As a member-focused platform, our team is always looking for feedback on how we can better serve our freelance community.

We recently carried out a survey to help us understand what platform features our members find most valuable, and which areas they believe we could improve on.

In this article, we share a brief round up of our findings.

A bit of context

Before we go any further, it’s important to note that we removed “finding jobs” as an option on the survey. 

We omitted this feature as landing paid jobs is generally the end goal for most freelancers and something that our other features tend to support. 

Collabs and showcasing work come out on top

When asked what platform features members find most valuable, collaborations (test shoots) and ‘showcasing work’ were the two most popular choices among our members.

On collabs, we were pretty excited with this feedback, as this is an area we’ve put a lot of energy into over the past few months. 

We’ve really focused on taking the pain and awkwardness out of test shooting by introducing new features to our collaboration tool and it’s been heartening to watch the increasing number of test shoots being posted as a result! 

We understand that many freelancers who have not taken part in collaborations before may be a little hesitant about joining one, so we’ve used Meetups like How to Plan and Organise a Test Shoot  as well as member interviews to help them understand the value of test shoots and how they work.

With regards to ‘showcasing work’, we hold our members' work in high esteem and enable them to share their work in a variety of ways across our platform - in their portfolios, on the projects page, through meetups or in our member interviews. We also regularly post our members' work on the Freelancer Club Instagram Page. 

Room for improvement

When asked what features Freelancer Club could improve on, our members highlighted ‘Showcasing work’ and ‘Meetups’

While we’ve created a range of ways to help our members showcase their work (as highlighted above), we’d love to hear your ideas on how we could further improve in this area.

With regard to ‘Meetups’, this is a recently launched feature and one that we’re quite excited about. 

We believe that the slower than expected uptake on Meetups, particularly in-person meetups, is largely down to the big C and the fact that we launched this feature right before the summer, which is always a bit of a silly season. 

While restrictions have been lifted, we’re aware that some members are still wary of meeting other freelancers in person and that the summer months tend to be a period when members are less available to host or attend meetups.

As we return to normality in the cooler months ahead, we believe that we’ll see an increase in Meetups being organised - both online and offline!

If there's a specific topic that you’d like us to organise a Meetup around, please let us know!  Want to set up your own Meetup? You can do so here. 

We’re really grateful to those who took the time to partake in this survey. We know our members are a busy bunch, particularly since restrictions were lifted, so we really do appreciate it.

It’s been hugely helpful to understand what our members are enjoying and what they’d like to see a bit more of. 

As mentioned above, if there’s something specific that you feel we could tweak or improve on with regards to showcasing work or meetups, we’d love to hear from you! Our Suggestion Box is always open and we’d love to hear your thoughts. 

If you want plan a test shoot or a meetup and need some help doing so, hop into our live on site chat box.

You can learn how to set up your very own test shoot by watching MEETUP - HOW TO PLAN & ORGANISE A TEST SHOOT. Read 4 ESSENTIAL TIPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL TEST SHOOT to help you plan a test shoot from beginning to end.