community engagement fundamentals Archives

Training update: Three CSCCE multi-week courses coming up later this year!

Registration is now open for our “Fall” cohorts of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), Nurturing Online Communities (NOC), and Project Management for Scientists (PMB)!

These trainings will round out our offerings for 2025. This blog post will give you a sense of who each training is designed for and how they connect to the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program. We’ve also created a new infographic detailing the impact of CEF on our 350+ CEF graduates and the communities they serve. If you’re considering the course, but need documentation to back up your professional development funding request, hopefully this will help!

If you have any questions, please let us know by emailing training@cscce.org.

Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF)

This eight-week course is designed to offer new and existing community managers a core set of actionable skills and strategies. Participants meet twice a week, with lecture-style content interspersed with discussion and project work.

Our fall offering of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF25F) will run on Mondays and Thursdays beginning Thursday, 4 September until Thursday, 23 October.

The key dates are:

Social hour: Thursday, 4 September at 10am – 11am EDT / 2pm – 3pm UTC
Monday lessons: 8, 15, 22, 29 September; 6*, 20 October at 10am – 11:30am EDT / 2pm – 3:30pm UTC
Thursday Co-Labs: 11, 18, 25 September; 2, 9*, 16 October at 10am – 11:30am EDT / 2pm – 3:30pm UTC
Graduation: 23 October at 10am – 12pm EDT / 2pm – 4pm UTC

*CSCCE will be closed on Monday, 13 October 2025 in observance of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. To accommodate this, we have slightly adjusted the schedule for this CEF cohort. “Reading Week” will now only take place during one session, on 2 October 2025, and the Week 7 lesson that would have taken place on Monday, 13 October will be held on Thursday, 9 October.

Pricing:

CSCCE offers rates to reflect the different organizations that community managers work for and the range of budgets that may be available.

General rate: $1275 – For non-profits.
Supporting rate: $1575 – Aimed at for-profits and others who would like to support the participation of others.
Discounted rate: Depending on participants paying the supporting rate, we may be able offer a limited number of discounted tickets for this cohort. If you would like to participate but your organization is unable to cover the whole cost, please complete this course discount request form.

Find out more about CSCCE’s refund policy.

More information is available on the CEF webpage.

Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF25W)

Our Winter offering of Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF24F) will run on Tuesdays and Fridays beginning Friday, 17 January until Friday, 7 March 2025.

The key dates are:

Social hour: Friday, 17 January at 10am – 11am EST / 3pm – 4pm UTC
Tuesday lessons: 21, 28 January; 4,11,18, 25 February; 4 March at 10am – 11:30pm EST / 3pm – 4:30pm UTC
Friday Co-Labs: 24, 31 January; 7,14, 21,28 February at 10am – 11:30am EST / 3pm – 4:30pm UTC
Graduation: Friday, 7 March at 9:30am – 11:30am EST / 2:30pm – 4:30pm UTC

Registration is now closed.

Pricing

CSCCE offers rates to reflect the different organizations that community managers work for and the range of budgets that may be available.

General rate: $1275 – For non-profits.
Supporting rate: $1575 – Aimed at for-profits and others who would like to support the participation of others.
Discounted rate: Depending on participants paying the supporting rate, we may be able offer a limited number of discounted tickets for this cohort. If you would like to participate but your organization is unable to cover the whole cost, please complete this course discount request form.

Find out more about CSCCE’s refund policy.

More information is available on the CEF webpage.

How does CSCCE online training impact community managers and their organizations? Read our report to find out!

Thanks to funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we recently completed a medium-term evaluation of our foundational training course, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF). We’ve just published a report that summarizes the results of this work, which shows impact across three levels of scale – the individual, their community/organization, and the wider STEM ecosystem.

In this blog post, we’ll recap some of the rationale for the report and a high level overview of our findings. Subsequent posts will share more about our user-centered design approach to creating professional training courses, what we learned about the impact of CEF at each level, and how this work will impact our ongoing training offerings.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT

Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF24F)

Our fall offering of Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF24F) will run on Mondays and Thursdays beginning Thursday, 12 September until Thursday, 31 October.

The key dates are:

Social hour: Thursday, 12 September at 12pm – 1pm EST / 4pm – 5pm UTC
Monday lessons: 16, 23, 30 September; 7, 14, 21, 28 October at 12pm – 1:30pm EST / 4pm – 5:30pm UTC
Thursday Co-Labs: 19, 26 September; 3, 10, 17, 24 October at 12pm – 1:30pm EST / 4pm – 5:30pm UTC
Graduation: Thursday, 31 October at 12pm – 2pm EST / 4pm – 6pm UTC

Registration is now closed.

More information is available on the CEF webpage.

More than 300 learners have graduated from Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals!

This month we celebrated a very exciting milestone – more than 300 STEM community managers (305, to be exact!) have now successfully completed our foundational training in community management, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF).

Congratulations to all of our graduates – many of whom are featured on this page of our website – and if you’re interested in taking part in the course yourself, registration is open for our fall 2024 cohort (registration deadline: 23 August). But hurry! It’s more than half full already.

“The course provides essential information to support community work whether you are just beginning or seeking to expand your community engagement activities. It provides resources to help you develop a strategy and tools to support implementation of your ideas. This course demystifies many aspects of community engagement and helps to ensure your community is built to last.”
CEF24W participant

April’s Community Call: Evaluating the impact of short-form training in the STEM ecosystem

On our April Community Call, we’ll be focusing on how to evaluate the impact of professional development trainings on individual participants, their organizations, and the STEM ecosystem as a whole.

Evaluation is something that we’ve been doing more and more at CSCCE in our client work – capturing the value created in various community programs and proposing improvements for future interactions. We’re especially interested in programs that support group-based learning in some way such as those that provide training and/or mentorship for community champions.

Over the last few months, thanks to funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we’ve been turning the spotlight back on one of our own learning activities, by researching the impact of our foundational training course in community management, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF). At the same time, Open Life Science (OLS) have been conducting an evaluation of their Open Seeds cohort-based training and mentorship program. These evaluations have taken place on the backdrop of an ongoing conversation about how to measure the impact of short-form trainings in the life sciences in general, thanks to the work of Jason Williams and Rochelle Trachtenberg.

Evaluation project underway to assess the impact of CSCCE’s foundational training, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals

At CSCCE, one of the ways we support scientific community managers is through professional development training courses and workshops. Our 8-week online course Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF) is our longest-running training option, and has reached more than 250 community managers over the past three years across a total of 15 cohorts (with another currently in session).

Two of these CEF cohorts were private offerings for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and late last year they asked if we could assess the mid- to long-term impact of CEF training on the individuals that took the course. CZI, like us, were particularly curious about the impacts of the course on the learners – as well as the wider impacts on their organizations and communities, and beyond in the STEM ecosystem more generally. And so, in December 2023 we surveyed graduates from 12 general registration CEF cohorts, 2 CZI cohorts, and a cohort that ran in an Australia-friendly time zone.

In this blog post, we share a little more about what we’re hoping to learn as we start analyzing the data, as well as how we’ll be sharing the outcomes of this study in a couple of months’ time. If you have any questions, or you’re interested in engaging us as consultants on your own evaluation program, please reach out to info@www.cscce.org.

Join us for CEF23F! Head into the new “school” year with some updates to our foundational training course

Today we opened general registration for the next offering of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), our foundational course on community management in STEM. This course is relevant to anyone convening communities in the STEM ecosystem, whether new to the work or more experienced.

Sign up by 4 August and enjoy a 25% early bird registration discount (use the code EARLYCEF23F at checkout)!!

CEF23F will run on Tuesdays and Fridays starting on 8 September and ending on 27 October. More information about the course can be found here.

If you have any questions about CSCCE’s professional development training courses – including about information in this post – please email training@www.cscce.org.

CSCCE offers a private CEF cohort “in Australia!”

Earlier this year, we had the pleasure of delivering a private cohort of our foundational training for STEM community managers, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), in collaboration with the Australian Biocommons.

This was the second private CEF cohort we’ve offered, having run one for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Essential Open Source Software program last Summer (and a second CZI cohort will start in early July). CEF cohorts are always unique, and custom cohorts are particularly engaging, allowing colleagues and collaborators to explore concepts in community management, and their own shared goals and challenges, together.