Today is a big day.
We’re launching our new online space for Excio members and fellow photographers to start the next chapter of our community.
As many of you know we have our members-only Facebook Group, but the need and momentum for us to move away from Facebook has been building, and there are many reasons for this. Facebook as a social network (and now Metaverse?) has many limitations when it comes to growing communities and many people have become disheartened with it, leaving in droves. We feel we’ve also outgrown it and any steps we try to take require us to use more advertising, more tools and be caught up in more algorithms. We don’t believe this is the future for our community.
This new space is not on Facebook, but a desktop platform (or app if you want), that has everything we need to grow our community and provide you all the benefits of being a part of Excio in one place. This one place is the Excio Hub.
Our future and our solution is to create our own independent place we can all call home no matter where we are. One where we will always be welcome, can share content safely, meet other photographers and where we can invite our whanau, family and friends to follow our journey without them being paid members.
It’s actually a simple, positive reason for change.
There’s so much more we can do together in this new community space:
- Participate in groups and discussions we are interested in.
- Easily submit our work to challenges and competitions.
- Start private and public conversations with other members and follow each other.
- Organise and join events without leaving the space (you will see we’ve already planned our monthly catch-ups there!).
- Safely post our work among Excio members only in the private groups.
We’re excited to bring you together in our own dedicated space away from the noise, distractions, and political debates of Facebook, and create our own special world where we can:
- Introduce you to each other by location, by categories, and by the sub-topics you’re interested in.
- Organise dedicated “mastermind” groups for you to meet and explore with other members.
- Launch new online workshops and courses in the near future.
Now, like with any new platform we’re going to have to navigate this transition together. But this new space will be ours. It’s private, ad-free, and available on every platform with its own mobile apps (it’s powered by a service called Mighty Networks, which is like Shopify or Squarespace, and we have our own space for Excio Hub).
To start we have kept things minimal and simple: We have created a few first groups where you can start participating depending on your interests and what activities you want to join. So click here to join and explore (If you are already a member of Excio you will have just received an invite by email today 1 August 2022 with your link to join directly)
There will be lessons for us too as we develop this space, so we ask for your patience, support and ideas to grow Excio Hub together.
Here are a few tips on how to navigate our new Excio community space.
When you login, check out the Discovery space which has all currently active groups:
If you have an active Excio membership you will have access to all these groups - just click on any of them and see what it is about, create a new post and add comments:
Invite your friends and family - they don't have to be paying members to join free activities. Just click on the 'Person with a +' icon at the top for your personal shareable link:
RSVP to current events - we have started with our regular monthly catch-ups and will add more over the next few days!
