Building the Scaffolding of Contribution
Setting member participation up for success
The most important question in the Maxwell membership application (here if you’re interested) is “How can you see contributing to Maxwell?”
But our early efforts at actually facilitating member contribution were a spectacular failure.
When we first launched, our member contribution strategy pretty much amounted to asking members who among them wanted to throw a party or event, and letting them do whatever they wanted.
Invariably this would result in disaster.
Went Off The Deep End. A hired DJ blew out a speaker in the first week, other parties just didn’t have the proper controls on crowd, vibe, etc.
Caused Severe Event Anxiety. Members would throw brunches or dinner parties that were elaborate and get overly stressed out (“Will anyone come?! Does everyone like the food?!”), and often resort to relying on our staff to fill in the gaps, or end up throwing a sub-par event. After, scarred from the experience of how hard it actually is to throw a good event, they never hosted again.
Unappealing to Other Members. Just because you wanted to do a sound bath meditation doesn’t mean the rest of the members wanted to as well.
We realized we needed more structure.
My co-founder Kyle started talking about our job as building the “Scaffolding of Contribution” — what structures, rules and best practices do you enforce so that members are set up to succeed and make sure their efforts not only give them personal satisfaction but advance the club mission to build camaraderie among the members.
In retrospect this is kind of obvious — you don’t join a church and they go “however you want to contribute, knock yourself out!” — they have bible study you can sign up for, Sunday school you can volunteer at, a choir you can join, etc. When you enroll in University there are tried and true methods of getting involved, either a sports team, or the marching band or Greek life or the co-ops, no one goes “feel free to start your own sports team, we’ll give you the field.” (Unless you’re the ultimate frisbee team.)
Those institutions built the structure, the scaffolding of contribution, and let you slot into it, and we realized we had to do the same, and as we sorted through what worked and what didn’t we came up with a few principals.
Find Your Formats
We realized some obvious things early on — yoga or meditation sessions required a ton of furniture movement, tended to generate zero bar revenue (we are still a business and that matters) and were not things Maxwell was really built for — if you want to go to a Yoga class go to a yoga studio, they will deliver that product a lot better than we will, but Maxwell was built to throw the ultimate dinner party, hangout session and cocktail party, so we leaned into that and became better at saying no to things that just didn’t align with what the space was built for.
But we realized it went beyond saying no to pop-up Yoga classes — we asked ourselves what was the actual goal of a Maxwell ritual? The inconvenience of moving furniture aside, it wasn’t to provide a workout class — we’ve been adamant from the beginning about not leaning into the amenity flywheel, the purpose of the club, and therefore every event we put on, should be to provide an opportunity for camaraderie and community, an opportunity to connect, and importantly, connect with other members.
So we experimented with various dinner formats — buffet/self serve dining vs sit down dinner, catered vs private chef vs cooked by the members, open to guests vs completely closed vs guest limits, and realized that the format that accomplished our goals of member bonding was a members cooked, sit down dinner with a +1 maximum.
Maxwell can comfortably sit about 60 at several long tables in our Grand Room, but we’d occasionally have dinners get up to 120, which would lead to people fighting for surfaces to eat on. We’d make more money, yes, but in reality the amount of money we’d make from 60 extra people on dinner paled in comparison to other ways our business makes money, and as our goal was member bonding & camaraderie we decided forgoing that short term revenue was an investment and forced everything that was officially a Maxwell dinner to be sit down so people took the time to have an actual conversation with each other.
Catering the food was fine but having members cook not only allowed us to save money (that we passed onto members), but it was a group activity that bonded 10-15 members together as they went grocery shopping and spent a few hours drinking wine while they seasoned the chicken.
And we realized that if we went to all this effort and there was anymore than 50% non-members it didn’t do the necessary member bonding we were striving for — our members would just meet other non-members, and the membership camaraderie flywheel we were trying to create wouldn’t kick off.
We understood our goals and figured out the format we’ve started calling “Family Dinner” — our once a month, members cooked, open bar, one guest maximum, sit down dinner.
Build Rituals With Broad Buy-In
Early on we also tried to launch a few traditions that were close to my heart like Premier League Mornings (I’m an Arsenal fan) — we thought we could pull it off as something like 1/4th of our membership base follows European soccer. But when we really drilled down to it most of them didn’t follow “European soccer” they followed Arsenal or Barcelona, so instead of 40 or so potential club members as attendees on a Saturday morning, we’d end up with the 6 Arsenal fans who were interested, 4 of which were out of town or had a conflict during the Arsenal-Tottenham Derby, and I’d end up by myself with one other guy bro-ing out.
Maxwell is ~20% Jewish (and 2/3 of our cofounders including myself are as well) so we again thought that launching a monthly First Fridays Shabbat was a layup. But we found it more difficult than we thought as the young downtown Jewish community in New York is incredibly tight (especially post October 7th) — there was always another Shabbat someone’s friend had invited them to so we couldn’t always rely on our own members to power it (though they’d ALWAYS show up to the after party).
Almost any effort to get more specific on interest, ethnicity, etc. we’ve rolled back to either work with additional partners (First Fridays is run with a rotation of various co-hosting Jewish organizations) or we do it when there is high member demand (Euro Finals, U.S. Open Finals, etc.).
What worked was sticking to things that could appeal to 100% of the club and making those our tentpoles that we push to members and give them an opportunity to participate in.
Sticking to a dinner that wasn’t catered to only Jews, or rituals that didn’t ultimately appeal to 6 members of the club who followed whatever team was playing a big game that weekend, was important to make sure our efforts, and the opportunity cost of reserving a room, weren’t for naught.
Distribute & Atomize the Risk
Finally we had to de-risk these events as we came to realize that deputizing anyone to do anything independently was almost sure to fail — we had too many members approach us about doing a really cool party, we’d say yes, only to have them drop out last minute when work got overwhelming, or move forward and have attendance be anemic.
It was wildly frustrating — we were giving up other forms of revenue to make room for these member events and they weren’t being executed on properly.
So after we chose the rituals with the most buy-in and the formats that were most likely to succeed, we focused on building committees around them.
We now have a Family Dinner Committee, a Salon Committee, a Trip Planning Committee (for summer camp, ski weekends and more), a Party Planning Committee (for the big marquee parties) and the Membership Committee. They meet once every 1-2 months and help plan things asynchronously.
We realized that making sure a committee was bought into an event before we green-lit it, deputizing the entire group with joint responsibility once we did, and guilting people to not let their fellow members down led to more accountability and ultimately more successful events.
Outside of events, we also realized that one of the highest value ways to make members feel empowered was to simply entrust them with vetting new members. It’s de-risked contribution (worst case scenario the meeting doesn’t happen), and members loved having a say in the future of the club.
It took us a while to get here and it took us longer because we initially decided to empower members before installing these guardrails.
But now that we have them it’s unlocked a whole new level of enthusiasm.
If you think you’d like to join a committee . . .
As always, subscribe for more updates and follow along on instagram here!
David, Kyle & Joelle
