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We’ve built Echo to make it simple, fun and rewarding to trade skills and talents with others. If you’ve got any questions, you should be able to find the answer here.
Echo is shorthand for Economy of Hours, and that’s exactly what we are. It’s also the name of our currency – one hour is worth one Echo.
Anyone and everyone. Echo brings together people and organisations – including freelancers, startups, established businesses and not-for-profits – to create a community-wide economy of hours. The more you put in, the more you get back.
Whether you want to learn something new, start a project or grow a business, you can tap into our network of talented Echo members and start trading in time, not money.
Sign up online and create your profile - it just takes a couple of minutes.
Echo is open to everyone, everywhere. In a digital-first world, we believe in the power of offline connections and in-person support. We have hubs in a number of locations, where Echo locals can join a thriving community beyond the screen.
At the moment, our in-person activity is focused in London. We plan to grow Echo by working with like-minded partners who want to launch an Echo hub in their own location. If you’d like to learn more about this, drop us a line.
Echo is funded by a range of public and private sector partners, from local authorities to development corporations. This enables us to keep Echo free for our members to use.
We believe everyone has knowledge, skills and experience to share. You don’t have to be an expert to offer something on Echo - even a basic level of knowledge can be helpful to other members.
Here are a few prompts to get your creative juices flowing:
What do you love doing?
What do other people come to you for help with?
What skills do you have from your day job that might help someone else?
We know you’ll want to start accessing skills and help from other Echo members as soon as possible, so we gift all new members 3 Echos to get you started. You’ll see this in your balance at the top right of the screen once you’re logged in.
Search ‘People’ on the Echo platform to discover a wealth of skills and talents offered by Echo members, ready for you to tap into.
If you can’t find an Echo member with the skills and expertise you’re after, you can message our team and we’ll do our very best to connect you with someone who can help.
It’s easy – once you’ve initiated, agreed and carried out your Echo trade, you can send Echos within your message thread. Simply tap the ‘+’ button at the bottom of the message window. You can select the number of Echos and what it was for, and hit send.
You can also add a ‘thank you’ - this will appear on the Echo activity feed and on the other member’s profile. See it as a mix between a public thank you and a record of what you did. Thank yous help other Echo members know what’s happening in the community.
Yes. Our philosophy is to value everybody’s time equally. Every hour of help given by one member of the community to another is worth 1 Echo, no matter your title, skill or level of experience.
At Echo, the currency we use is time, not money. All skills and offers of help listed on Echo are available for Echo currency (1 Echo = 1 hour), not pounds and pence.
Our general guiding principle is that all services offered on Echo must have inherent standalone value – we discourage listings that could be perceived as ‘sales leads’ (such as free trials or one-off free sessions).
A nice side-effect of the Echo way of doing business is that the trusted relationships built often lead to collaboration and commercial opportunities off the platform - and that’s great news too.
For more detailed information on the shared values between our members, check out our Community Values.
If you can’t find the answer to your question, send us an email: hello@economyofhours.com