How are you doing with this new reality? | Experts’ Roundup
If you’re here and reading this it’s probably because you are still trying to adapt to this new reality. This is for the ones who are running a community program(of any kind) and need help with how to succeed & survive in this crisis by confronting challenges they are facing.
Last week, somehow I managed to schedule a call with my community members to know their well-being and discuss a few things mainly challenges every one of us is facing and to take out great insights, I kept this discussion in the Q&A format as it is the best format to discuss anything and bring out something meaningful.
So what I did is, I asked them to put down a few challenges as per the ongoing situations based on the following three categories:
1. Work from home
2. Pivoting in-person events to virtual
3. Managing online communities
This blog will take you through these categories, what challenges has been asked and a few recommendations/feedbacks given by members who’ve attended this group discussion call.
1. Work from home
As we can observe, for many people who used to commuting daily and work in shared offices. This is a huge upheaval which will take a while for them to adjust and make a good work-life balance out of it.
On facing something similar working from home, Smriti Anand, Community Programs & Partnerships for Developer Platform at Truecaller came up with a few challenges to get helpful recommendations from other members.
A. How to increase productivity working from home?
Rohan Pareek, Founder & CEO at Badlee said:
Productivity is directly related to a clear and positive mind. Making bed and taking a shower can be good starters and then organizing stuff and working in a well-organized area helps more in being productive.
Shruti Dubey, Community Manager at The Hive Collaborative Workspaces said:
Creating a dump zone either on your computer or in a notebook where you can put all those nagging little thoughts that need to happen in the future but perhaps not right now can really help. These are the things that seep into your mind as you spend time trying to work on something else.
Apart from this, we can also be prepared with backups, take care of our meals by pre-planning it so you don’t waste more time thinking about it, and also by making a simple to-do list for the next day before going to sleep.
Azhar Shams, Program Manager at Skillenza said:
Make it a habit of having video calls with your colleagues during your lunchtime and talk about your day which you all used to have back at the office during lunch hours. This helps you feel relaxed and also makes you feel like it’s a weekday and not a weekend.
Ashwin K S, Program Manager at Speckbit said:
I have a desk environment & I stick my ass to the chair for at least 2 to 3 hours. It might be hard at first, but it truly helps me to stay productive. It’s absolutely fine to use social-media or do whatever you want for the first 10–15 mins, but you need to sit at your desk & do it. This helps me to get a sense of the environment to work.
Grishma Singh, Community Manager at Gaius Network said:
I motivate myself to engage with my team and focus on getting the work done instead of postponing just because I am home.
Yash Sethia, Assistant at Design Jungle Community said:
I prefer binaural beats to increase my productivity while working.
B. Are you finding it beneficial or are you finding it more difficult to stay focused?
Rohan Pareek said:
Being at any place for a longer period can kill positive vibes, so one should keep distracting oneself for an active mind.
Shruti Dubey said:
A proper schedule, creating boundaries, and knowing when to clock out helps me stay focused. Make sure you enjoy break times, have humans connect by calling or face-timing your friends and colleagues.
C. What new structures have you put in place as you work from home to keep you going?
Shruti Dubey said:
A whiteboard to keep a track of the to-do lists. One can always use sticky notes instead of this in a properly arranged pattern.
Azhar Shams said:
I am following the same routine except for the travel time( for the office ), I am spending the same time doing some basic stretching and exercising. This has actually helped me to focus a little more considering we have to stay indoors all day long. So, the point is to have a good timeline for the day, stretch your muscles a little and this will keep you going hopefully.
Navin Narayan, Partner at Centre of Gravity said:
Keeping one google chat on all the time and having a ritual definitely works.
Vidyadhar Sharma, Founder & Full-Stack Maker at Speckbit said:
Make a dedicated space in your room for work can really help you to keep going.
2. Pivoting in-person events to virtual
Many events have been canceled or postponed that people rely on to maintain their professional networks and also advance their domain knowledge. To keep people connected by moving planned in-person events to a virtual forum. Communities are where these new virtual events can become interactive and engaging for an audience.
Mahesh Chikane, Founder Tribal at The Test Tribe asked the following questions:
A. How to bring engagement in virtual events?
Grishma Singh said:
We give away benefits according to our products for eg: Vouchers, extra classes, etc. We mostly use Zoom for Virtual conferences at the moment.
Shruti Dubey said:
In order to bring engagement, we can create small chat rooms separately so that they get to know each other. Secondly, if we predefine an agenda for each minute of the online activity, people might get hooked to last for their topic. We can make use of this situation and maybe incentives in between their contributions in some way. Maybe have a commercial break of sorts with some sponsor which involves activity and guaranteed responses.
Azhar Shams said:
Run a Twitter contest during the live virtual event. Have a few Hashtags, announce that the viewers/attendees can click pictures of the slides/screen, or tweet about the event and the Twitter Handle with the maximum number of tweets, award them with e-vouchers (since delivery of swags could be a great challenge right now).
Have a proper flow or agenda of what is the event all about. Announce this prior to the event over Social Media. This will help you get more registrations and will look more neat/organized.
Vidyadhar Sharma said:
Tell your audience that we’re not recording and let them interact with each other. Secondly, use the break out rooms for connecting people in different groups.
B. What can be our offerings to sponsors for virtual events?
Azhar Shams said:
Some organizations have different ROIs, not every brand necessarily wants to be directly branded. Look out for organizations who want to push their Content/Online learning resources (to have more content consumption), firms who want more signups on their newsletters or even companies who are doing a survey and want feedback from a specific audience who could be a part of your online event as well. Push these links to the people who register for your online event and also share these links during the online event as the conversion rate is actually good. This could be one offering, and the other is by getting their brand social traction through Twitter Contest being run during the event with hashtags suitable to their brand.
Aashish Ramamurthy said:
In the middle of the call, play the video of the brand or use restream.io to stream it at other platforms.
Vidyadhar Sharma said:
Keep sliding link to the sponsor offering in the messenger in the chats or you can switch background with sponsor logo or put the logo behind the speaker.
C. Can you share the toolset you’re using for virtual events/webinars/conferences?
Azhar Shams said:
Zoom is a good option to organize webinars, you get to run polls during the webinar, live stream it, have an option for Q&A (so that the chatbox does not get cluttered). Apart from that, you can send an invite email that is automated by Zoom to all the registered people along with reminder emails before the event starts. You can also have a practice session with the speakers where you do a dry run of the event before it goes live.
Amit Pandey mentioned:
Toolset I use are,
https://www.loom.com/
https://www.webex.co.in/
Vidyadhar Sharma said:
Tools which I use for virtual events are,
1. zoom.us — for streaming & meeting
2. notion.so — for sharing curated links & content
3. loom.com — for sharing screen rec with others
4. youtube.com — for uploading recordings of zoom calls
Ashish Ramamurthy said:
I use Notion for collaborated notes and Trello for task management.
3. Managing online communities
Amit Pandey, Founder & Community Head at Global Nomad Summit asked the following questions.
A. How to maintain engagement in community activities?
Shruti Dubey said:
Having a personal connection has always helped. This can be achieved by identifying the groups and picking volunteers from the same. This way it is also easier for us to take control and supervise what is happening at the root level. Making sure to connect with these volunteers in return not only brings in more audience but also ensures the close knitting and comfort level of individuals of the group and because of this, they take part in all the activities more enthusiastically.
Navin Narayan said:
We work on customer communities for brands, There is no getting around the fact that you have to talk about what is facing everyone’s lives. So how are we spending time at home, making it better is the core of the conversation we can have And that’s what we are focusing on?
This is the discussion that took place in our group discussion call and I hope these points will help you in confronting with challenges you’re facing right now.
We would like to thank all of them for sharing these valuable learnings.
Are we missing any important point here? It’s a community-driven blog, if you have anything from your community-building experiences, do add your thoughts in the comment section and it will be updated here.
