Naming a worker coop - how did you choose your name?

Questions
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Dear all,

Our Therapy Worker Cooperative project is progressing and we recently completed our business plan. We intend to present it to local councillors in the hope of acquiring a lease for unused council property in which to have our therapy-centre premises.

We are now at the point of needing to chose a name for our business, on which to build our brand etc.

We were hoping our fellow worker coops could give us a steer by sharing how you chose your name: if you had any particular process through which you chose your name and the branding-design you build upon it.

Thanks in advance!

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I would start with establishing your brand values then using them to test names you come up with (btw some will be great, some awful, some will seem great than tarnish with time, and always consider the acronym if you have more than two words). Consider what you want to tell the world about your co-op. How you want the world to see you. E.g. If you want to be seen as serious, a gimmicky name is not going to work.

On a lighter note, I always think of this sketch when people are choosing names. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoACQCJWx10

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Thanks so much, Nathan - really helpful and enjoyed the Peep Show comedy!

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wellbeings.coop ?
b x

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Thanks for this - in the end we went with Common Ground Therapy.

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How did you come up with the name, in the end? Just thinking this is a really useful question because almost everyone will have had to come up with a trading/legal name at some point - and sharing migth help others! :slight_smile:

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Absolutely.
The short answer is that we used Loomio.
The 3 of us brainstormed individually then chose 3-6 potential names and provided an explanation for those names or the results from any testing we did with family, friends and contacts.
So we have 17 options in the end and put them into a Loomio ‘Score Poll’.

9 options scored 0 points.
6 options scored 3-5 points.
The top 3 got 6, 7, and 10 points respectively so it was quite clear which was the best option.

Only 2 out of 3 of us did the score poll.

In total it took about a week.

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Interesting, good idea to use Loomio..

We used a similar but less technical system when we came up with a name for our new building for SCD . We chose Jessie Eden.
We had time to all submit ideas. We collectively had an idea of what we wanted it to be to start with. We discussed options at a few general meetings and then set a deadline by which we had to choose, and then were lucky to come to concensus.