Lean In is a global community dedicated to helping women achieve their ambitions.
I’m talking on a panel about community management best practices.
2019 Leaders Conference – Saturday, August 24th
Location: Hyatt Regency SFO in Burlingame, CA
“Community Management Best Practices”
Call time: 10:30 am
Panel time: 11 am to 12 pm
Format: presentation, panel discussion, and audience Q&A
Dinner at Sheryl’s – Friday, August 23rd
Location: Palo Alto, CA
A 130+ person dinner including our team, Network leaders, and speakers.
Time: 7 to 9 pm
Notes
2019 Leaders Conference – Tech Panel Qs
Convo Direction
We’ll use the first 40 minutes on the moderated panel conversation and conclude with a 20-minute audience Q&A. We’ll start off with a general and high-level overview of your platform, then progress through more specific questions and an interactive exercise, and finally end with an inside scoop and actionable advice for our leaders. How to build your community using technology solutions
Speaker
Total: 40 mins
Intro myself, speakers, and topic. Gabriela 2 mins Q1 How would you say your product helps leaders build their communities? To All 8 mins Q2 When we think about communities, we think about how people connect and communicate to feel closer together. How does your platform enable this type of real-time connection online? To FB, Slack 4 mins Q3 Let’s talk about IRL connection and harnessing passion to bring people together. How have you seen communities set themselves apart when organizing IRL meetups (small and large scale)? To Eventbrite 3 mins Q4 Before we continue with a round of #protips and insider advice, can we touch on the pitfalls? Where do you see the biggest misses when community leaders use your platform? To All (quick round robin) 3 mins Q5 How about we do an exercise and workshop a problem and solution together with our leaders. → Problem ex: It’s becoming increasingly challenging to engage with all 900 members of our community. We don’t know much about them. We don’t know what they need most from us. We don’t know how to get messages and announcements to them effectively. We don’t have the “womanpower” or hours to support many of our great ideas. → Solution:
- You start by asking your community and engaging in two way conversation… (SM)
- You figure out how to best communicate with your volunteer team so you can use the few hours you have to the fullest… (Slack)
- You x (FB) To All 10 mins
-
You can use all of these tools together. We integrate! (all)
I’d love to get a little more technical now. Can you help us understand the term “mobile-first” and what it means against your platform? First, let’s get a show of hands for the number of leaders who feel confident they understand mobile-first. Gabriela 1 mins Q6 What exactly does it mean to think mobile-first when using your platforms and why does it matter?
- Share some data points (% of users on mobile vs desktop, % of global community and broadband on mobile vs desktop) in your answer. To ALL 4 mins Q7 Can you share a sneak peek of what you’re working on launching soon or are excited about with your team? To ALL 3 mins Q8 Finally, what’s one action our leaders could take today to engage their communities on your platform? (round robin) To ALL 2 mins
2019 Lean In Regional Leaders Conference — Speaker Agenda August 23 & 24, Hyatt Regency SFO, Burlingame, CA
YOUR SESSION
Title: Community Management Best Practices
Description: Join Survey Monkey, Eventbrite, Slack and Facebook share their top tips on how to manage and engage your community online. There will also be the opportunity to ask questions to these companies in an open Q&A and over lunch.
Date and time:
Call time: Saturday 24th August 10:30 AM
Panel: Saturday 24th August 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Lunch: Saturday 24th August 12:00-1:15PM – please join us for lunch so that leaders have the chance to ask you more 1:1 questions. We will have a space for you to sit and hand out your swag.
Arrival: please ensure you arrive by 10:30AM to get mic’d up and meet the other panelists!
AV requirements: No slides, handheld microphones
Panelists:
Laura Mesa Global Lead, Community Advocacy, Facebook
Sarah Cho Director of Research, Survey Monkey
Frances Coronel Software Engineer, Slack
Kelly Burg Head of Customer Success, Eventbrite
ABOUT LEAN IN:
At LeanIn.Org, we help women achieve their ambitions and work to create an equal world. We do this by helping them come together to learn from each other and achieve their goals through Lean In Circles (small peer groups that meet regularly to support one another and build new skills together), advocating for a more equitable workplaces, and running programs that combat bias.
CONFERENCE OVERVIEW:
We actively support women who are determined to drive powerful change in their region, industry or culture, and this year we will bring together our 90 most active volunteer community leaders to join us in San Francisco for our fifth annual Leaders Conference. Together, they oversee a community of over 120,000 members in Lean In Circles across more than 30 countries.
CONFERENCE OBJECTIVES:
The Lean In conference provides an opportunity for leaders to come together to learn from one another, hear about new ways to grow Circles, drive engagement and make an impact for women in their communities and around the world. CONFERENCE LOGISTICS
- Venue & hotel
- Hyatt Regency Hotel, 1333 Old Bayshore Hwy, Burlingame, CA 94010
- Conference will take place in the main ballroom
- Parking: There is self-parking in a parking garage at the hotel
CONFERENCE TIMINGS:
- Friday 9:00 – 5:15 PM
- Dinner at Sheryl Sandberg’s house in Menlo Park – please arrive promptly at 6.45 PM
- Saturday – 9:00 – 5:35 PM
How would you say your product helps leaders build their communities? (2 min)
A lot of online forums have “moderators” and I knew we needed something a little different. Our conversations didn’t need moderating in the traditional sense, they needed warmth, new perspectives, and energy! My teammate Alfred came up with the term “Host” and I thought it fit perfectly. Hosts could show new members the ropes, lead folks into new conversations, kick off discussions, organize new events, and other “host-like” things.
To the second point, online communities are filled with members at many different stages of their community journey. There are always new members joining in, the curious ones reading posts but not yet posting, folks who contribute every so often, regulars who know the ropes, and the people who step up as leaders.
New members – curious – contributors – regulars – leaders
Finally, Slack groups are free to start and run. Your biggest investment will be in choosing which apps to integrate your Slack with.
Warmly welcome newcomers in our #introductions channel
Prompt discussions and empower fellow members to join in for conversations in various channels
Answer questions or find a way to get them answered
Take turns hosting an AMA in a channel or post a live webinar
Help make the community a safe and supportive space
Listen to feedback and discuss ways to improve the community
When we think about communities, we think about how people connect and communicate to feel closer together. How does your platform enable this type of real-time connection online? (2 min)
Techqueria – cafecitos –
Slack drives high engagement. Since it’s a real-time collaboration hub, users tend to check in more often than most other types of groups. There’s a sense of fun and support you get on Slack that can be tougher to achieve when there’s a lag between posting something and getting a reply.
Slack also allows you to direct message other people in the group for even greater communication possibilities. (On LinkedIn, you can also send messages to other people in your group, though it’s a bit more complicated, which could possibly discourage one-on-one conversations.)
4,000 – 1,000 weekly active users
Put all the useful information in there through app integrations
“People were very quickly sold into the idea of getting into Slack because it was just much more productive, and you could interact with a team that was miles away or oceans away very, very quickly.”
Before we continue with a round of #protips and insider advice, can we touch on the pitfalls? Where do you see the biggest misses when community leaders use your platform? (30 seconds)
It can very hard to moderate a fast growing Slack community unless you have some baselines or practices in place.
The last serious challenge is managing growth. These communities tend to be made up of tech-savvy member with an interest in connecting. That means things can grow too quickly, especially if it’s rolled out to an existing group all at once. If you don’t have certain people take the lead and set the tone it can be the last time you hear from some of your members.
Problem ex: It’s becoming increasingly challenging to engage with all 900 members of our community. We don’t know much about them. We don’t know what they need most from us. We don’t know how to get messages and announcements to them effectively. We don’t have the “womanpower” or hours to support many of our great ideas (2 minutes)
dedicated sign up form – career level, profession category – so you can see from a high level what most of your members might benefit from
survey
combine all of them
#ideas, #volunteers, #positive-vibesMost people assume that automating routine tasks and processes requires heavy support from an engineer or developer. Not so. With Workflow Builder, it can take two minutes. Slack’s visually-driven Workflow Builder is a simple way to automate manual, repetitive processes without requiring any coding knowledge at all. Interested in automating your routine tasks? This feature will be available later this year, but in the meantime, sign up for your sneak preview right here.
announcements channel
What exactly does it mean to think mobile-first when using your platforms and why does it matter?
Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking (instead of desktop)
Starting July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is enabled by default for all new websites (new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search).
That means that it is more likely that the pages you visit from a Google search are based on how Google crawled and indexed that content based on the mobile version of that page.
A lot of companies or communities need to access Slack from whereever they are
Most accessible platform for communication for anyone across the world, regardless of their background is the radio. The next is the mobile web.
Pew research – cell phone of any kind – 96%
35% smartphones across the world, 67% phone of any kind
ios
windows
mac
android
web browser
linux
Can you share a sneak peek of what you’re working on launching soon or are excited about with your team?
So at frontiers back in april of this year, -A two-day conference for leaders and their teams to learn best practices for creating the right conditions for collaboration. Explore how new ways of working …
Workflow Builder – allows you to automate manual repetitive processes without requiring any coding knowledge. It’s in beta right now and will be available to all users later this year — onboarding or notifying everyone who reacted to a message with an emoji
Slack and Email work together
We’ve expanded interoperability with email so that no one gets left out of important conversations, from executives lovingly holding on to their inboxes, to new hires who haven’t joined their company’s Slack workspace yet. We’ve recently released add-ins for Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. These add-ins allow you to forward emails (along with attachments) directly into Slack.
Slack has built a new bridge between its service and email. If you’ve got someone in your organization who refuses to use Slack or if they’re a new hire who still hasn’t signed into the service, then you’ll still be able to chat with them straight from within Slack. In the coming months, you’ll be able to @-mention these people in channels or send them a direct message, and it will route these messages to their email inbox. Replies will come straight back into Slack, and the back-and-forth exchange will also transform into a full Slack history if the person decides to join Slack.
Finally, what’s one action our leaders could take today to engage their communities on your platform?
Add an app
Default channels – positive vibes, meta, meta events, organizers private for each chapter, allies, private partners, events, Latinas
Eventbot, Polly, Jira
News channel – product hunt, hacker news, Reddit, Twitter
Hundreds of customer stories, some of which you can find on our website about
Onboarding with Aloha
Code of conduct
Overview on website
Google forms – pipe into Slack
hashinvite.com
Giphy, Google Calendar for Teams, Donut, etc
Google Calendar for Teams
HeyTaco
Our logo is a taco