Content creation is a core skill for any community manager in STEM. Creating content might look very different depending on your context – from writing monthly newsletters or resources and reports, to creating podcasts, videos, and slide decks. And it’s a skill that many of us pick up on the job, without formal training or a sense of strategy behind what we make.
In this month’s call, we’ll share a new framework for thinking about how to share information with your community members, and how the content you create can meet specific goals in your engagement strategy. The “informational roles of community-engaged content” is a CSCCE framework that we explore more deeply as part of our Content Design (CODE) course, the spring 2024 cohort of which (CODE24Sp) is now open for registration. So, this month’s community call is both a primer for anyone creating community-engaged content, and a sneak peek into what you can expect from a CSCCE professional development training course.
Date: Wednesday, 28 February 2024
Time: 11am EST / 4pm UTC
Add to calendar (or contact us at info@cscce.org to be automatically added to CSCCE calendar updates)
What is community-engaged content?
When you create a piece of content – a blog post, a report, or a slide deck – you might pay close attention to formatting, or sentence structure, or the images that you use. When you’re creating community-engaged content, you add an extra layer to this, asking yourself “how does this piece of content inspire or support community member participation?” It might look like including clear calls to action (“register here for our next webinar!”), or drafting clear instructions of how to log in to the community platform alongside an aspirational mission statement.
In developing the CODE course, we defined six informational roles for community-engaged content. The informational role of a piece of content describes its purpose in terms of how it shares information. They include: To synthesize a body of work for a report, to curate a range of resources in one place, or to provide an invitation to engage.
In combination with the social roles of content (you’ll have to take the course to find out more about those!) taking the time to define the informational role(s) of your content is a key step in creating materials with which your members actually engage. We hope you’ll join us at this month’s community call to find out more about the informational roles of community-engaged content!
February’s call
ABSTRACT
Join February’s community call to:
- Find out more about the six informational roles of community-engaged content – and how they can be deployed in your community
- Explore the nuance of this framework – including ways that these roles can be combined in a single piece of content, or as collections that work together to engage members
- Share your perspective on content creation and connect with other community managers in STEM
How to join
February’s call will take place on Wednesday, 28 January 2024, at 11am EST / 4pm UTC
Our calls are hosted in Zoom – click here and we’ll see you in the webinar!
Video or not? You’re welcome to turn on your webcam if you like but fine if you prefer just to use audio.
Our community calls generally last 90 minutes to allow time for discussion, but we try to keep all of the presentations within the first 60 minutes. We understand that virtual meetings have a tendency to overrun and overlap, so please don’t feel sheepish about arriving late or leaving early. We’d love to see you either way!
We will record the first 60 minutes of the call and share presentation clips on our YouTube channel. We generally do not record the last 30 minutes of our calls, which are reserved for discussion.
ADDITIONAL INFO ABOUT OUR COMMUNITY CALLS
Our community calls usually take place on the third Wednesday of every month at 11am Eastern, but occasionally times and dates vary depending on speaker availability so please check our calendar of events.
Wonder what we’ve talked about in previous calls? The archive listings can be found here, with select recordings available on YouTube.
Not yet in our Slack group? Request to join here.
Further resources
We curate a growing collection of resources for community managers on our website. If you have any questions about our work, or are interested in partnering with us on a future project or call, please contact info@cscce.org.