Who are we?
We’re a creative, women-led agency making animation, film, graphic design and digital media. We work only with charities, co-operatives, social enterprises and the public sector. Our studio is in Glasgow and we work across the UK and sometimes abroad.
What do we do?
We create campaigns, training & education materials and communications for social justice. We specialise in co-production: giving non-professionals a real creative role. We’ve picked up a few awards for our work.
Quick facts
| Website | www.mediaco-op.net |
| Industry | Digital, Media & Communications |
| Founded | 2004 |
| Turnover | £470,000 |
| Workers | 7 |
| Members | 6 |
| Who are the members? | Employees |
| Governance | Collective |
| Pay | Equal pay |
| Legal form | Company |
How do we operate?
We believe in equality so we all get the same rate of pay, and all cooperative members are directors of the company. The team meets at the start of each week to plan our work. We take formal decisions like reviewing and approving accounts at quarterly Board meetings. We have clearly defined roles on the team for project work, and a dedicated finance manager, but otherwise share out responsibilities.
Where did we come from?
We started in 2004 as a group of media professionals from broadcast TV, journalism and community video. We knew each other from volunteering on community projects and campaigns. We noticed a lot of flashy corporate video done for charities pro bono, usually with an authoritative male voiceover; or community video with great engagement but poor production quality. So we decided to set up a non-profit media co-op specifically to partner with third and public sector organisations and to blend supportive participatory processes, which foregrounded the voices of ordinary people, together creative, technical and editorial excellence.
Why are we a co-op?
It’s both egalitarian and motivating for us as workers to lead the co-op together.
Being a co-op means challenging a top-down model of social change where profits are deployed to shareholders or to make a business look good rather than to raise up the whole workforce as the company flourishes. Co-operation is an authentic, ethical and practical alternative to individualised social entrepreneurism and philanthropy.
We’re proud to be an established part of Scotland’s third sector for over 20 years.
Lessons learned
Setting up as a co-op seemed the obvious route for us: it fitted with our values and is based on democratic ownership and control.
If you’re a tart-up spend time working out how you want to work together as a group and what’s important to you. Test out scenarios. Model how you’ll work in practice. Then select the governance model that best suits who you are. We were advised to set up a ‘marketing’ co-op (as it used to be known) as freelancers but soon realised that in practice we were operating more like a workers co-op and should be employees. So we changed our governance. It’s not hard to do, and we only lost a couple of years’ trading history, but the hassle could have been avoided.
Being a co-op has plugged us into a vast international family of co-ops of all shapes and sizes and sectors. There’s a real sense of solidarity in knowing that together with other co-ops around the world, we’re working towards the same goals of a better society for everyone. That is amazing.