Couchsurfing’s strategy is “not sustainable”, concludes a Couchsurfing interim marketing consultant in a presentation given in San Francisco last Summer. “In order to keep cashflow, you would need to grow all the time”.
The consultant Mirek, also a CS-member, served at Basecamp from 16-21 July 2009 for Gadget and Matthew Brauer. The presentation of his ideas and conclusions can be found online (pdf, odp ).
Some Couchsurfing Facts from the presentation:
- CS has 15-20 thousand new users each week
- 5.6% of them pay verification fee of 26 $
- That makes more than 20.000 USD flowing in every week = ca. 1 mln USD a year.
- Expenses = 700-800 K USD
- 200.000 USD of surplus, and growing…
- Big Question: What to do with the extra money?
Mirek has some nice other nice observations about the organisational model of Couchsurfing. “Your present structure is based on a ‘family business’ model: tasks and responsibilities are ‘automatically’ assigned to people (mainly insiders).”
He advices to give it more structure, to have better defined functions and thinks it is a bad idea “to pay salaries to people staying [at Basecamp] up to one year, even if you have enough money. This would spoil the CS atmosphere and cause lot of formal (legal) obstacles.”
Interesting enough, Mirek explains to see donations as “a loan of trust”, which CS has to repay, “by improving the value you bring to CS users.” Couchsurfing should do that by “improving the website and services” and the organization, “so you are able to create a better product”.
It’s been a while I came across an interview or something related by Casey but here is an interesting interview on Shareble.net, a website devoted to increase sharing.
It contains a lot of general information about trust, history, the mission of CS and community democracy but Casey also speaks about the 2006 crash (“a turning point in the organization”) and how things evolved after that.
There was no infrastructure built for collaboration, but we had a lot of people who wanted to offer their help and energy. So we basically said, “If think you know what to do just get in there and do it.”
We later realized that there were problems with this approach. Specifically, we were not providing a lot of direction, and people had drastically different ideas on how they would like to see CouchSurfing grow. I was sending out the message: “Possibilities are endless and up to you. Whatever you think it can be, it is.” Unfortunately, what this created was a lot of chaos; competing interests and constant disagreement around the direction CouchSurfing should be going.
It took a couple of years to finally work it out and say, this is what our mission and vision are. I would caution people from the outset to clearly articulate what it is they do and where they are going, so that people have a shared understanding upfront. Community democracy offers a lot of opportunities to explore and experiment, but it poses a lot of challenges as well.
Seriously, since the beginning this is one of my most important dogmas for the HC: no official structure for decision taking. I will always discuss issues openly with the people involved and with knowledge to come to good decisions that are the best for the network. But the final decision will always be with me.
This excerpt is from an e-mail by Veit Kühne (dated, 19 Jan 2005) as an answer to a Hospitality Club volunteer discussion. It has now been published on Wikileaks. According to Wikileaks’ “Latest Leaks and Censored Media”, Hospitality Club founder Veit Kühne planned organizational dictatorship for life and the e-mail “describes his plans for the power structure of the club: a benevolent dictatorship for life”.
Three and a half years after writing this e-mail, Veit also publicly gave away his strategy for taking over BeWelcome, the democratic hospitality exchange network that was started as a result of Veit’s ignorance towards members and volunteers of Hospitality Club.
Read the full e-mail “HC democracy and strategy” at Wikileaks.
You could pretty much figure out by Veit’s unguided flame against BeWelcome last year, that his income through adds on Hospitality Club was already dropping. But now it appears that there are hardly any volunteers left at HC: these days it takes more than 4 months to get your profile approved after you sign up to become a new member. Nice one if you plan to travel the next day and just found out about hospitality exchange.
Greetings new member. We have just accepted you as a new member of Veit’s Club. It took us more than 4 months to have you approved but finally you (if you still remember us?) can connect with Hostility Club, one of the most friendly clubs on the internet and in the real world. – Slighly adapted welcome message that new members receive.
It might be sad to see Hospitality Club, the first online hospitality exchange service that we shared but also the one that is well known for its censorship-issues, ceased to exist beyond a plane website. But such is life if the so-called leaders simply don’t respect their members and volunteers.
What do you want to do with your life? What is your mission? This is what Casey and Heather ask you in the marketing video “Couchsurfing The Movie”.
We will choose three Missions and CouchSurfers to star as the subjects in our documentary “Couchsurfing: The Movie” (expenses paid! sic). This journey isn’t just about sightseeing, it’s about traveling with a purpose!
Maybe the idea seems good to the regular couchsurfer, but the status and funding of this project is completely unclear. The website is hosted by Entrip while the project is co-produced and created by Alexandra Liss, also the owner of the websites. In her CS-profile she explains it a little bit herself:
I met Casey Fenton, who recently commissioned me to create the feature length documentary “Couchsurfing: The Movie,”– loving life right now and all the possibilities that this journey will lead to…
In her profile she also mentiones that she is busy with raising sponsorships. It is unclear though what type of expenses and funding are related. Casey mentions in the video that flight-tickets are fully paid, but do people also get some pocket-money? And what if you go hitchhiking? It is also pretty insane to see Couchsurfing Inc. promoting unsustainable forms of traveling such as flying – by the way. And how much community money is actually going into this project?
Let’s see when this project is to start though. First deadline was set for December 15th but now it is January the 15th, according to csthemovie.com. Still, the site is not ready yet and you cannot signin, upload or for example “Rate Missions and Vote”. (See also the beta-site which is a bit further developed).
The video is great though. It makes you laugh, guaranteed.
If you want to know where the next CS collective will take place, just follow one of the CS bunnies. For two months now Pinkfish, has been traveling (with her expenses paid?) in a tropical wonderland, scouting a place for yet the next ‘collective’…
I’m traveling around in Costa Rica at the moment, in search of the perfect location/house for our next CS collective.
It makes you wonder, as you might think that after the CS leadership team settled down in San Francisco, they would be focusing on getting things done. But… on the contrary, they yet move again.
Changing the world, one decadent collective at a time.
Somehow, I always think it is funny when CS defines itself, knowing that whatever it says about being so wonderful and inclusive, doesn’t count for the organisation itself.
By the very definition of our mission, we have a commutation solution that is 100% inclusive. We invite everyone everywhere into the community: old, young, conservative, liberal, east, west, black, white, gregarious, introverted, rich or poor. The beauty of addressing a communications challenge of this nature—bridging cultural differences and building understanding between people around the world—is that the more diverse our membership base is, the more fully we will achieve our communications goals.
This excerpt is from the submission of Couchsurfing Inc. for the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), where Couchsurfing won the Award “for Excellence in New Communications” for Nonprofits November last year.
We operate on a shoestring budget. This has required us to become experts in distributing our workload to a large, often remote, volunteer work force. We currently only have four paid staff members. We have two approaches to make this happen: sophisticated online volunteering tools that allow hundreds of members to easily perform needed tasks such as individually greeting every new member, and responding to every member inquiry
If you feel like ranting protesting, comments go here.
We are just fresh in 2009 and CS finally launched its new feature: ‘News Channels’, one overview for all organizational communication towards all CS-member. It not only features the latest news from the organization and tech-news, it even hosts the earlier announced member-stories about hospitality experiences and also the news-letters that are supposed to arrive in your inbox soon again.
But what a completely uncoordinated launch this is. We’ve been anticipating this new features since a long while, and now that it is finally ready, you just have the feeling something is still not going right at the CS Basecamp. The only launch-news shown, dates back to news which is 4 months old, August and September 2008, and the thread on the communications channel that catches my eye the most is still the infamous ‘do we have a team?‘.
It could be just a simple lack of coordination but the impression you get from this launch is that volunteers are still not supported in the work they do. Imagine: you work hard on implementing a new system – or enthousiastic about writing news for the CS-members – but somehow you just don’t get the feeling you are receiving support from some key people to get this launched professionally. At the same time, while older volunteers are tired from their effort, there is a lack of empowerment of new volunteers, no news has been written, or the editors didn’t have access to the tools. Really, sometimes you just feel pity for the people that still work for Casey Couchsurfing Inc.
Anyway, let’s see how quickly this new feature will be used and how it will run. I just hope that somehow, the first news item will be a BIG apology from Casey himself about the 14,000 e-mails that got deleted corrupted while upgrading the messaging system last month, and an honest explanation why this took 3 days instead of an hour. Followed the next day by news about the 501c3 status, news about BaseCamp on the third day, new hires on the fourth, expenses and income of the past quarters on the fifth, and support for the OCS-campaigns on the sixth. Now that would be communication.
To many people’s surprise – especially supporters of the OpenCS campaign – CS appeared on the list of nominees for the Open Web Awards. CS was nominated mostly because of the efforts of Ambassadors. In the end -after a voting round of 4 weeks – CS didn’t win at all though. Out of the three finalists CS ended up… last.
For those who feel disappointed now, don’t worry… there might be another chance coming up soon for a another award. Some people even want to get CS nominated for the Nobel Price of Peace….
With CS getting more mainstream day by day, the culture of hosting might also be changing. Christopher Culver raises this interesting issue on the hitchhiking forum on Couchsurfing. “Does anyone else get the impression that the CS hosting community is becoming less friendly to hitchhikers? I was shocked when two of the hosts I stayed with this summer expressed their disappoval of hitchhiking, considering it ‘freeloading’.”
Chris also puts forward the question: “what experiences have you had as the Couchsurfing hosting community is shifting from a bunch of freespirited wanderers to everyday people with strict schedules and expectations?” And subsequently he concludes: “It feels like we are being forced out of our own community.”
This might be a very valid point. Couchsurfing, Bewelcome or Hospitality Club for that matter, are these still the networks of travelers supporting fellow-travelers? There are still lots of great hosts and travelers around, but somehow – due to the popularity of the network – it is also becoming more and more a network of people that are just looking for entertainment, other people to ‘party’ and get drunk with. Further to that, it does not necessarily has to be a coincidence either that the news-wire of CS has been full with party-events in the past couple of months.
But then again – on the others hand – CS still provides you a pool of lots of different people, which means you just have to be selective in picking the right host. Or like Sanne says in the same forum, “I guess my conclusion is: it’s not bad that ‘normal’ people are hosting, it’s just different. I think it’s a good thing that couchsurfing is turning into a thing for everyone. And yes, that means that you do have to put some more effort in selecting the right host for you.”
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