One of the things that makes Spoon so different from other companies that look like us is our focus on education and empowerment — and we’ve worked hard to build technology to provide both to our whole community.
Our tech team built a backend program specifically for our contributors and members. It’s called Secret Sauce, and it can help you form your community, manage your team, go through all kinds of online courses, produce content (articles, photos and videos), and get feedback on that content through analytics
*Note, the screenshots below are from the beta version that we’ll launch officially in the fall. If you’re a current member and you want early access to it, let us know!
It’s your home base.
Secret Sauce is basically your one-stop-shop for everything Spoon. As soon as you log in, you can see the current state of the Spooniverse, personalized for your specific role.
If you’re the leader of your chapter, you can see how many people are trying to join your chapter and learn how to approve them. If you’re a writer, you can see how many articles you’ve written and how many people have seen them. Whatever your role, we help you maximize it to meet your goals.
Manager your chapter.
Chapter leaders (editorial, marketing, video and photo directors) can use the chapter management tools in Secret Sauce to recruit new members, monitor the application process from start to finish, communicate with team members, log meeting minutes and event reports and oversee member activity and publishing.
Create content easily.
Writers, videographers and photographers all use Secret Sauce to create content from pitch to publish. While they’re editing their articles, contributors are able to optimize for SEO and Facebook, add locations, insert multimedia including gifs and original images, and eventually submit to their chapter’s leaders for feedback and approval before ultimately getting famous on the interwebs.
Our text editor (kind of like Medium) looks exactly the same while you’re writing as it does when it’s finally published. Our photo editor lets you tag your photos and submit them into our gallery for anyone in Spoon to use (and credit you!). Our video editor (which we’ll be launching in the fall) will let pros and wannabe videographers source footage from anywhere and build a story using our scripting tool.
Ultimately, we want to make sure that creating any kind of content is fun, easy, and (most importantly) a valuable learning experience.
Distribute content everywhere.
Once content is live and online, all contributors and members are given the opportunity to distribute to social channels, such as Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook, directly through Secret Sauce.
Get personalized feedback from analytics.
Just because you finished something doesn’t mean you’re done — now people can finally see your work, and you get to learn from that! Secret Sauce offers personalized analytics on what’s working and what’s not so all our members and contributors can enter the real world ahead of the curve.
Not only are our contributors able to access the total traffic on any given article, but they are also able to access the total amount of social shares and the main sources of traffic on those articles.
Interested in gaining access to this incredible resource?
Check out our Apply page for more info on joining yourself. Can’t wait to meet you!