ed note: the below is an email sent to the Ada’s List Global community; in an effort to be as transparent as possible, I’m also sharing here. If you’d like to join Ada’s List, sign up here.
I’m entering month 3 of running Ada’s List full time and wanted to give an update on where we’re at, what I’ve been up to and learned, and what could be next. (background: my Ada’s List announcement)
In short, Ada’s List members are an awesome, brilliant, generous, friendly group of changemakers and I have so enjoyed getting to know you all better via our focus groups, survey, conference, and everything in between.
Digging in
Over the past few months, I’ve dug in and reengaged with the community — I’ve always been a member of Ada’s List (duh), but for the last 2 years I’ve mostly lurked on the list (because life) and attended the rare event. I have *so enjoyed* getting to know more of our members, both on- and offline. You are a fab, engaged community. Here’s an update on our membership numbers:
- 7800 members globally, completely organic, word of mouth growth
- 5100 in the UK
- On average, 500- 1400 women engage with Ada’s List community emails everyday
- Newsletter with 1600 people globally; 49% click-through rate
Our members are (the below is a few months out of date, but you get the 📸)
- 723 corporate board members
- 1861 C-suite or founders
- 16% of our members have 15+ years of experience
- 15% have 10–15 years of experience
- 28% have 5–10 years of experience
- 41% have >5 years
Our members identify as:
- 34% women of color
- 13% LGBTQ+
In summary, a mega active, engaged, and diverse community. Thank you to our members for your support these years!
Community Research
We also hired a UX researcher on a project to understand the community’s needs — she’s been holding focus groups and one-on-one sessions to better understand the overall Ada’s List experience, what we could do better; as well as more targeted research sessions/focus groups around onboarding and different audiences. I had the honor of attending a few focus groups here in London and it was awesome meeting up with so many of you, as well as hearing the good/bad/meh of your Ada’s List experience.
While the research is ongoing, I’m comfortable saying:
- Ada’s List members that are engaged are generally happy, grateful community members.
- Many of you run businesses within our community and lots of you have found jobs or hired an Ada.
- You want content that’s easier to manage (eg. ability to search for posts, be able to create/view posts by tags or keywords, to easily skim posts with a clear subject line)
- You want more thoughtful and targeted content on the list and you want more connection with peers (looking at launching a ‘founders’ channel for CEOs and COOs; we’ve launched the board channel).
- Our founders have asked for more support in running their businesses; we are looking into different ideas for this.
- The vast majority of you decided to join Ada’s List because a friend or colleague referred you — and you stay because of FOMO (which is both good and bad :)). We’ll be working to find more ways to keep you engaged.
- A huge number of our community members use our jobs channel either to recruit or to find a job themselves.
- You want more real life connection, so we’re examining cohorts and events.
- There is a lot of confusion about our onboarding process so we are working on improving it.
And, if you’re a long-term Ada you won’t be surprised to hear, but there are still many debates around which is the best tech platform to host our community. At this point we will remain an email-based community, as email adheres to many of our values — email is inclusive (no apps required), it’s decentralized (anyone can email), non-hierarchical, scales (there are close to 8k of us), and adheres to some of the most thoughtful online behaviors that we want to continue (generally, people pause to think before writing an email). That said, there are many things we can improve in terms of how we manage the volume of our 8k person community, so stay tuned as we tweak our ways of working.
The 4th Annual Ada’s List Conf
Saving the best for last — the Ada’s List Conf was absolutely unbelievable. Here’s a summary of the day and I’ll probably do another one in the coming weeks, as it has really stayed with me (3 weeks on!). But it was a very inspiring day full of the most friendly and supportive people who are passionate about our agenda. It was our biggest conference ever (close to 200 people!), the most speakers (22), and some wonderful, generous sponsors.
What’s next?
Over the last few weeks before Christmas, I’ll be focusing on hiring a couple of people to join the Ada’s List team to help focus on our member services, as well as spending some time on:
Our Partner Network has received a great response and we’ll be sharing more as that grows.
The Ada’s List Board Channel is open for applications; the founding members will be convening soon to come up with our mission and more.
Our researcher is wrapping up her project soon and we’ll share more details about what we’ve heard, as well as a summary of our member survey.
It’s been a fun ride so far — feel free to reach out if you have additional thoughts or comments on the above feedback@adaslist.co
