Room Supporter Help Center
Get Started Room Supporting on 7Cups
Need to know info for new room supporters as well as a refresher for existing room supporters.
Duties and Expectations
As a room supporter, one should have high warmth and high expectations.
The aim of the room supporter is to foster and guide supportive and compassionate chats among the members and listeners in the chat rooms. As a room supporter, it is important you proactively engage and participate in these chats to build your face as a friendly face and a helping hand in the chat rooms. So, everyone feels welcomed and supported.
As a room supporter, your essential checklist:
- Welcome, everyone who joins the chatroom and makes them feel welcomed, included, and comfortable.
- Foster healthy, compassionate, and supportive conversations.
- Share resources and support chat room moderators to enforce chatroom and community guidelines in the room.
You will be successful in this role if you:
- Join your focused support rooms often and consistently to build yourself as a reliable group support leader.
- Welcome every entrant with warmth and compassion to make them feel included in the group
- Show compassion, respect, warmth, support, and care to everyone in the chatroom.
- Foster good conversations by asking helpful and thoughtful questions. Acknowledging and validating one’s experiences and emotions.
- Maintain a level of professionalism and a reminder to all to follow the chatroom guidelines.
- Familiar with the chatroom guidelines and support the chatroom moderators to enforce them whenever needed.
- Be observant to see who all is participating and who needed a bit more encouragement to participate and work to adjust the environment as per the needs.
First-week essential checklist
There are several things you can do immediately to give your assigned chatroom a leg up. Try taking a week and doing everything in the list below to help your community's odds for success.
- Join & Introduce yourself
Jumping into your focused chat room as a group support leader (Room Supporter) is intimidating. It's up to you to create a welcoming environment. So start with introducing yourself to the members in the chatroom and try to greet & welcome and do a quick check-in with at least 10 members this week. If you are struggling for participation, inviting members from other chat rooms can help.
- Always remember, room supporter is more about supporting everyone.
Let’s try to do our best to listen to everyone and give them space to talk about their thoughts and emotions. If anyone is not engaging, focus on them and encourage and invite them to make them feel included. You have this amazing gift of listening to acknowledge and validate someone. Use it often!
- Demo compassion, acceptance, validation, always!
Your attitude and how you participate and support will matter in setting the tone of the chatroom. At times, you will feel like some are not really happy with what you are doing but some would always feel encouraged, inspired, and motivated to try and go for things they didn't do in the first place. Just because of your efforts to demonstrate compassion, acceptance, and validation to everyone.
- Join the conversation
If you see an interesting discussion in another chat room, visit and participate there and share about your chat room as well. Make sure to let them know when they can join your chat room.
- Keep going!
Keep your chatroom active by growing your chatroom and supporting throughout the month along with your fellow room supporter and chat room moderator team.
If you've already done all of the above, you're off to a great start.
Building a supportive and healthy chatroom with great group dynamics takes time and dedication. It almost never happens overnight. Don't be discouraged by slow momentum - slow and steady is the healthy path to growth for anything and everything.
Fostering healthy conversation in the room
The art of holding a healthy conversation can make you an influencer of your chat room. Here are a few simple tips that you could find helpful to have a dazzling conversation with the members and make them feel encouraged to come back and interact with you.
- Set a purpose for your conversation. Any good conversation has an intention. Without a clear intention, it is like driving without a map.
- Be gentle and compassionate as a friend. We make our first impression in the first few seconds of interacting with them. As it is text-based communication in the chatroom where they can’t hear your tone or see your gestures and body language, you need to reflect your friendliness approach in your words.
- Use Conversation Openers. The hardest part of any interaction is its opener. But you don’t have to worry about it. You can start with a simple icebreaker and then start the conversation with a question or a statement about the topic you are going to discuss.
- Keep the spark going. Once the conversation starts, you want to keep it going. And for that recognize who all are proactively participating and validate their thoughts, share your perspectives and invite every new entrant or a lurking participant to share their views.
- Encourage them to share stories and listen. Listening is the key to fostering healthy conversations. Encourage the members to share more on their stories and listen to them.
- Conclude the conversation on a positive note. Every conversation has an end due to time limitations. But, conclude the chat on a positive note so the members look forward to participating in similar conversations in the future as well.
- And, have a bit of humor. A bit of humor is good for healthy conversation as it makes the chat more enjoyable and engaging for everyone. And, please remember you are interesting! You have lots of great things to say and share. Bring your best self to a conversation and your members will find it captivating.
Welcoming new members
To grow your chatroom, new members are the key. Here new members are not those who joined just a few days ago but also those who are around for a while but joining the chatroom for the first time or after a long time. Whenever there is a new member in the chatroom, greet and welcome them. Share a resource that they may find helpful, like, Members Welcome Pack, <------ Clickable) and encourage them to share their views, thoughts, stories with the rest of the participants. How they feel the first time will decide if they will return to the chatroom in the future too.
General Chat Rooms Info (Clickable texts)
