class.

Lessons Learned:
There are a number of lessons we learned from the project (and I’m sure more to come).  The very first is don’t listen to those who believe things have to be done the way they’ve always been done.  We were told time and time again that it would be impossible to get press, spread the word, find places to have classes, etc without money and yet we haven’t had this issue at all.  In fact we believe that because we don’t take money we have been interesting to the press and have mobilized the community to want to help through actions (teaching, sharing, spreading the word).  The problems that others predicted never came true or turned up in any way.  Don’t assume that the past is the predictor of the future or that because things have always been done a certain way means that’s the only way to do a thing.

We learned not to work on things that aren’t really needed.  In the beginning we tried to find locations even though we had access to the entire string of Seattle Public Libraries and could teach virtually anything we wanted to teach at these locations.  Trying to get people to donate space before growing our “brand” was both fruitless and a waste of time since we really didn’t need these new spaces to hold the classes we were teaching.  Eventually as our reputation grew we not only had some of these places reaching out to us but had other organizations coming out of the woodwork and asking us to have classes at their location.  Again the problem never really existed.

We learned to be prepared for the impact press can have on your organization.  In one 24 hour period we had a growth in our email list of over 100 people (thanks to the cover story in the Seattle Times/PI).  Our use of Gmail to send out our emails became impossible and we had to scramble to establish a legitimate listserve so we could continue to email our subscribers.  It’s hardly a problem to complain about!

Finally we learned to not be surprised by what is possible through social networking.  People are motivated to help and are willing to spread the word about something they see as a positive for the community.  We now have a new website thanks to the local community college who reached out to us to redesign our poorly executed free site.  We are hosted by a friend in France who we only know through Second Life.  We have had others come out of the woodwork to deal with our email issues and offer up space to host should we need it.  While involvement from both the community and ourselves does have a few lulls (the holidays, etc) it continues to grow in ways we couldn’t imagine or predict.  By not being attached to how that happens we can truly appreciate the power of social networking for what it is, powerful, chaotic, unpredictable and beautiful.

URLs:

http://www.seattlefreeschool.org,http://www.facebook.com/SeattleFreeSchool, http://twitter.com/seafreeschool

Jessica Dally

Seattle Free School