Once your community has begun to grow it’s likely that you’re going to need help from community members in running local events, working groups, technical workshops or other “community champion” activities that support the overall success of the community. But where do you start when planning for these activities?
Guidebooks, reports, and survey results
What are community champions?
Community champions are emergent leaders – members of a community who wish to take on additional activities in support of the community. Usually, to successfully support these individuals community managers organize a program in which the champions may alternatively be called fellows, ambassadors, or advocates.
To learn more generally about why champions are necessary for community success, check out the CSCCE Community Participation Guide which describes the CHAMPION mode in more detail.
The CSCCE Community Participation Model: A framework to describe member engagement and information flow in STEM communities
by Lou Woodley and Katie Pratt
The CSCCE Community Participation Model describes four modes of member engagement that can occur within a community and one that can occur outside of it. This guidebook is intended to help you use the model to inform your community member engagement strategy.
What do community champion programs look like?
In 2017, the Advocacy Ninjas CEFP project team comprised of Stephanie O’Donnell, Heidi Olds, Allen Pope, Gabrielle Rabinowitz and Rosanna Volchok created a survey to better understand what champion programs (at the time, they referred to them as advocacy programs) look like within scientific communities.
They collected data from 37 scientific community managers who work at academic, non-profit, industry, and government sector organizations. They asked 22 questions that addressed the following areas:
- Overall Community and Membership Characteristics
- Advocacy Program Characteristics
- Recruitment for Advocacy Program
- Incentives and Support for Advocacy Program
- Success Metrics for Advocacy Program
They found, among other things: Older programs had the biggest budgets while newer programs offered more incentives for involvement; Program size, community size, and resources may be correlated; And some program characteristics hold similar across various budget sizes, while low budget programs tend to represent smaller communities with fewer internal resources.
For an overview of the project, watch this presentation from co-authors Rosanna Volchok and Allen Pope:
Download the full report:
Ambassadors, Champions, Fellows, and More: What defines success in scientific community Advocacy Programs?
by Rebecca Aicher, Melanie Binder, Heidi Laješić, Stephanie O’Donnell, Allen Pope, Gabrielle Rabinowitz, Rosanna Volchok, and Lou Woodley
This report presents data on the scope, characteristics and efficacy of ambassador programs in STEM, which was collected and analyzed by the CSCCE CEFP "Advocacy Ninjas" Project Team.
What motivates community champions or super-users?
The Busy Bees project team of the CEFP2019 cohort comprised of Toby Hodges, Naomi Penfold and Kathryne Woodle with support from Lou Woodley, created a survey to better understand the motivations of community super-users or ambassadors (which we now refer to as champions). You can learn more about the project from this presentation during the March 2020 community call.
Blog posts
- Ambassadors, Fellows, Champions, and More: What defines success in scientific community champions programs? – this guest blog post, authored by the Advocacy Ninjas, accompanies the release of their report and lays out their key findings.
- March’s Community Call Recap – What makes a great ambassador program? – a recap of our March 2020 community call, which focused on ambassador (aka champion) programs.
- Changing our Plantae Fellows Program from Exclusive to Inclusive – CEFP2017 fellow Melanie Binder talks about the evolution of a champions program.
- Champions, Ambassadors, Fellows, and More: Introducing the Advocacy Ninjas – CEFP2017 fellow Allen Pope introduces the Advocacy Ninjas and lays out the many names of champion programs.
- Understanding the Advocacy and Ambassador Program Landscape – CEFP2017 fellows Melanie Binder and Rosanna Volchok report out on the early stages of the Advocacy Ninja’s project.
Additional CSCCE resources
Resources for reuse
CSCCE staff have produced various guidelines and how to guides to support community champions within the CSCCE community of practice. The following resources are licensed CC BY and are available for reuse with attribution. We intend to share more resources in 2021 as our working group (see below) comes together.
- Guidelines for working groups and special interest groups
- Guide to setting up your special interest or working group
- Guidelines for contributing to the CSCCE blog
Community champions working group
CSCCE has a newly-launched community champions programs working group. To find out more about the group, please drop us an email: info@cscce.org.