How-To Guide

Many cooperatives want members to engage more, and seek to increase input, communication, discussion, and “sense of ownership.”   This short memo suggests the best way to achieve this is to reverse the goal, and find ways for the cooperative to engage more with members’ lives and the things that matter to them.  In general, a plan for increasing member engagement should find an activity that will have broad appeal to members’ existing motivations, increase their ability to do the activity, and build triggers and rewards to cue and incentivize action. 

This learning and training tool has been developed for member education and board training about basic worker cooperative finance. It consists of a document and a set of linked spreadsheets that allow users to explore the relationship between the primary financial statements that are used for business reporting and decision-making.