Lounjee is a community platform that helps you engage your members.

If you organize a community (or want to do so in the future), then you will need an online platform to help you engage members.

You may have a community today or have thought about building one in the past. You won’t be surprised to learn the single biggest blocker that prevents people from building an engaged community – resources.

Lounjee connects your members individually to each other. This means that your community engagement stats are growing – literally while you are sleeping in bed at night. Because each Lounjee member has a very rich profile and we proactively suggest members to other members who are a great match, each member will benefit from their membership – even if you have zero hours or budget for community management.

Want to hear the irony of the situation?

Being able to “unlock” the network in this way and find perfect individual members to connect with – that can help you as a member – that’s exactly what members value the most as well.

Lounjee connects members of your community on an individual level.

But that’s not all we do. Our platform gives your members the match-making outcomes, chat functionality including group chats, activity feeds (i.e. forums), chat channels (similar to Slack), events and more.

As an organizer, the platform gives you an admin dashboard, a single platform for all your hybrid, virtual and physical events, the ability to create chat channels, group chats, broadcast messages, manage event registration and ticket sales, view metrics and analytics and manage the community from a single place.

Both.

Lounjee is built primarily as a platform for communities - designed to help members connect effectively.

We have a full set of event functionality - a full event agenda, attendee management, ticketing, sponsor/exhibitor portal and more.

Some of our clients use Lounjee to power their communities and enjoy unlimited events within their annual community package. Some of our clients are event organizers who choose Lounjee because it has all the features they need – and is optimized for building true connection and networking.

There are two main elements that make Lounjee unique.

How members connect. Lounjee connects the members of a network based on their professional goals and interests (with AI-based matchmaking). This matchmaking will suggest members to each other and explain all the good reasons why they should connect. This simple approach has a dramatic impact when it comes to building and engaging the network.

How networks are built. Lounjee gives you a platform to create a private community. Only members you allow can join and only you can communicate with your members. Because members can belong to multiple communities, you can also create spaces that members can optionally join that involve a wider community (for example, we have such a space for the Berlin University Alliance of 9 universities).

This can be a game-changer for you.

Let me illustrate with an example. We have a number of Plant Breeding communities that choose to be related to each other. This means that each new community can offer its members access to thousands of experts for networking – what a way to get your community started. Get in touch to discuss what other ‘networks of networks’ we are currently working with.

A vertical network (or thematic network) is a targeted social network of people who share a common interest or proficiency.

Some communities are primarily for experts or members of exclusive groups to exchange with each other. Other communities resemble more of an ecosystem – for example Plant Breeding experts, academics, students, PhDs, journalists and so on. In both cases, there is a vertical or theme/interest which binds all members together.

Lounjee matches members of a community based on purpose .

Rather than matching solely when 2 members have something in common (e.g. “both interested in entrepreneurship“), we match members who can help each other.

For example Tom “looking for a job in the Biotechnology industry in New York” could be matched to Mike who is “hiring people in the Biotechnology industry in New York”.

Lounjee takes an algorithmic approach. This means we:

• Ask each member what they are looking for
• Show each member the best matches for them
• Show the reasons to meet a given match
• Enable connecting and chatting in an instant

In this way, Lounjee helps a member discover the other members of the community that they should know but do not yet.

It is our belief that the value of a community is the sum of all the individual connections and collaborations within it. We seek to connect members to other individuals in your community. This 1-1 connection is different from just chatting in a forum (we have that too!) – because it builds deep, authentic connections between members.

Growing and building a community is hard.

We have some examples where we facilitate the structure of an existing network and some examples where a community has come to us and we have helped them develop a network by identifying related groups of mutual interest.

For example, the UNA Europa is a group of 8 leading research universities and La French Tech is a network of 300k members in over 200 cities representing members active in the French tech scene. We create a group structure in Lounjee to allow admins of each individual group to engage their community only and a parent group for engaging/messaging/inviting all members of the network to events.

We also have communities that are active in biotechnology or digital nomad communities for example that we put in touch with existing groups (and sometimes reach out to new outside communities) so we can build a genuine ecosystem in Lounjee. Though these communities come to us on their own, we connect their groups to others of interest when requested to do so, turbo-charging their growth, engagement and value.

Author Peter Block famously said “change in the world happens one small group at a time” and we have optimized the Lounjee platform to enable pods of members with complimentary skills to form and collaborate effectively.

Here are a few ways we facilitate this.

Group Chat – each member can quickly browse, filter and search for other members of their community and invite a small group to join a chat. These member-created group chats enable any member to form a small pod of people to engage in a discussion or begin to collaborate on a project. Because these groups are formed “bottom-up”, the grass roots of the community and its desire to achieve certain outcomes will emerge.

Multi-Person Meetings – groups of members can book calls in the platform. There’s no need to open Zoom or Webex and send invite links – all of this is Lounjee functionality built into our platform. A member just needs to know who to invite and then click “start meeting” at the appropriate time. Members can share files, images, chat and can share screen and have video calls with gallery view (see everyone). If the group wants to re-connect, they can just restart the call anytime. The meeting is persistent, meaning that the files, images, notes, chats and other materials do not disappear when the meeting is over but rather persist to enable small groups to truly have a space to collaborate over time. Members can be added to meetings before, during or after a call as the members choose.

Breakout Rooms – Lounjee breakout rooms are also persistent. This means that after watching a session, the organizer can break people up into groups and when the breakout ends after a fixed number of minutes, each member can go back to retrieve shared files and continue to collaborate after, connect to the individuals or start a group call with the participants at a later point.

Yes. We are fully GDPR-compliant and have a secure platform with full data encryption and robust data protection. Email us if you want to talk about it in further depth.

We sometimes get requests from “creators”, that is people who have created courses or exclusive content that they want to sell to paying members. They ask if Lounjee can manage this.

There are other solutions like Teachable which are cheaper that will do a fine job at this, and we would point you in that direction. Creators want to offer a community solution so that their paying students can comment or ask questions in a forum as well as accessing the course content. This isn’t really what we do.

Lounjee focuses more on identifying which members of a community should connect and have 1-1 chats or video calls as they get together to help each other with their work goals, career goals or task-based scientific, corporate or charitable projects. For this reason, we have many clients from scientific groups, expert groups, university groups, consulting groups, not-for- profits, startup incubators and so on. They want their members to connect and collaborate.