Mega Members - Introducing a new role for members!

Over the past few months, we have been experimenting with member leadership activities or teams. Some examples of this have been members leading discussions, member forum friends & other group support badges which indicate leadership or excellence from a member.

These teams/ projects have been not been as successful as we would have hoped. Laura & I have been thinking a lot about our dedicated awesome members and how they fit into our ecosystem, project teams, or other structured teams/groups.

We have realized that members & listeners have different levels of ability to participate in the community. One way to think about this is: listeners are in giving mode & members are in receiving mode. Listeners are here to provide support & members are here to receive support. They have inherently different intentions for participating.

On the listener side of the house, we have done a great job engaging listeners to help with volunteer projects which advance our mission & increase support giving across the entire community. We have not done this as well on the member side of the house.

One thing we know for sure, we have some really awesome, dedicated members. Our listeners & the 7 Cups community experience have filled up these members gas tanks enough, so they are able to give back to the community in special ways. They reply to forum threads, they attend group discussions, they have listeners who they chat with regularly, they say hello to community managers, the post on the feed daily, they offer suggestions on how to improve the member community..etc. We have all encountered these awesome members & we love them.

This suggests that members need to receive a certain amount of support from the community in order to start giving back to the broader community.

You may be wondering, why dont these members just join the listener community?

The short is, they arent ready or they have & they prefer the member side of the house. Our hypothesis is: Members need to be proactively & regularly receiving support from the community in order to start giving back to the community in more dynamic ways.

Knowing this, we need to continue to experiment where long term member fit in into our ecosystem. In this vein, we are excited to launch the Mega Member badge. This badge will be awarded to members who have been selected by the community management team.

They are members who are regularly taking growth path steps, talking to listeners as members, but also contributing to the community in special ways.

What will a Mega Member do?

They will keep being awesome. We will not be giving them any formal tasks beyond asking them to intentionally maintain a 50/50 balance between receiving support & giving back to the community.

What will this look like?

Receiving support (50% of the time they are on 7 Cups): Chatting with listeners, attending group discussions..etc.

Giving back to the community (50% of the time they are on 7 Cups): Well ask them to pick one focus areas. It can be anything of their choice. Ex. Feed hashtags, a forum category or a specific forum thread they always reply to, co-leading a group support session with a listener or any other specific item they are interested in. It is up to them to select the area they want to focus on.

How will the Mega members be selected?

To start, since we are still experimenting, Mega Members will be selected by the community management team. We will pick up to 6 for this first group. They are selected based on:

✦ How long they have been members of 7 Cups community
✦ They already have an area of focus or a place in the community they like to give back to
✦ They are known by community management staff & entire community as being kind, trustworthy and loving

In the first 2-3 months, we will be experimenting with this first group. In time, we hope to learn how the mega members take this role on, what they like about it, what they dont like about..etc. With this data, we will improve the application process & encourage more members to join in.

You can nominate a Mega Member by posting to this thread. We will formalize this process soon!