You’re the executive or program director of a local downtown association or small economic development agency (EDA), and you have an overarching goal of building a strong community of local businesses, nonprofits and municipal organizations. You signed up for the job because you fundamentally want to impact your local community.
And you’re about to unleash the power of community even further with Community Gearbox. Directors like you are using our platform to collaborate on events and share resources, encouraging each other to buy, produce and invest locally.
Individuals like Jimmy Askew, who serves on the board of a larger downtown association, representing 103 downtown businesses, knows the importance of sharing and allocating resources between businesses and individuals.
To ensure Jimmy’s city reaches its economic development goals and can maintain its position as a great place to live and work, board members like Jimmy turn to Community Gearbox.
“We always emphasize our local community, and the focus and mission of Community Gearbox really resonated with us, which is why we chose them over any of the other generic asset tracking programs.” – Jimmy Askew
Three Ways You Can Use Community Gearbox:
- To track all physical assets
- To provide visibility of the underutilized resources that can be reappropriated or sold to other local businesses
- To connect like-minded individuals to tackle larger issues
1. To Track All Physical Assets
Following and tracking asset activity is critical to your ability to shape overall economic development strategy. And you might rely on excel spreadsheets, word of mouth, or long email chains to keep track of who uses what resource at any given time. But ever have something like a computer, or other valuable asset go missing after a larger community event? Or perhaps you lent out a projector or other type of asset to another organization within your membership base, and you don’t remember where it went?
Never lose track of another item again. You, like many other EDAs, can sign up for the Go Unlimited version of Community Gearbox, which allows unlimited members and items to be tracked within the greater network. The Go Unlimited version comes with a dedicated customer success team and facilitated onboarding process.
“I really enjoy the easy to use interface of Community Gearbox, how they helped onboard us, our very own dedicated account specialist. They took all of our excel documents and within 24 hours had uploaded all of our assets onto the platform.”
– Jimmy Askew
Jimmy continues, “And what’s really great, is that anyone within our membership base can sign up for a free account, join our community umbrella, and start borrowing the resources we have at hand. And I never have to remember where that item went.”
Every Monday morning, Jimmy looks at Community Gearbox to see what company or individual has been borrowing what resource, and knows that one of the microphone and audio setups is ten days late, and that three other groups have requested it. Or that their main conference room will be used in the next couple weeks for one of their local companies.
All of their own internal items and assets can easily be tracked and assigned to any of the 103 different organizations under their network, and many of these organizations have even started their own Communities within the platform.
And it’s just as easy for you to start tracking all of your assets as well.
2. To provide visibility of the underutilized resources that can be reappropriated or sold to other local businesses
And once you get to a certain level of adoption within your membership base, you’ll start to see how all assets are linked together within the larger Community. Now, when one of the small local non-profits is looking for a set of new office tables and chairs, it’s easy to see that one of the local startups is willing to offload them for cheap.
Or say that a local farm has extra equipment they would willingly lend to a fledgling new farm startup, you’d easily be able to see it and facilitate that transaction because all these items are clearly identifiable within the platform.
This proactive item sourcing, with Jimmy likens to “hunting, not fishing,” increases the speed at which its member organizations can jumpstart their productivity. Members are utilizing all the assets that would otherwise be sitting idle.
“And I can’t stress enough, we’ve looked at so many Asset Management Softwares, and none of them had the same peer-to-peer functionality that Community Gearbox has, which makes it feel a lot like Venmo. Our members don’t have to go to our ‘one’ guy, who managed our old asset management software. Anyone can download the app and just go.”
3. To connect like-minded individuals to tackle larger issues
And last but not least, you’re probably the consummate networker who travels across town to meet with individual stakeholders across the whole community. And you know that making the most informed strategic decision often requires getting the best and brightest in the same room. Now with Community Gearbox you can easily see what all your other member groups are up to within our app. Share resources, idea and talent.
“Community Gearbox has definitely made everyone seem much more visible, know what resources are available, including the talent within our neighborhood. I’m excited to see what big projects we can tackle next.”
– Jimmy
Interested in learning more? Email sales@communitygearbox.com for more information and one of our representatives will be in touch!