 Hello everyone and a very warm welcome. So, as Chloe says, I'm Carolina Barnes, the community specialist at JISC and I'm joined by my colleague Natasha Vinndale, who is Head of Engagement. Today, we will be tackling one of community's biggest challenges and that's around community planning and engagement. So what we're going to be doing today is we're going to be talking a little bit about how we approach community engagement and tackling this with a little bit of a new mindset so you can help overcome some of that planning burnout. We'll go through some tactics that we have found have the most success and you may be able to experiment with. We will mostly be using that chat feature, which Chloe explained earlier. You can find on the bottom right and we will have the opportunity to go into some breakout groups for a short activity so you can talk with each other and hopefully share some of your ideas. But before we begin, we would love to know who is here today. So can you all navigate to that chat icon and can you let us know your name, what institution you're from and what do you wish for your community in 2023 this year? So that can be a community that maybe you're managing or just one that you're involved in. What do you hope for your community space? So if you can find that chat feature, we'll just give you maybe 30 seconds to a minute to write in there your name, where are you from and what do you wish for your community this year? If anyone's having a problem finding the chat, just raise your hand or let me know. Hi there Eleanor. So you're hoping people will share more? Yep. Common problem we have getting people engaged, getting people sharing and interacting. Anybody else? Yeah, hi Sarah, that creating that sense of belonging is very important. The more we help people feel that I belong in the space. Hopefully that's more we're going to encourage them to get involved, get that engagement, get those interactions. That's what we're all striving for, isn't it? Yeah, getting some more useful information Chloe, really good point. And yeah, getting those interactions from Eleanor. Thank you everyone. So today we're here to share some of that thinking about ways we approach community here at JISC. So this is for you whether you are starting a brand new community from scratch or maybe you're trying to reignite an existing community idea that you have that maybe it's got a little stale and needs some new life. We hope that some of these tips can spark some ideas that you can take back to your institutions. So we build our communities to really bring people together, whether that's around a shared passion, a problem, one of your product or services. And when we do it correctly, our communities can really be that lifeline for so many that help remove those feelings of isolation and help you get that much needed support from like-minded peers. When we start a new community or try and mature something existing, it can be really overwhelming. We can have a million and one different ideas that all seem amazing. But in reality, they can be really hard to implement and get traction with. And it shouldn't be a surprise that community outcomes, they are really hard to predict sometimes. Hence, we don't always want to build too much without knowing we're on the right track. Sometimes what we think might work might actually have no, might not resonate at all with our audience, which can mean we've wasted a ton of time and a ton of effort. So building community can really seem like a maze sometimes where there are so many options and places to turn and go to. But you know there's something really special around the corner. This is where I would like to introduce the idea of the minimum viable community. So this is a framework that really rephrases how we approach our communities. And I like to think of it as nice little A-B steps to community. So I'm sure many of you will have heard of the minimum viable product. So it's that idea that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learnings from your customers with the least amount of effort. And you establish a really base minimum product and use this to gauge a response from your audience before you take it to a way that you think it's needed. And this minimum viable product idea has been adapted for the digital world as we now deal so much more with online services. So it's been adapted specifically for our online communities. Natasha and I were first introduced to this idea when we saw a lady called Rosie Sherry talk about it and other things at the Guild Community Summit in London last spring. If you're interested in community I'd strongly recommend joining the Guild Group. It's a great source of resource and inspiration. We were both really impressed with her ideas which struck a chord as I think too often we fall into that trap of over-complicating things. And in summary, Rosie's key message was you really have to talk with your community prospects before you start your community journey and the planning stages and you need to start small and begin to learn what makes them tick and what they need. So I'd really recommend also checking out Rosie's resources and we'll share all these links at the end. So by starting small and focusing on the conversations first, we find that we get inspired in completely new ways while helping build trust with those that are involved. And this is quite a drastic mindset shift from needing to plan absolutely everything up front to instead being more curious and embracing what's really important here is small scale experimentation. So often we can fall into the trap of thinking that with excessive planning, our community spaces will be all singing, all dancing from the very beginning and have that explosion of activity. When in reality, I think unfortunately that rarely happens. Communities are a slow burn and they take a lot of time to nurture and to grow. What's important is to keep in mind that all this small scale experimentation that you'll do should come attached to your community's long-term vision. This minimum viable community approach really helps us become much more human centred. I think that's really, really important, especially for our community spaces. It helps us come up with new ideas that really push our communities forward as we know that when it comes to community, everything can be a good idea until we actually have to put in the work. We can stop doing lots of those planning up front and instead embrace the small scale experimentation to find out what we're looking for is what has real value and really aligns with our community's vision and remembering it's those people and conversations that will inspire us in new ways and will help us form the great ideas and directions that will have the most impact. So what are the other benefits of using this minimum viable community approach? Your resources don't need to be stretched. Starting small is much less risky. You can create a much better understanding of your community member needs. It really helps you listen to what your members are actually saying and doing rather than making decisions from assumptions and falling into that trap of just not hitting the nail on the head. You can get feedback faster. You can receive feedback from your members. You can build on that. You can measure that and learn a much faster rate as you progress. And lastly, you can scale where appropriate. So when you find something that works, you can build on it and turn it into a flywheel. Now, what is a flywheel? I might hear you say. Now, this is a really handy tool I like to use to visualize some of your community actions and think about how they relate to each other and then how they can lead to lots of other activities. So it's a really nice visual framework and I love seeing visual things. It really helps me process and think about things in a different way. And all these activities ultimately, they're building to more growth and they're building trust. So here I have an example that works with most communities. I think this work with anything really which you could experiment with. So whatever your topic, you can research some relating industry news or summarize some of your community activity. Then you publish this as a blog post and that's quite a common thing. I think a lot of communities do. You could then adapt some of that content to publish as a blog. And then you can share it on your socials and you can repeat this so it becomes a regular task. So this flywheel is basically helping us look at that activity and see how it can build momentum. But then it grows. So from that simple action of writing a newsletter, we find that it creates lots more traction with other activities that all relate to that initial flywheel. And as you can see here on the right, the post might get lots of interest that you shared on social media and or the initial post might spark a workshop that you need to dig a little deeper into. You could get a guest speaker from the post on social media that you can invite to speak with your community. All these little actions can lead to other activities that ultimately helps you grow. So what we're doing with this minimum viable community mindset is really finding the smallest actions you need to organize and bring your people together. So be sure that you have a really clear vision and understand where you want to be and what your goals are. So you can start experimenting and review and build on those things that work really well. Like Mark Twain said, the secret of getting ahead is simply getting started. And the secret of getting started is breaking those complex overwhelming tasks that you might be planning into smaller manageable tasks that you can start to action. So before we go into a little bit more detail about different tactics with Natasha, we'd like to ask you in some small groups is to have a discussion between yourselves about what you currently have in your community spaces. Now, this might be a community that you manage. It might be just the community you're a part of and maybe you want to contribute to. So have a think about what your skills are, your knowledges in that area that you could start or help to develop the community space with. Okay, all right. I'm going to share my screen which is just taking, going to take me a couple of minutes. I want to get it right so I'm not used to that board. There we go. So I'm going to talk to you about engagement tactics. Here it goes, here it goes. So let me just, here we go. So before we get into how we engage people, I wanted us to get kind of a sense of how many people we think are engaged. So I wondered if you might be able to give me a percentage in the chat. So on every, you know, in our first community, how many people do you think will actively contribute to an online community by percentage? So by that, I mean to post something or reply to a post, do something active. What percentage of an online community do you think will do something active? Yeah, we've got some fairly low numbers there. Everyone's having a go. Okay, ooh, that's a bit more optimistic. So it's quite difficult actually to benchmark this because you don't get that much data. But so the standard, sort of, this is what's quoted a lot is the Nils Norman group talks about a 991%. So 90% lurkers, 9% intermittent contributors and 1% heavy contributors. So that's sort of 10% that a few of you talked about. I personally don't like the term lurkers. I prefer watchers or listeners because actually these people are really important part of your audience and they're quietly getting value from the community. So just because they're not posting something or contributing in that way doesn't mean they're not important. So to get another viewpoint, this is some figures from Ashley Friedlin who is the founder of Guild which is a professional community platform that I'm a part of. And he thinks on that he's looking at anything between two and 10% of contributors and 15 to 25% of people who are active. So that's actually, that might actually just be visiting the site. And then so, you know, that's still a lot of inactive people for any community. So I think what I'm trying to tell you is, is this is hard and you shouldn't expect masses of engagement. So I like to use gardening metaphors because I think community takes nurturing and it's not a building and they will come. This isn't the field of dreams. You need to tend the soil, weed, fertilize, talk to your plants, put the right plants together that complement one another. So it is difficult, it does take time but there are things that you can do. So what can you do to get that garden thriving? So I'm going to run through a few engagement techniques and from this, I'd then like you to think about what you might do new this year. So a lot of what I'm going to show you is based on teams because that is the communities base that we use. I've also got some examples from Guild which is a community platform that I'm a participant of. But I think, you know, most things can be applicable to different platforms and also don't be constrained by the platform you're using. Remember, community is a group of people, not a platform. So your people and your community might come together across multiple platforms. It doesn't all have to happen in one place for it to be a community. So first of all, I'd say, welcoming new members. So it doesn't have to be every day or every week but something regular to welcome people and tag them and encourage and engage is really useful. So this is an example from a community that I'm a member of on the Guild platform called She Has No Limits. It's a female professional development community. And each time the community manager does this, probably one or two people will come back and introduce themselves of the list. And then a couple of people might like it. So it's not everybody on the list will do it but those couple of people have crossed that hurdle. They've actually posted something in the community. Tagging people, which I mentioned in the last thing. So you can build tagged groups. You can tag whole channels in teams, for example. You can tag the whole community, you can tag individuals. By tagging, people are gonna get a notification. So there is a whole art to managing notifications but in most platforms, there'll be some sort of tagging and then that means that people get a notification. So it's worth thinking about how to use tags. You can respond to somebody else's post by matching up somebody else who could talk to them. So there's lots of great ways of connecting people through tagging. Also on that theme of the new joiners, the first time when someone posts, nurture them. Ask them a question, say thank you, make it a positive experience. Because remember also that other people who are doing that sort of post, they're seeing, your other potential posts rather are seeing that engagement. You don't wanna leave someone just hanging. Although saying that you also want ideally for someone within the community to respond to them. So it's about trying to continue that conversation. So polls, polls can be a really useful, low friction way of getting involved in the conversation. People don't have to do a lot. Their response can be anonymous or it can be open. And so this is an example on the screen here of something in our cybersecurity community and where they're doing a poll. I think that one of the more important things to remember with polls is that you want to create a conversation with it. So rather than just leaving it there, go back and go, oh, look, looks interesting. What's happening? This is what people are thinking so far. Anybody else got things to add? When it's finished, declare a winner of the poll, prompt conversation, try and make it more of a conversation than just posting it and leaving it. Short-scanable updates are useful. So this could be within the community or by email. So the examples here on the left-hand side is an email that I get from Guild with the latest posts. And then I have a little flick through and I'll go into the ones I find interesting. The example on the right-hand side is a digest that we posted in the team site. This was actually a team site that we had for the right at the beginning of the pandemic. And it was so busy, there was so much going on that it was really useful just to kind of have someone summarize the key points. And one of the things I really liked about this one is unanswered questions. So that we would always be like, look, this person's still asking about something, can anyone help them? So I think there's a few good things. If you're doing something via email, it's then bringing people back into the community. And even if you're doing something within the community, it just helps people to navigate. But I would say with anything like that, you wanna make sure it's really consistently regular. So of course, you're gonna use your community to share news, links, updates, resources. But I think it's important that when you're sharing stuff, you're also giving an opinion or asking a question, trying to make it an opportunity for collaboration. So an example here on the screen, again, another community I'm a part of at the Guild platform. So Michelle here is talking about a report that's come out. She knows it's important, but she's not ready yet. So she's going, I'm not ready yet, but I think it's important. And she's going, would encourage you to read it, gather your thoughts, contribute. Because she's understanding that actually, if we all have a look at this, you might be able to pull out some interesting things between you. So I think that's a good example there that's done well. Shared milestones. So reaching a number of members might be a milestone. So that's what the top of those two examples is on the slide. Or reaching a time, perhaps a year in operation. Or you could also be celebrating a special day that's relevant to your community. So the second example there is quite a slightly comical one though as well, happy mobile apps in scope day everybody. So that's our accessibility community. And that won't be something that everyone would have been looking forward to, but something that everyone has got to manage. So it's quite, she's done it in a, Kelly there has been a slightly cheeky way of going, hey, this is like we're all working on and reminding people of a legal deadline coming in. And it's those sorts of moments of sort of togetherness that bring you together. So emojis, gifts and stickers. So images tell a story and enable engagement. It helps be more human. So although we are in work environments, being human, that helps us communicate and it's what communities are made of for all people. And so I thought actually, just to give me a moment of reading from talking, perhaps we should have a little conversation with some emojis today. So I had a little look at a blackboard and there are emojis enabled within the chat. So I wondered if everyone wanted to go and pick an emoji that perhaps best represents their week or their mood today. And I'll have a sip of water. Oh, yes, lots of snoozy January. Oh, Caroline is juggling. Oh, we're about to having a party. And Sarah's very wide-eyed. Oh, but it's Friday, indeed it is. So I hope that, you know, you see Dan's thinking. See, we all know what these things mean. And yeah, it's fun. You can also do some quite fun things with Rehubar. Just be careful with it. But I think it is appropriate even in these sort of professional environments. So my next tip. Vary your content. Think about different things that you can post in your community. Video, images, audio, there's lots of little tools out there and maybe that will just make things more interesting for people rather than just text posts. And now we get a bit deeper into kind of real collaboration. Ask for advice. So gather the shared knowledge of the community. What's interesting about Liz's example here, is that Liz actually starts a conversation in July and it's still running in November with people contributing over several months. She's asking people for tips about setting up new library spaces. What you did with the space and he might have done differently. People like sharing, but it helps when they've got a question to answer. And also, I think, you know, you need to create that environment where people don't have to be experts. They're just sharing their experience and that can be really powerful. So there is a kind of another example of where that becomes sort of co-creation, if you like. So this is posted in a professional community leaders community, very matter, I know, that I'm a part of. So Ashley here talks about the power of using good questions, which is also a very good tip. And he's looking to create, create a list of good questions. So in his post here, he's highlighting the expertise that lives in the group. He's starting the process by giving people a bit of a list of some ideas and he's asking people to add to it. So I think, again, you know, a good example. And hopefully, you know, when we share the slides later, there's some quite nice questions there as well because there's something about being a community facilitator where a lot of your job is about getting conversations started and good questions really help get conversations started. So next outreach. Numbers matter. You know, if you've, as we talked about in the beginning, if you've only got 10% of your audience contributing, you want that 10% to be a decent sized number. And that said, you know, there is a space for niche communities and you don't want to reach out to everybody because you want people who are actually interested in the topic. So not all communities will lend themselves to having a thousand people in them. And those smaller communities, sometimes you get, I think, a higher level of participation because people are more comfortable there. So, you know, it's like with most communities, it's not one size fits all. But one of our business communities is our accessibility community and we've got 1,300 people in there now. So, you know, that means that on a monthly basis, there should be at least 100 people doing something, writing something in there, which, you know, leads to a very busy, bustling space. So it's always worth thinking about how can you gain more of the right people in your community. The little snippet of the image there is from a maturity model that I can share. And he talks about life cycle stages that actually moving from inception to establishment of maturity, you need the increase of members. So different, you know, think about, as Carolina said, the contacts you have access to, the channels you have access to, how you can bring people in by hosting something, an event, and then the outcome is that is come and join the community. Having a, you know, a newsletter that's not the community newsletter, but a wider newsletter that perhaps you can advertise in and other places is, you know, you can spend a lot of time talking about outreach, but it's just right for this just to remember that it's something you should be doing. And then another big topic that I'm not going to try and cover, but it's worth talking about is meetups. So we could have a whole session about what a good meetup looks like. But I would say probably for most of our communities, when we've established a regular, usually monthly meetup, different communities of different things, that has been the biggest kind of powerful thing for driving engagement, driving new membership, and kind of having that energy that a group needs. Sometimes actually we find that the meetup is the amount of people want to do, and we don't get as much sharing in online spaces. But if you sort of trailer it well and take themes out of that conversation and put them back into the community as questions, you know, it can create a lot of content and engagement opportunity for your group. There's also really, you know, you've got to make sure those meetups are actually relevant to members. There's also really topics that members think are interesting. So we often work with a steering group for our communities, so that helps us determine so that the community is determining what the community wants to talk about. But we also do things like regular polling to actually find out what people want to talk about. And it doesn't have to always be loads of work. It doesn't have to be a presentation scheduled in. It can be just an opportunity for the conversation. So then really, you know, in formal coffee chats, you know, some structures useful, some facilitation, but it doesn't have to be loads of work. So what I would say kind of in conclusion is whatever the tactics, because there's lots of different ones to try, be brave. There's not much risk here. Try something new is good. Try and be consistent. People do like having regular things happening at regular times, and they'll be waiting for them. And be human. So, you know, that's what pulls us together is being human beings. So that's the tactics I wanted to share. And I wanted to kind of end on a question of what will you try in 2023? Now, we've got about 10 minutes left of the session. Do we want to, Chloe and Carolina, do we want to do that kind of, have that question as a conversation? Do we think? Should we do some breakout rooms for sort of five, seven minutes to see if people want to have a chat about the different tactics I've just shared and what they might then therefore try into 2023? So I'm going to hand back over to my colleague, Carolina. Thanks a pleasure. Yeah, so we, or just Natasha and I, we're really keen to try and find ways that we can support all the communities out there across education and research. And we'd love to find out what is out there. So please get in touch, whether you need help promoting maybe a new event or are looking for a speaker or you want to get involved on a JISC mail list or you want to just have somewhere to promote your community with a slightly wider audience. We'd love to hear from you. So we've got a link to this Get Involved page and somewhere that we can share where you can still inform to let us know if you need more support. Jack, I know we spoke briefly earlier. We get to hear from you as well about your community and ways that we can help you. So before we close today, does anybody have any questions? Oh, Chloe's just put a little plug in there. That was my commitment to action, but also obviously it's related to Amplify Fee as well. And we did a little survey to see, to kind of like take stock of where we're at with the Amplify Fee. And if people do have, on a Friday afternoon, I'd really appreciate your help. Chloe, someone's asking if you just repeat about sharing and tweeting. Oh, yes. Dan, if you just use the hashtag Amplify Fee and then also tag the disc as well. So I'll pop that in. Thanks, Chloe. Then yes, that'll be fantastic. The only kind of like restriction was please just try and avoid screenshot in or put in a screenshot where there's chat in there because obviously, you know, it's got people's personal information and stuff. So if you could just avoid putting a screenshot that includes chat, that would be fantastic. Thank you. I'd really appreciate that. Hope that helps. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us. And we put loads of links in the chat while you were in the final breakout. So do take a look. And yeah, you know where we are. Thanks for your time, everyone. Fantastic. Thank you all, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Natasha as well. Bye. Thank you. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye, everyone. Oh, links will be sent out afterwards in e-mail too. I'll make sure that happens in case you haven't got them. Thanks, everyone. Have a good weekend. Okay, then thanks, Chloe. We're all ahead of.