Lazy Women is a community-driven platform created by young women from all over Europe and beyond, building a community that embraces the diversity of womanhood. They joined the Accelerator with the goal of designing a participatory and transparent business model that is meeting the audiences’ needs.  

Here, The Lazy Women team shares insights into their journey within the Transition Accelerator and what lies ahead. [You can also tune in to their Behind the Scenes podcast here to learn more about their progress and future plans.]

At the beginning of the Accelerator programme, we set ourselves three main objectives: deeper engagement, organizational stability, and financial stability. Below, we discuss in more detail the concrete steps we took to progress on each of these. 

In terms of deeper engagement, we put into practice what we learnt in our design thinking workshops and decided to get to know our community better. Once we grasped that there is no point in guessing or imposing our views onto the kind of content our audience would like to see, we conducted two surveys: one aimed at measuring the satisfaction of contributors and their suggestions for improvement; the other one targeting our readers and their specific needs. 

The enhancement of our two-way communication strategies went hand-in-hand with a stronger personalization of our content, as we understood that it is far more crucial to take our audiences on this journey with us rather than presenting them with ‘perfect’ or overly curated impersonal content. Moreover, we implemented an ‘open-door’ policy, offering 1:1 feedback sessions and more regular ‘general assemblies’ where the most important decisions (including our annual plan or budget) are agreed on collectively. 

Being an international organization with no specific local ‘hub’, we put more effort into organizing localized meet-ups: an opportunity to exchange experiences with our contributors and recruit future members. Be it in Budapest, London, or most recently in Paris with more than 30 attendees, we were amazed by how much our brand resonates with the public. This might be one of the biggest takeaways of our audience research: no matter what our future steps might be, what we do is valuable and our community is here to support us. 

Organizational stability is the area which has seen the most changes. Despite becoming an association in autumn 2022, we quickly realized that much more groundwork was needed to become a properly functioning media outlet and not just a ‘hobby blog.’ After some initial hurdles, we finally managed to open a business account, sign a contract with an accounting firm and secure an association-specific legal advisor. 

Internally, we established a three-member executive team in charge of the day-to-day logistics of the organization, spanning from editorial oversight, community management and project management responsibilities. We also onboarded a social media manager, a grants manager and a creative director, ensuring the professional maintenance of our platform. Additionally, we modified our content plan and social media strategy, which has already borne fruit in terms of new newsletter subscriptions and social media engagement. 

On top of this, we are currently in contact with website developers about a planned website revamp, to be carried out by early autumn. Yet the biggest change in this regard has been the introduction of an official membership status with special members-only perks, secured by a membership fee. To date, we have converted 33 paying members out of our 52 volunteers – a significant step towards strengthening our community and ensuring its financial stability. 

Financial stability was the primary reason why we applied to the Accelerator programme, to learn the best industry tips on securing our platform’s long-term sustainability. We are currently working on preparing a huge crowdfunding campaign to be launched at the end of September this year, starting with a pre-launch party in Paris. Our aim with this campaign is to gain a strong enough financial baseline to be able to fairly compensate our contributors in the upcoming year, ensuring their commitment in this crucial transformation period. 

Resources gained during this campaign would also allow us to focus on developing our subscription-based model, which will contribute to our platform’s financial sustainability. We have already made a few preliminary steps in this regard, from moving our newsletter to a subscription-friendly Substack to introducing participation in our subscription-development focus group as one of our crowdfunding ‘rewards.’ 

Overall, it is fair to say that these past six months have significantly accelerated our transformation into a professional media outlet and community space, and we are eternally grateful for all the knowledge and support we have received.