After getting back into the usual groove for the month of November, we took December to wrap up the year and end it on a good note.
Since time is hard to grasp this year, we wanted to take the month to reflect on what we have done and where we have gone in 2020.
So, for the length of December, we reflected, thought bigger, and planned on how we can take the good we gained from 2020 into 2021. The following reviews these Roundtable Calls, Network programming, and other conversations...
December in TheCR Network: Roundtable Calls
Our first call of December focused on the reflecting part of our goal as we explored the different conferences and virtual events we attended, facilitated, and were a part of in 2020.
On "Community Conferences Year in Review: 2020 & The Shift To Virtual", we discussed the key takeaways, the good ideas, the challenges, and the ideas we noticed after a year of virtual conferences and events.
Several attendees had run their own virtual events and many had to shift in-person events to virtual events in the past year, so instead of focusing solely on reviewing conferences we attended, we wanted to make space to also talk about how people are approaching virtual events, especially exploring what we could be doing better or more efficiently to make virtual events more valuable for attendees.
While consensus was that we still don't have a perfect answer in terms of tools or overall structures (there are pros and cons to longer, spread out events as well as shorter, more intensive events), we did find that we all appreciate when we have time built in to reflect, learn, and connect with others. One main challenge seemed to occur when event facilitators seek to create "hallway spaces" or to find ways to bring people to connect in the virtual space.
All in all, though, we could use any tools and any structure, but if we do not know and keep the purpose of our events in mind as we create and manage them, we will miss the true value. While we may not have many answers at the given time, we do have much more to explore and more questions to ask to explore these areas.
If you want to catch up on this call, you can find the Roundtable Report here.
On our second Roundtable Call of the month, "Community Reflections Panel: Past, Present, & Future", was a conversation between a panel of members: two of whom are relatively new to community and two of whom have much experience in the space. This call was part one of our two part series on this topic and focused on four members based in Europe, but with global communities.
There has been much to talk about in terms of challenges occurring over the past year, but we also wanted to use this space to bring together different perspectives (use cases, experience levels, etc.) to show that, even though we have many differences, we also have much in common.
Many of the members on the panel saw an increase in membership at at least one point in the year, which means that they also dealt with an increase in expectations and need to build a valuable community. Members discussed how they had to adapt to this increase in attention and need and how they had to adapt their own engagement strategies in order to build and grow that value for all of these members, new and old alike.
While again, we just opened the floor to this conversation, we found a lot of value in looking at our commonalities through the lens of our challenges as well as progress made.
If you are interested in listening in to this call, you can find the edited Roundtable Recording here.
Our next call was part two of our two-part series, "Community Reflections Panel: Past, Present, & Future", in which we heard from another couple of members, one who is relatively new to community and one who has spent many years working in community. This conversation was moderated by another member who is new to community and focused again on our challenges and commonalities in order to find places where we can work collaboratively to move the industry forward.
While we did discuss proud moments as well as challenges, we also got to see the passion of two different community professionals with vastly different levels of experience, but both with immense love and care for their work. We saw similar struggles (getting buy-in and advocating for yourself and the profession) as well as overall challenges for the space (breaking down siloed working/organizational structures), but also heard some amazing wins (800% growth in engagement in an internal space post-lockdown and successfully advocating for Community Managers for every new community launched!).
This all helped remind us that we are in this together, no matter how much experience we have in the past. We, as professionals in the community space, can work collaboratively to grow our work, and we need to bring this drive, passion, and (dare I say it) optimism into the new year.
If you are interested in listening in to this call, you can find the edited Roundtable Recording here.
Our last Roundtable Call of December, "element14 Presents: A Community Programming Case Study", was led by @Dianne Kibbey who walked through the process of how she and the element14 team created and launching the "#badass women makers and engineers contest" with the goal of finding new talent and allowing women to show off their talents in the online community.
Through hearing more about the programming, there were a couple of key themes that kept coming up as advice, suggestions, and successful strategies: keep it simple and make it broad.
With a global community, these kinds of programming need to be accessible to everyone in order to get that wide-scale engagement that Dianne was looking for, so, by keeping it simple (streamlining the voting process and communicating that it did not need to look "professional") and making it broad (allowing members to determine what they showed and to what degree), the outcomes were only good. Even if the members did not win the contest, they were then in the community engaging and sharing, which is an amazing value add. Because members were allowed to define their own submissions in a way, it made the contest more accessible across the globe and encouraged people who tend to feel marginalized in their spaces the chance to get the attention.
While this kind of programming may not work for every community, every community manager can take these key lessons to heart.
If you want to listen in on this Roundtable Call, you can find the Roundtable Recording here.
In a new programming experiment, we also hosted our first Roundtable Watch Party, "Priya Parker & The Art of Gathering", as our last event before the end of 2020. This Watch Party was launched as a way to rewatch some of our past events with a new (or returning) audience. We did not facilitate, but actually just allowed for any natural conversation. For some of us, this was a rewatch and, for others, this was an opportunity to watch this conversation for the first time.
Regardless of how many times we heard this conversation, there were still some amazing key points to be gleamed and remember as we navigate our own end of the year gatherings. First and foremost, gather with purpose. Without purpose, you are not creating meaningful meetings, and the purpose will be different from what you might have done if you were in person, and that is the point. We need to create a gathering for the space we are in, the people that are there, and the reason we are coming together.
This is not just a good reminder for our personal lives, but also our work gatherings as well. Do we need that meeting or should it actually be something else? How can we better utilize the tools we have to make sure everyone is finding value in the gathering? These are questions we need to continue to ask ourselves as our world shifts and changes and new digital tools are discovered.
While we may not have all of the answers right now, we at least have a guiding light telling us where to start the journey.
If you want to watch the archive of this Watch Party's subject, you can find that in TheCR Connect 2020 archives here.
We heard some great examples and had some great discussions this month, so why not round it out with what we learned about members of TheCR Network overall...
What Did You Think?
For the month of December, we opened a lighter poll to get an idea of how many Roundtable Calls members feel like they have attended over the year.
We know that we are all facing a bit of a digital overload after moving most communications online, but we also saw a good amount of members attending calls this year, so how many did members attend all together? Let's find out...
The poll results represent a small sample size, but show that the vast majority attend one or fewer Roundtable Calls a month if averaged out. This shows that you do not need to attend every call to get value and it shows that we have a large variety of members attending these calls over the year.
If we look at 2020 metrics as a whole, we see that 218 different members attended a Roundtable Call at some point during the year, and the members who attended the top three most calls attended 12, 11, and 10 calls over the respectively. This both showcases the small sample size of the poll (and the fact that many members are out of the office and unable to answer the poll during the holiday months!) and the large assortment of Roundtable Call attendees.
While this poll was more of an informative "benchmark" poll, it is always interesting to see where members think they stand versus what the data says and how aware we are of our own actions and behaviors. If your member goal is to attend more calls this year, consider this a friendly reminder to keep the calendar on your radar. If your goal is to attend more of a variety of calls or meet a more varied set of members, keep these numbers in mind. With 218 unique members attending a call this year, that means there were many chances to meet 217 different people, and this will continue in 2021.
So, let me know if these are your goals or you have something different in mind, and we can work to support you in achieving them.
In the meantime, let's look forward to 2021, shall we...
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
Our goal from December was to take everything that we have dealt with, learned, and overcome in 2020 and reflect on and learn from it in order to take it forward into the new year.
So, while reflecting may feel like an invaluable use of time, it is actually key to being able to plan for the future as, if we do not learn from what we have experienced, how can we guide our future decisions?
So, if any of these conversations or concepts have sparked an idea or recommendation from you, let us know! While we plan our programming calendar, we also leave space for reactive programming, spur-of-the-moment topics, and member involvement, so leave us a note or send us a message and we'll get something together to address your topics of interest.
And if you're not a member of TheCR Network, or if you know someone who isn't a member of TheCR Network, but would love to participate in these conversations, please reach out! We're happy to talk about how you or they can get involved.
If you'd rather do that yourself, you can find out more about how to join TheCR Network here.