Honesty box for independent "starting a soft play centre" seminars

Since 2007 when Radiohead bravely experimented with an honesty system to sell “In Rainbows,” I have been fascinated how such economic initiatives revolutionise business models, influence demand and propagate ideas.

As you know, we like our experiments (Free influenced the founding of our Company) and trust our community so it seemed an interesting (and scary) idea to use an honesty system in the pricing of our “How to Start a Soft Play Centre” seminars to demonstrate the value of spending a day with us in January.

According to Wikipedia, an honesty system is:

“a philosophical way of running a variety of endeavours based on trust, honour, and honesty…granting freedom from customary surveillance…with the understanding that those who are so freed will be bound by their honour … not (to) abuse the trust placed in them.”

Although we know our seminars to be extremely popular and valuable (you can read feedback here), the challenge we face in fully adopting a fully fledged honesty box system is that unlike Radiohead, we have released no albums (believe me, that is a good thing) and unless you have attended our seminars (where capacity is limited to fifteen) you have no way of measuring value in advance.

Therefore, reflecting the principles of trust, value and honour in pricing the seminar became the most important considerations. After much thought, we decided to maintain the current price but at the end of the seminar, ask attendees to value the day they shared with us. If they think the value of the information we share is not worth £100 (+ VAT), we will refund the difference; this does not cover failure to attend where we offer alternative dates. Don’t worry, if you join us and value the day at more than £100, we will not ask you to pay more (unless you really really want to).

Like all experiments, we can’t predict the outcome but we hope this shows our confidence in the value of the information we share, the trust we place in the users of our website and those attending our seminars; this also hopefully makes it even easier to get your hands on all the independent information you need when starting a soft play centre.

Ultimately, we also hope that by again trying something new and risky, we inspire and / or encourage soft play suppliers and indoor play centre operators to experiment with business models and adopt ideas from outside the indoor play industry.

As always, our future is in your hands…over to you.

ShareAndComparePlay.com is the Indoor Play Supplier Comparison Website that Saves Play Operators £10,000s. The only source of independent reviews on every Supplier to the Play Industry, ShareAndComparePlay.com works to revolutionise the Play Experience for Children and to enable Businesses to profitably understand and meet the future needs of Families.

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Soft play suppliers, your reviews count!

When we started ShareAndComparePlay.com, it was an experiment to test if we could revolutionise an industry we care deeply about, by introducing the following philosophies:

1. Provide valuable and corroborated information, for Free
2. Introduce Transparency, improving standards and reducing costs
3. Facilitate collaboration to enable innovation in play (involving children, parents, play operators, soft play suppliers, designers and schools)

Since our launch in February, this “experiment” has evolved into a commercial organisation enabling growth in the play market and with the potential to support change in subsequent markets, such as weddings.

To introduce each of the above, we developed and rapidly tested several strategies, inviting all stakeholders to share what we have learned so that they may invest in the future and prosper.

In the last few days, Spi Play (where I was previously a shareholder and Director), one of the “traditional” soft play equipment suppliers took up our offer. What was scheduled to be a two hour meeting took four hours; we discussed the changes that our presence has caused and how the market may evolve, both a threat and opportunity for an organisation such as Spi.

As previously discussed, “radical transparency” is likely the most controversial and difficult of trends that are resulting from our launch. The value-added by each organisation is laid bare (add no value and you will be eliminated) and all strengths, weaknesses and actions will be exposed to the market.

The essence of transparency for me is that each business must imagine that each and every communication, installation and quotation were being exposed to a capacity-filled Wembley stadium; future customers being able to judge each action and make informed decisions.

In reality, no organisation is ever going to achieve 100% satisfaction all of the time, at least in part because a positive or negative experience is in the eye of the beholder. However, what is important is that organisations engage with reviewers, encourage customers and employees to participate in the play community, allowing all to learn and share their experience.

In the case of Spi Play, I was pleased that they have responded to a recent negative review by calling the customer (who re-visited our site to say he was much happier), accepting that they dropped the ball in that particular case and then committing their organisation to valuing each star rating.

It is in the latter point that the role of the reviewer has commercial impact. Our algorithm means that each star awarded has real value in terms of pounds. This is because that more people each week are visiting our site (thanks again) as they start an indoor play centre and the worse an organisations overall rating, the lower they appear in our listings and the less likely future play operators are to make contact.

In an “eco-system” such as ours, each participant has an important role to play; ours is to provide an independent platform for information exchange; the suppliers is to listen, engage and contribute; the (prospective) play operators is to share their experience and use the information in making decisions.

In terms of advice for play suppliers and others (the offer for a meeting is always open if you would like to personalise the information and share our experience), this is a (very brief) summary:

- Participate with the play community. Share experience and expertise using our play forum (please don’t just make it an advertisement for your business) and by commenting on blogs; if you have insightful views, please tell us and we will publish them or interview you for softplay.tv

- Encourage your customers and prospects to review your organisation. If you have no ratings, not only are you at the bottom of the charts, play entrepreneurs are assuming you have something to hide

- Look to innovate by forming partnerships so that you can share the costs of R&D (more about this in a future blog); no one organisation is profitable enough to invest in developing the play areas that children dream about and play operators will want to buy. Participating in our play design competition is an alternative and low-cost method of innovating, contact us to learn more

- Consider exposing your value chain to the free market for comparison. For example, if you manufacture play equipment, consider listing as a components supplier so that people starting a play area can choose which elements of your proposition they want to buy. Transparency enables working with "best of breed" in each supplier category (e.g. maintenance, design etc) , invest and compete in each category to provide customers with genuine choice and value

This is an exciting and potentially prosperous time for the play industry; we hope more organisations continue to embrace the potential of the three philosophies that started it all.

ShareAndComparePlay.com is the Indoor Play Supplier Comparison Website that Saves Play Operators £10,000s. The only source of independent reviews on every Supplier to the Play Industry, ShareAndComparePlay.com works to revolutionise the Play Experience for Children and to enable Businesses to profitably understand and meet the future needs of Families.

Follow us at Twitter.com/shareandcompare or (Un)subscribe to our Blog by e-mailing us

FREE...What does it mean for Soft Play?

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson




http://www.shareandcompareplay.com/ started as an experiment to test the theories first outlined in this article http://tinyurl.com/556yld in March 2008.

The hypothesis was simple. Publish all we knew for FREE about the Indoor Play industry, explore opportunities as they emerge, monitor / apply feedback and see what happens.

FREE is a new, more open way of business that reflects a change of thinking as much as a new economic model. I can empathise with the fears that people / organisations have with regard to sharing information from which they have previously earned their living; however, I believe that by clinging to the status quo bigger opportunities are missed.

At Business School, you are taught to think strategically and plan long-term and this approach likely still has it uses. However, in the last eighteen months our business approach has had to become more adaptable, constantly in Beta http://tinyurl.com/6m5nlj; this experience is no bad thing in these times when the Macroeconomic landscape is changing as it is.

The results have been exhilarating and sometimes challenging whilst leading to untold opportunities and interesting results:

• Shareandcompareplay.com now lists over 80 suppliers of all descriptions for FREE (including the smaller companies that previously could not be found)
  
• Users (rather than us) review and rank all suppliers to help Play Operators choose the right supplier for them
  
• Information that was either tied to a play supplier or you had to pay for, is now available for FREE in a variety of formats
  
• We are connecting people in the Soft Play industry, sharing information so that we can together create the best possible play experience
• A sister company is soon to do the same for the Wedding industry http://www.shareandcompareweddings.com
  

In the last few days, the Book from which the article was taken (you can read it for FREE above or buy it here http://tinyurl.com/lbuune) has been released and a lively discussion has started at the Blog of the Author http://tinyurl.com/l387zt .

We will continue to share our experience from this experiment but the questions for play operators and businesses now include:

• What impact would it have on your business if a competitor started to offer some of your core products and services for FREE?
• Does your business model allow for flexibility and constant change?
  
• Is your organisation open to new opportunities and new methods of serving your customers?

If this answer is NO to any of these questions then perhaps it is time to re-consider your strategy; you just never know where it may lead.

Shareandcompareplay.com is the Indoor Soft Play Comparison website.

Follow us at Twitter.com/shareandcompare or (Un)subscribe to our Blog by e-mailing us at contact@shareandcompareplay.com

Soft Play & Social marketing, a report...

http://www.shareandcompareplay.com has started working with Indoor Play Centres to offer Web 2.0 Workshops to their staff and suppliers to explore the significant potential that Social Marketing has to help us transform the Soft Play industry.

The first of these free workshops took place on Monday 20th April at Parents Paradise http://www.parentsparadise.eu in Watford.

We were delighted with the attendance of eight suppliers that are new to Share & Compare Play. Each of these companies serves customers in the Soft Play market but they have had few potential routes to market until we offered to list them for free as part of our mission to help play operators find and learn everything they need to be successful.

Above are a couple of pictures of the attendees (the Group photographs were not the best); Chris Field from “The Noisy Drinks Company” proudly standing next to his machine and Chris Bartup from “Funtasia Design”, one of the quality orientated indoor play service companies in the UK.

If you are an indoor play operator and would like to partner with Shareandcompareplay.com and involve your suppliers in a Free Social Marketing workshop, please drop us a line at contact@shareandcompareplay.com.

If you are a supplier and would like to attend a future Workshop, please get in touch and we will check which is the most convenient for you to attend.

Thanks again to Lyn, Wendy and Rachael from Parents Paradise; we are more impressed each time we visit the play area.

Shareandcompareplay.com is the Indoor Soft Play Comparison website. You can subscribe and unsubscribe to e-mails with special offers and information releases by e-mailing us at contact@shareandcompareplay.com