SPEAK’s replication model is similar to a social franchising, where SPEAK shares the brand, tools and knowledge and provides support to the SPEAK founders in exchange for a starting fee and a small royalty on revenues.

Commercial franchising has the goal of generating profit whereas a social franchising, has the goal of making a positive impact on society.

The following characteristics are important when considering the city where you want to start a SPEAK chapter: cities where diversity is a reality, where there are migration flows and where more than 6% of its residents are international.

As a founder you will be the project manager of SPEAK in your city, meaning you will be the one bringing people together by organizing language groups and events. Founders are the changemakers who create impact within their communities. They are people who deeply care about promoting the understanding and embracing of diversity and democratizing language learning.

During your first weeks as a SPEAK founder, you will take part in an onboarding training consisting in a combination of videos, documents and tools to help you master all the information you need to manage your SPEAK chapter. You will also have a dedicated point of contact who will meet with you to make sure you have everything you need to be successful, as well as access to SPEAK’s management platform where you will see the activity in your SPEAK chapter in real time, as well access to tools to create and manage your language groups and cultural exchange events.

SPEAK currently uses a pay-what-you-want model, meaning that participants can choose what to contribute to join language groups. SPEAK cities have a gross margin of 75% on language groups contributions.  Also, SPEAK Central Team relies on philanthropy and on B2B sales with local companies. If you want to bring your SPEAK chapter to the next level and you want to make it sustainable we are willing to support you sharing our knowledge and experience. In the case of other revenue streams SPEAK chapter gross margin will be 85%.

We have a dedicated page here that explains the different steps of the application process to start a SPEAK chapter.

After the application process, SPEAK founders immediately start an onboarding process that last up to 8 weeks and that will give them the opportunity to start working on the project while learning and acquiring knowledge. By the end of the onboarding process SPEAK founders will have a full knowledge of the project and will be able to independently implement it locally.

This will be a trial period of up to 8 weeks where we can assess the viability of opening SPEAK in your city. During this period, SPEAK will support you through your first steps and challenges as a potential founder. Once all the steps and challenges are met, we will close the agreement for your SPEAK chapter.

SPEAK cities sign a social agreement together with the SPEAK central team as soon as the onboarding is complete. The social agreement is a document that set the responsibilities, the rights and the goals of each contracted part. You can sign the agreement either you are a group of founders (individuals) or an organization.