December 2019 Community Update!

Hello Community!

I hope you all are well! I cant believe the end of the year is upon us. My kids are out of school and Ill be heading up to Massachusetts to spend time with my family. I wish you and yours a happy holiday season.

As discussed in the November update, well be making a monthly summary post of what weve been up to since the last update. Heather, Hope, Obs, Cris and I have been working on a number of items and we have also been working closely with the ambassadors. We will outline details in this post!

Culture Comment:

Ive had the opportunity to spend more time in the community this last month - talking with many of you, chatting in LSR, and spending time with our leaders. Before saying anything else, I want to highlight a couple of key strengths I see in our community. First, I see people genuinely looking out for one another. Knowing one another, seeing one another, and authentically helping one another. I see this happening across the board. It is beautiful! A second key strength I want to highlight is the deep competence. The awareness of how things work at present, where the challenges are, and how they can be made to work better. Thank you all for this smart, hard, and patient work!

Team + Community Leadership Alignment:

The first thing we did at the start of the month was complete an overall community audit of all that we are doing across the community, and our collective strengths and weaknesses (Thank you to all for completing the survey! Please see a summary from @heather225 below).

We started by identifying some key fundamental challenges we want to solve. Here they are:

--Too much distance between team and community - The team is working on one thing and the community is working on something else and there is limited communication about all that is happening across domains.

--Limited alignment between team and community goals - no overarching north star or goal that we are all working towards.

--Duplicative work - sometimes people working on similar projects without others knowing.

--Things falling through the cracks - missing things and not re-surfacing them because we were distracted by something else

Next, we reviewed all the work that we are doing and realized that there are 3 key domains (or teams): Quality, Safety, and Engagement. We have team members and community leadership that play different roles and carry different responsibilities, but almost all of them fall under these 3 domains. This is helpful to know because it allows us to identify goals - or ways we want to most help people and the community - across the different domains/teams.

We then put our heads together and came up with a north star goal. The north star is a star in the north that does not change position. People to use it to know where they are at present and where they are going. It guides people and shows them the way.

Our North Star: Increase Quality, Safety, and Trust Across the Community

This is the goal we are all pointing towards. All of our individual efforts, team efforts, and overall community efforts will all be aligned so we can collectively move ourselves towards this overarching goal. We are working more on this now and will share more details in the next update.

3 Key Things

We also launched the 3 Key Things Initiative. The goal was to help share what is happening across the team and community so we can better support one another. It has been a great and growing success. Many people posted things they did to help us move towards that north star on a daily or weekly basis. A quick estimate is that there have been close to 1,000 key things posted - that is a tremendous amount of effort and only captures a fraction of what we all collectively accomplish. I want to give a shout out to all the people that are encouraging people on this thread. Kind words go a long way. Thank you!

Strengths and Weakness Survey Summary

Close to 100 of you took your time to fill out a survey to help us better understand our strengths and weaknesses. @heather225 has summarize them below. Thank you Heather!

(from Heather)

Hi, everyone!

From the results of the site-wide survey, we have gathered that the community sees our strengths in being an anonymous platform with round-the-clock 24/7 volunteers to provide emotional support to anyone in need. The community values these features: 1-1, GS, the discussions, the Q&A column, the Growth Path, Self-Help Guides, and the many opportunities to explore leadership roles. Were also hearing 24/7 moderation has had a positive impact on the community. Were so glad the Mod Programs helping fill in room coverage and nurture the safe, supportive environment we treasure.

We have also critically reviewed and absorbed your input on what our current weaknesses are. We recognize the ongoing issue that is listener quality and will be problem-solving ways to improve training and reduce dropped chats. The forum will also be getting some much-needed love too in terms of engineering assistance, so look forward to that! The community has expressed concerns about communication and a desire to maintain a rapport with us (admin/staff). We hope these regular monthly updates will help bridge that gap.

Lastly, feedback! Youve asked, where can we submit feedback? You can send feedback regarding the site, changes, etc. through the Help Center and Customer Support will make sure we see it!

Theres a lot to do, and although our team is small at the moment, it is also robust, and we are dedicated to collaborating with the community as closely as possible in all future changes. All your contributions lay the building blocks to a better Cups. Thank you for caring about each other! - H

Community Leadership Calls

We had a great call with the forum team. Cris joined the forum team call. We have a shared understanding of short and long-term fixes that we can make to help the forum experience become a lot better (e.g., ways of quickly identifying spam). Look for more updates here soon.

We also had an ambassador call. I was able to join for the first time since 2016. We talked about our north star goal, efforts that are already underway, and how we can better support teams so we can both have fun and multiply our impact. Look for more updates on this front in the new year!

Special Projects

One theme we are also hearing is that there are a lot of people that want to help in ways that are consistent with their strengths, but might not fit into one of our leadership tracks. @Heather225 posted on special projects - which is a new recognition/badge - that indicated that we can move beyond tracks and plug people in in unique ways. We are doing more thinking on this this month and early next and will have an update soon.

Updates from Obs!

--Brought and shared the idea of One Room, 24 Hours with the community. We ran the polling of room preferences and based on mutual preferences, launched the trial on Dec 09, 2019! We will be reaching out to gather feedback on how the idea doing and what improvements we can do to make it better! To learn more about the trial, please check here!

--Introduced Submit a request to open/close support rooms to have an efficient way to manage rooms as per the community needs without much stress and hassle. Read more about the update here!

--Reviewing and processing pending applications of all the roles related to Group Support.

--Started Group Support High Fives to appreciate and give recognition to the efforts and contributions of everyone in the community. If you want to appreciate someone for their good work or support, please do share here!

--To ease the process of unlocking Listener Community Room, we brought up the new criteria!

For more Group Support Updates, please find them here!

Updates from Hope!

--Sub-communities overall structure and engagement was reviewed by the sub-community and forum leadership team to identify areas of improvement, some areas of forum and sub-communities needed added support and to provide that an initiative was made to merge some of these areas with sub-communities that have an active leadership team. You can read the announcement post here! Moreover, the team onboarded a new community mentor leader

--The Forum Leadership Team had been working on making the forum supporter trainings simpler and more time-efficient which led to the trialling of form-based forum supporter training. The trial is still ongoing with positive results so far. Additionally, the forum ambassadors connected with the admin team to be the voice of the community in discussing various aspects of the forums.

--The Internship Project Introduced three new listener quality based electives now available to be chosen as an elective by the community track interns. 19 more interns graduated from the Internship since the last community update. One more intern teen star joined the Internship Team. Lastly, minor changes were made to the Internship application to provide more clarity to the applicants in terms of Internship Track selection.

--On the teen side, eventful Mondays came into being! a weekly session to hear feedback/concerns and to discuss important issues like boundaries and safety in the teen community. The participants propose the topic of discussion and the most popular vote is picked for the next weeks discussion agenda. Additionally, the teen community joined hands in supporting activity in the teen listener room to ensure a better support system for teen listeners.

Closing

We still have plenty of time left in this month and will accomplish more items, but I wanted to get a second update posted before too long. I understand that this is a lot of info. These updates will likely continue to be long as we want to err on providing more info rather than too little. We welcome your thoughts and feedback on the above. Thank you all for being an important part of our community and for all of the hard work and smart efforts in moving things forward. We are doing good and important work!

Happy Holidays!

Glen, Heather, Hope, and Obs