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Leveraging anniversary programming & content to nurture community

In this post by CEFP2019 Fellow Camille Santistevan, Associate Director of Public Relations at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY, she explores how an organization’s anniversary can be an opportunity to nurture community. Camille shares 5 tips for success and 3 potential challenges to anticipate.

Community-first event planning

Is your scientific organization celebrating an anniversary sometime soon? If so, how will you be celebrating?

In the higher education and non-profit sectors, anniversaries are often used to launch major fundraising campaigns. Central leadership, in concert with the development office, tend to spend a lot of time, energy, and resources to organize a big bash for external stakeholders, with the internal community often left as an afterthought.

The ASRC Open House event. Image credit: ASRC.

How can we re-engineer some of this content and programming to supercharge our scientific communities? Below are some ideas both big and small for how community managers can leverage anniversary activities to nurture community.

Congratulations to the CEFP2019 fellows on their graduation!

Last week we celebrated the conclusion of the fellowship year for the 2019 cohort of our Community Engagement Fellows Program (CEFP) – with a three-day wrap-up meeting in NYC.

The meeting was a milestone for several reasons. It was our first true hybrid CEFP meeting where we bridged between in-person and remote participation, it was our first time hosting the CEFP training outside of DC (and we loved being in NYC!) and it was the first time that we now have a clear path from fellowship participation to a broader, ongoing set of professional development programming via our new community of practice.

CEFP2019 fellows and staff in the room celebrate those joining remotely! Image credit: CSCCE

Join January’s Community Call for initial survey results, CSCCE working groups and more!

We’re continuing our monthly community calls for scientific community managers next week at 2pm Eastern on Wednesday 29th January. Please join us to discuss what comes next for our community of practice.

As we start a new year our first community call of 2020 will focus on updates about phase two of our activities to support those building community in science. Join us to discuss the initial results of our survey of the members of our community of practice on Slack – which includes programming requests. We’ll also be sharing opportunities to join an initial number of working groups – and we’ll introduce CSCCE’s advisory board.

We’re excited to share the initial results from our survey of members of the CSCCE community of practice. Image credit: CSCCE.

December’s Community Call: you’re invited to a virtual pot luck holiday party!

2019 has been a big year for CSCCE and with the holiday season rapidly approaching we thought we’d enter into the festive community-building spirit for our last community call of the year. So please join us on December 18th at 2pm Eastern for a virtual gathering designed to help us continue to get to know one another, celebrate the successes and things we learned this year, and look ahead to 2020.

Join November’s Community Call!

Last month we launched the brand new CSCCE community of practice for scientific community managers – which includes monthly community calls that allow us to explore some foundational ideas in scientific community engagement together while getting to know one another and our communities.

What’s a community call?

A community call is a regular online event for community members to come together and meet one another, discuss topics of shared interest, and learn new things. Calls might include individual presentations, guest speakers, celebrating successes or diving deeper to brainstorm a particular topic in more detail.

We’ll be hosting a community call once per month on the third Wednesday of every month at 2pm Eastern which means November’s call will be on Wednesday November 20th.

A brand new community of practice (CoP) for scientific community managers – the CSCCE CoP

By CSCCE Director, Lou Woodley

Supporting scientific community managers

CSCCE’s primary mission is to support and study the work of scientific community engagement managers – those professionals who build and nurture teams, networks and communities within science.

We do this through a variety of activities including our year-long fellowship program for existing scientific community-builders. This week, we expand our programming by launching a brand new community of practice (CoP) open to scientific community managers and those interested in this emerging role. Whether you’re new to community engagement or have many years or experience, whether you’re building, funding or evaluating communities in science, we welcome you to join and help to shape this new, supportive learning space.

Provide support for scientific community managers remains at the heart of CSCCE’s mission. Image credit: CSCCE

Join our first CSCCE community call!

As part of the launch of our brand new community of practice for scientific community managers, you’re warmly invited to join our first community call this Wednesday, 30th October at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific, 6pm GMT – note that the clocks went back in the UK this past weekend).

What’s a community call?

We’ll be hosting a community call once per month on the third Wednesday of every month, but to kick things off this month we’ll be meeting on Wednesday 30th October.

A new home for the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE)

We’re delighted to announce that the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) has a brand new home!

CSCCE is now a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives, a 501(c)3. If you’re familiar with the Carpentries’ software and data skills trainings, we now share the same non-profit parent organization. Lou Woodley will remain director of the Center and says of the move:

“I’m thrilled that we’re entering the next phase of our activities to support the emerging field of scientific community engagement. We’re excited to join a stable of other community-oriented projects at Community Initiatives – and we’re eagerly looking ahead to launching new programming and our community of practice for scientific community managers”
Lou Woodley, CSCCE Director

Our work continues to be supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funds the Community Engagement Fellows Program and other core CSCCE activities.

Providing support for scientific community managers remains at the heart of CSCCE’s mission. Image credit: CSCCE

Crafting effective community surveys

Toby Hodges is a Bioinformatics Community Project Manager at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. He coordinates the EMBL Bio-IT Project, a community building and support project for bioinformaticians and computational biologists. In this role, he works with volunteers from the community to provide training and consulting, information, networking opportunities, and resources to EMBL scientists who use computational approaches in their research.

As community managers, one of the of the pressures on us is the requirement that we make decisions based on an understanding of our community members. We must frequently make choices on the assumption that we know what the desires, motivations, and preferences are of the people that make up our community. Although we have a close working relationship and perhaps even friendship with some of them, it’s generally very difficult for us to maintain a deep understanding of what makes every member of our community tick, what they want to achieve, and how we can help them to do that.

Impostor syndrome and community management – lessons on building a community while building myself

Shane M Hanlon is the Program Manager for AGU’s Sharing Science Program and a Senior Producer with the science storytelling organization The Story Collider. Learn more about the Sharing Science Community / @AGU_SciComm and follow him @EcologyOfShane.

Community (and communication) don’t happen naturally

Six months ago, I had no idea what a community manager was.

I’m the Program Manager for the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU’s) Sharing Science Program. My team and I work to provide scientists with the skills, tools, and opportunities to help them share their science with any audience. We hold workshops, webinars, create tools, manager social media outlets, and more, all in the pursuit of this goal. Eventually we starting pulling folks together into a network of like-minded individuals who are passionate about, and committed to, science communication (scicomm), policy, and outreach. We called it the “Sharing Science Network.” At that point I don’t know if I would have called it a community – but it quickly evolved into one.