Social J Spotlight: Katelyn Gillum
CUNY-J social journalism graduate Katelyn Gillum (M.A. ’16) helps bring people together in real life to create opportunity for everyone in her job as a senior community specialist at Meetup, and in the coming year, she’ll do it while traveling the world.
As part of a partnership with Remote Year, Katelyn will be visiting 12 cities in 12 months, including Cape Town, Marrakesh, Valencia, Belgrade, Split, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Lima, Medellin, Bogota, and Mexico City. She’ll work on building relationships with Meetup organizers in these countries, learning about their successes and challenges in building community in different cultures.
This month, Katelyn spoke to thousands of colleagues at WeWork’s Global Summit at Madison Square Garden. At the summit, Katelyn represented Meetup in a panel called ‘How We Build Community,’ alongside representatives from other community-centric organizations like The Wing and The Flatiron School. Meetup was recently purchased by WeWork, and the company and its efforts to grow “real-world” communities are growing, with more hiring and international expansion planned.
As a graduate student, Katelyn built her knowledge on how to listen to and engage communities with her work with Wire the Wise, a program that pairs young professionals in New York City with senior adults and provides one-on-one technology help.
Recently, I spoke to Katelyn about Meetup, WeWork and Remote Year, and the busy year ahead of her. [Conversation lightly edited for clarity.]
Martika Ornella: I’d like to talk about what you’ll be doing with Remote Year and Meetup over the coming year.
Katelyn Gillum: Essentially my role, in terms of how I support Meetup organizers and members, is currently very much social media and emails. It’s not in “real life,” aside from a few panels and internal face-to-faces with members and organizers. The goal of this partnership between Meetup and Remote Year is to put our support team in front of the organizers and members who are using our platforms. That will allow us to build real-life relationships with people in various cities as we plan to expand internationally, which is part of the excitement surrounding WeWork’s Meetup acquisition.
We’re going to bring WeWork the communities Meetup has already built internationally, and WeWork will provide physical venues, furthering the growth for both companies. The idea of the partnership I’m doing with Remote Year and Meetup will be for me to continue supporting members and organizers in the same way that I’m doing now, but to have that real-life experience of building relationships face-to-face, and to hear from our Meetup organizers on what’s working for them and what they’re struggling with in terms of building communities. This can show us what community looks like in other cultures and places around the world. I’m assuming it may be different from how we define community in America.
I’m excited to put myself out there and to experiment a bit. I think that’s sort of Meetup’s idea behind it too. Let’s try different strategies for engaging people. Let’s host organizer Meetups, listen to them and see what we learn.
M: What do physical work spaces like WeWork mean to you in terms of building community?
K: It’s interesting. This idea of having access to more physical space is going to bring with it all of this opportunity to provide services to people. Using real estate in a way we haven’t really before, to bring everything to a group of people what they need to thrive and to be successful as groups. WeWork does a great job between the nine to five hours, hosting space for workers, and Meetup comes in for the after-hours portion of the day. We provide the sense of community in terms of how a space is utilized from 6 p.m. to midnight.
We’ve constantly struggled with venues as a company, especially in New York City, where you can have support groups meeting in a Starbucks. We’ve just never been able to get that totally right.
This is an exciting chance for us to provide our community the appropriate physical space to make their Meetup feel authentic and true to who they are and what they want to do.
M: What are some strategies for engaging communities that you learned as a social-j student that apply to Meetup and now, WeWork and Remote Year?
K: As cliche and as simple as it sounds, listening. In my role here, there’s so much listening and advocating, and I think that’s something that’s the heartbeat of the socialj program. Finding a specific community and almost being an advocate and a listener, and elevating the voices within that community, is very true of what I do at Meetup.
We listen and sometimes it’s something as simple as a product, or a feature, that we’re seeing an overwhelming interest in from our organizers or members. Maybe it’s a feature that’s been added or taken away. We’re the people [Meetup’s community specialists] elevating those voices to our product team and saying, “This doesn’t seem to be working for our community.” Then we’re able to adapt based on that feedback. It works all the way down to listening to the specific needs of a women’s group in Chicago struggling with x, y, z, then just tailoring our response individually to that specific location, to that specific group. A lot of it just boils down to listening and advocating. Luckily, Meetup is very good at taking feedback.
Each group is so different and so unique and has its own needs, and is successful in its own ways and not successful in its own ways.
Right now, we’ve been working on how we even define a great Meetup group. Can we even define them? What do great groups look like? It boils down to what our members think quality is. We’re really trying to tackle that question now, and that involves a lot of listening.
How much machine learning can you incorporate, or algorithms can you create, to figure out what makes a great Meetup? I think you’re going to need a human — listening, being empathetic and understanding — to build the formula for what works.
M: Meetup has been a go-to field trip for social-j, and now there are two social journalists working at Meetup (Katelyn and Colin-Pierre Larnerd). For social journalism alumni currently looking for opportunities to express themselves, since you’ve been really successful, what’s some advice you’d give them?
K: In our class, I probably had the least journalistic outlook compared to everyone else. Journalism can be a really difficult field to break into. I got lucky because I found the right company that fits my personality, and fits the kind of work I was already passionate about. The role I’m in now is not the role I’ll be in forever, so I think success is about being creative and being willing to go outside your comfort zone when you’re looking for potential opportunities. Try not to have a super zoned-in path you’re only willing to take, because the skill set gained through social-j is so open to different types of opportunities.
It’s about having the willingness to look beyond what you think is the only thing possible for you and just recognizing that the skills we learned can apply to not only journalism, but can apply to any organization that’s looking for community.
Every company has a user base, a community that they’re trying to serve, so it’s important to consider that. It’s important to understand, especially in journalism, that everyone’s just trying to figure things out.
This interview is part of a profile series highlighting alumni and current students of the CUNY School of Journalism’s social journalism program. Follow #socialj for more stories of innovation, community-centered journalism, and updates from our graduates.
