Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF) terms Archives - Page 3 of 4

Content

Any written, audio or visual materials you make that are related to the functioning of your community. Content includes blog posts, news articles, reports, infographics, photos, videos, podcasts etc.

Citation: Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement. (2025) CSCCE Glossary: Designing community-engaged content. Woodley and Pratt doi: 10.5281/zenodo.10277480

A secure database or spreadsheet that tracks a community manager’s interactions with key members of a community. Often the lightweight solution for a community manager when starting or bootstrapping a community, and may be superseded by investing in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

Citation: Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement. (2025) CSCCE Glossary: Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals. Woodley, Pratt, and Santistevan doi: 10.5281/zenodo.15359413

Member research

The deliberate process of finding out more about your community members. This might include conducting one-on-one interviews, distributing a survey, convening focus groups, or a combination of research activities. Results are curated into a report for your community team and/or leadership, and may or may not also be shared with the community.

Stakeholders

People or organizations outside of your community who have a vested interest in the community’s success, which may include benefiting from the activities of the community. Stakeholders might include funders, related communities, or special interest groups.

Use of the word “stakeholder” is currently a topic of debate, which you can read more about in this article.

Personas

Personas are descriptions of fictional, representative members of your community. They are created by aggregating key characteristics of similar members to create representative descriptions.

Member types

Member types vary by community, but broadly describe the attributes (e.g., career stage, discipline, organization, etc.) of different groups within a community. Describing member types can help guide programming and communications.

Network-centric leadership

Network-centric leadership is a type of leadership where the goal is to support and empower community members in working together. Network-centric leaders encourage cooperation, seek to distribute resources and power, and are responsive to the needs of community members. For a full description of network-centric leadership, see Andy Robinson’s publication; “The less visible leader.”

Community overview statement

A short, stand-alone description or “executive summary” describing a community or collaboration. Community overview statements include the name of the community, why it exists, who participates in it and what members do together. It also includes information about who convenes the community (e.g., a host organization), the intended lifespan, and whether members connect in person or online.

CO-CREATE mode

Most common within established communities, this mode describes how members work together WITHIN the community to CO-CREATE something that they couldn’t do before. For example, community members might organize an event together, form working groups to push the work of the community forward, or establish new communication channels such as a podcast.

This is one of four modes of engagement described in the CSCCE Community Participation Model.

Citation: Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (2020) The CSCCE Community Participation Model – A framework to describe member engagement and information flow in STEM communities. Woodley and Pratt doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3997802

COLLABORATE mode

In this mode members of a community COLLABORATE with one another, often with the community manager providing scaffolding for success but taking a less visible coordinating role. Such collaborations might include co-authoring a white paper or blog post and may involve infrastructure created or maintained by the community manager, but used more independently by community members. For example, there may be general guidelines for writing a guest blog post that the community manager has created, but co-authors work together without the community manager to write the post.