tidyhq-blog

[tidyhq-blog]

Let's paint the scene of the typical Annual General Meeting (AGM) . A group of volunteers who have given up an evening after a full day at the 9-5 job and have driven in peak traffic to the meeting venue. They aren't getting paid for this time but are greeted with tea bags and and an unlimited supply of instant coffee to get them through it ☕️.

You, the Chair, sit down with your agenda that's a mile long from the last meeting. The minute taker is armed with a couple of pens and may even have a fresh notebook for the evening 📝.

You open the meeting and move through the agenda but as there are no time limits you spend half an hour talking about the colour of the training uniforms.  

Three hours later, you are three quarters through the agenda! ⏳

Be smart with your time, your time is priceless.

When chairing a meeting:

Note who should speak to a topic and indicate when a person may speak

Be responsible for keeping the discussion to the subject

Decide when discussion should be brought to an end

Don't get involved in the discussion unless their opinion is sought

Summarise the issue under discussion, to aid in decision making and to make life easier for the minute taker. 

To learn more about hosting meetings with TidyHQ, head to https://tidyhq.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/201523563-Meetings

[tidyhq-blog]

Remote Retreat - Thailand edition.

TidyHQ wouldn’t be where it is without the people working behind the scenes ideating and creating the best product for our customers 🤗

We have expanded from the dynamic duo of our CEO and one Ruby on Rails developer in September 2015 to a group of seven full time employees 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦. We maintain a remote team with TidyHQ team members in different parts of Asia, Eastern Europe and Australia 🌏

Although we utilise the best communication and project management tools to their full capacity - @slackhq and trello, some things are just better done in person! For example, it’s hard to have a casual conversation over Google Hangout about your background, some random idea you may have about improving our platform or just to sit down and talk about the TidyHQ values. These things tend to happen naturally in person but don’t necessarily in a remote team, unless we force it.

To combat the productivity slumps that exist when remote workers have been left to their own devices too long, we aim to get the whole team together twice a year to set up our strategy in 6 month blocks and spend some time together. 

TidyHQ’s first remote retreat was held for a week on the remote island *pun intended* of Ko Racha Yai, 20 kilometres south of Phuket, Thailand 🍹🌴 

Family is important to TidyHQ so we extended the invitation to team member’s partners and families which worked great and injected some different conversation at the end of the long days.  

We didn’t look up nomad’s list before locking in the location so we did have some wifi issues but there was no shortage of whiteboards and paper or a lack of beautiful views. PRO TIP: Check wifi speeds before booking remote retreat.

We started off with a mission statement exercise to get everyone thinking about why TidyHQ do what we do. We used the non profit hub ‘Step-by-Step Exercise for Creating a Mission Statement’ as a basis. It was interesting to hear the developers perspective on this exercise as they are more wired for “how?��� rather that “why?” 🤔  We got some great results from this! 

The retreat ran for 5 days with 4 days split into sessions of solid workshopping and strategy planning with generous lunch breaks. The fifth day was a chance to explore the island at our leisure.

Here’s some of the team discussing the next features to be developed. 

It was great to have everyone in the same room and witness the culture and relationships forming between the team🌱. You wouldn’t have guessed it was the first time most of us had met each other! 

We left the retreat with some great ideas and solutions for the road ahead 🎢 Everyone is enthused and excited for the new features and development about to hit @tidyhq @tidyhqtech. Stay tuned for the next retreat in October 2016. 

[tidyhq-blog]

TidyHQ and Zendesk

Looking for help? Need a refresher? TidyHQ supports our users by integrating with @zendesk to host our knowledge documentation. Our customer support or ‘Customer Happiness Heroes’ (who you will soon get to know and love as much as we do 😍) are our customers who love our product so much they want to help you and make sure you love TidyHQ too! Their enthusiasm is contagious 🤗 and makes our job so much easier by communicating to our development team all of the feedback our users have.

Our Customer Happiness Heroes regularly update our @zendesk​ to provide 24/7 solutions for when you need support on the go!🏃

There are two main sections of our TidyHQ Knowledge @zendesk​ :

‘Getting Started’ contains further information when you sign up for the first time and common questions associated with familiarising with TidyHQ.🚀

‘Knowledge Base’ is divided into articles supporting the respective functions of the TidyHQ platform. 📚

At @tidyhq we understand that everyone may not be computer savvy and that’s why we focus on making the user experience as easy as possible.🏌 If our @tidyhq Knowledge articles are not quite enough - our Customer Happiness Heroes will swoop in and save the day 🏆! 

For more info about TidyHQ, check out our website tidyhq.com

[tidyhq-blog]

On the road with SANFL!

Our CEO, Isaak, has been on the road to South Australia thanks to the South Australian National Football League (SANFL).  🛣

The visit to Adelaide was fantastic as we showed off the TidyHQ product to clubs and leagues from all over the state 👏. It’s great to be talking to the SANFL about their administration and learn about some of the things they’re looking to achieve in the 2016 season! 🏉 

[tidyhq-blog]

Fixed v Rolling Memberships. 

Fixed = Fixed Period of time regardless of when the Member pays or registers. Rolling = Membership period rolls from the date the Member pays or registers.

Apologies to Isaaks Mum for the collar situation.

[tidyhq-blog]

Look out UK

We are very happy and proud to announce we have been invited to be a part of the Australian Financial Technology delegation to London courtesy of the UK Trade & Investment Department. 

We are looking forward to creating new friendships and partnerships and improving our English!

Thank you to ungroundedthinking and ukti for helping us get to London. 

https://www.gov.uk/government/world-location-news/ukti-to-send-delegation-of-australian-fintech-companies-to-london 

[tidyhq-blog]

Action is eloquence

Building a platform that connects the doers allows the people that want to take action the tools to do so. Using the platform means we keep decreasing the gap between the doers and the talkers. 

Those that are not willing to roll up their sleeves and get on with it slowly get drowned out by those actually doing something about it...particularly now that everyone can see it.

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Jono Harris from the Tamworth Organic Community Garden group talks about TidyClub and how it has helped them bring together their geographically sparse membership.

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Michelle from East Fremantle Family Playgroup talks about using TidyClub to help her get the kids and the parents under control!

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Nathan Chapman, Auskick Coordinator talks about his experiences using TidyClub to help get the administration of Scarborough Junior Football Club under control.

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Mark and Magnus from Profectus talk TidyClub. Profectus is a not-for-profit founded in mid-2013 by three UWA students who loved social entrepreneurship but were dismayed by how few other young people were getting involved. Profectus was founded to encourage young Western Australians to put their ideas into action and launch businesses and not-for-profits. Profectus guides young innovative Western Australians by providing fun and accessible business & technical training, connecting with successful mentors, linking enterprising young people together, and providing support for their enterprise development.

[tidyhq-blog]

Refunds

Being able to refund someone has always been something we’ve wanted to make easier for a number of reasons. From today those using the Stripe Connect service will find it super simple and easy to make Refunds happen.

[tidyhq-blog]

Let's reduce our fees!

The challenge of building a platform is tough... and trying to work out the pricing can be even harder!

When we started building this our goal was to make this a powerful solution but with pricing that would suit even the smallest of community groups.

We said that we didn't want the standard SaaS pricing model of a regular monthly fees... as many clubs are either seasonal or simply can't justify those sorts of fees. We thought a fairer way was to give away the solution for free and charge a service fee for every online transaction...that way the more successful the club was the more successful we would be. 

TidyClub also charges for Add-Ons for some additional features or third party services that further assist in running the club. 

Obviously we need to make money somehow as bills and people need to paid, it's always hard to figure out the right path but we think this is the fairest way. As part of this we regularly think about it and as such we have now reduced our service fee for PayPal and Stripe customers to 1.5%+30cents per transaction. 

We love to hear feedback on the pricing model and open to ideas as to how to improve it. 

[tidyhq-blog]

Number 1000!

We now have 1000 groups and well over 50,000 users worldwide all pulling TidyClub in a variety of ways. The next 12 months promises to be even more exciting with some great announcements not too far away (fingers and toes crossed!)

We have learnt a huge amount over the past few years but primarily we have learnt that regardless of geography or language if there is a collection of people trying to organise things together there will be administration headaches... headaches we want to solve!

Thank you very much for your support throughout as we continue to build the BEST platform possible for community groups all over the world.

Cheers, Isaak and the TC team

[tidyhq-blog]

Stripe Integration

We're not going to lie, we have a bit of a crush on Stripe. They're a payments company that are doing big things in the payments space and we're excited to be joining them. 

Most recently they started to allow for Bitcoin payments, helped contribute to a new platform for exchange foreign currency around the world called Stellar and most recently are working side-by-side with Apple and their new ApplePay service. 

So from today you will now be able to use Stripe Connect, a one click connection to your Stripe Account within your TidyClub Settings > Payment Settings page and start accepting funds. If you don't have a Stripe account you can set one up here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/register 

Stripe is still limited to the following countries but they are adding more at surprising speed so check back often for updates. 

If you're yet to sign up for TidyClub get on with it here: https://tidyclub.com/sign-up/ 

We look forward to hearing your thoughts. 

Available currently for groups in these 17 countries.  

Australia

Canada

Ireland

United Kingdom

United States

Belgium 

Finland 

France 

Germany 

Luxembourg 

Netherlands 

Spain 

Denmark 

Italy 

Norway 

Sweden 

[tidyhq-blog]

We caught up with David from WACAN at our #Perth User Information Session recently... here is his story. The Western Australian Community Access Network (WACAN) was founded to facilitate the deployment and management of community based networks in Western Australia for enthusiasts and the general community and to encourage and foster experimentation and learning of wireless and networking technologies. They do some really cool stuff and they're using TidyClub to help power them!

[tidyhq-blog]

Stagnation

Stagnation is common in business, clubs, and any organisation which has a manager or someone giving directions.

More than likely they will fall into a similar routine, perhaps as a result of producing a winning formula and sticking with it. This is good for the immediate future of a club, and it may well build the foundation for the long term benefit of the club. But unless you step back, review and then adjust, your club won't understand what exactly it is that is working, what has been required, or how to do it.

Stepping back and reviewing doesn’t mean leaving altogether. It may mean you sit on an advisory board to the club, it may mean that you sit in on committee meetings to lend advice when asked, either way you’re still available.

This is important for those that eventually take over from you, along with those that merely participate in the club. They get the message that this place, this club is SO good that even the ex-President wants to stick around. It facilitates the sort of message you want your club to present, and breeds better decisions and more volunteering.