Pinayista Virtual Headquarters

Context

Our team has been working with Gina Rosales' (virtual) events company, Make it Mariko, on holding corporate events for quite some time. Being familiar with Gatherly, Gina sought to use our platform for her nonprofit, Pinayista.

Pinayista is a nonprofit community collective, with a stated mission to "create spaces where self-identified Pinays can come together to share their stories, cultivate and nurture trusting relationships, collaborate, and build sisterhood in the hustle."

Unable to connect with members in a physical space due to COVID-19, Gina thought of an innovative way of using Gatherly. She looked to use the platform as the Pinayista HQ— a place where members of the community could gather to co-work, chat, or even share a meal together!

To make the Pinayista HQ a reality, Gina needed:

• A virtual space that would recreate the ambience of a physical venue
• The ability to fully customize aspects of the Gatherly platform
• A persistent HQ that would be available for months

Setup

Helped in part by her familiarity with the Gatherly platform, Gina was able to create a highly branded virtual venue on Gatherly. The Pinayista HQ contains multiple floors, a custom PDF brochure, as well as white-labeling.

Over time, the Pinayista team was able to further tailor the virtual space to their needs by adding and changing an event password and by experimenting with different custom maps. Below are a few examples of maps their team designed:

During the larger events (upwards of 300 unique attendees) that were hosted in the HQ, members of the Pinayista leadership team used admin features such as broadcasting as well as the news tab to communicate updates and announcements to all attendees.

All in all, the Pinayista team used the following Gatherly features to bring their community together online:

• Event brochure
• White-labeling
• Password protection
• Custom maps
• Broadcast
• News announcements

Results

For the past few months, the Pinayista community has thrived online thanks to their virtual HQ. Everything from office kickoff parties to casual hangouts have been hosted on the space. Here's what Gina had to say:

"Gatherly has helped our Pinayista team build a global community online during a time when deep connection is needed the most. The Gatherly team has been so easy to work with, they are super responsive to our needs, and are so focused on creating engaging attendee experiences. Using Gatherly, we've been able to create the FIRST global virtual office dedicated to collaboration and engagement with our Filipina women-of-color community." - Gina Rosales, Founder of Pinayista

To date, Gina and her team have customized the Pinayista HQ extensively, bringing in hundreds of unique attendees per month.

We look forward to working with non-profits as they aim to maintain a sense of community during these trying times.