Tag Archives: Online Consultation

Moderating a Facebook-based peer support group. Training for Hemihelp staff and volunteers

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I recently worked with Hemihelp (now part of Contact) to help them train volunteer moderators for their peer support group on Facebook.

The group was established in 2007 and became more active in 2011. It has over 5,000 members and over 11,000 interactions each month. It seems to be a strong community with a lot of peer support offered (there is little need for moderator input on this front). There is debate among members over the nature of the group and how it should be used.

I offered some advice around consultation with the community to help ensure the guidelines and moderation approach are based on the needs of the group. This can also be a really good way to introduce and embed changes.

Recruiting volunteers

Hemihelp planned to recruit volunteer moderators to help them manage the group moderation during office hours. I am usually a little wary about using volunteer moderators especially ones who are still active members of the group but this can depend very much on the community in question.

Initial response to the advert was quite low. This was perhaps understandable given the nature of the group (busy parents from all over the UK, many of whom couldn’t make it to London for training). I recommended that they emphasise the transferable skills volunteers might gain as well as the opportunity to help the community. This helped them recruit a few additional trainees but I think they would need to offer comprehensive online training to really increase their numbers.

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Community development and management support for Contact a Family

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Contact a Family got in touch late last year. They were looking for help setting up their new community, developing guidelines, establishing processes and training new moderators. Over the last few months I have been working closely with them and we’re almost ready for launch.

Scoping

I spent some time on scoping work – reading existing research and interviewing stakeholders throughout the organisation. This helped me understand the different requirements for the community and develop a proposed action plan.

Online consultation

Contact a Family had done some extensive research on their digital offering more generally but I wanted to do some more consultation work with potential community members.

We chose an online consultation as this was felt to be more accessible to parent carers who could sign on at any time on each of the three days of the consultation. It also enabled us to involve parents from all over the country.

Contact a Family had chosen the community platform they would like to use so I was able to set up the consultation on a basic version of the new community. This gave parents a chance to offer feedback on the platform itself and helped to familiarise them with the site.

77 people expressed an interest in the community consultation and development. We had 26 participants in the consultation workshop, giving us 228 comments and answers to our questions. Lots of participants volunteered to stay involved, give feedback on developments and form a ‘welcome committee’ when the community launched.

The consultation took place over three days.

On day 1 we asked about what different people want from an online community, their priorities and what would put them off.

On day 2 we asked about moderation and guidelines – how we can keep the community safe without stopping people from having the discussions that help them.

On day 3 we asked participants to have good look round the existing set up and think in more detail about specific groups of users – parents of children with rare conditions, people running or looking for support groups and parent carer forum representatives.

Thank you, I’ve really enjoyed being part of this new venture and it would be a pleasure to be on the welcoming committee.

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Setting up a new community – defining roles in moderation and peer support.

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Consultancy for The Katie Piper Foundation

Katie Piper FoundationIn September I was contacted by Kerry from The Katy Piper Foundation. The Foundation supports people living with burns and scars. Kerry was looking for more information on managing online forums. She was particularly interested in moderation strategies and procedures for managing safeguarding and escalation.

We had an initial chat on the phone where we explored different ways an online peer support community could be moderated and managed.

Almost every community I have been involved with has slightly different definitions  for members and moderators so it felt important to start by clarifying these roles.

Building on existing knowledge

Charities like YouthNet (who were pioneers of online peer support) and Mind (whose Elefriends community grew quickly and organically from a Facebook group) saw their moderation strategy and structure grow and develop with the needs of the community. They were often exploring new ground and didn’t always have examples of how a particular approach had worked in the past. You can see this learning in practice in a post about training community members from 2012.

Now online peer support is offered by many charities. It is easier for those looking to establish a new service to understand and clearly define these roles early on. But it’s always important to make sure that there is room for consultation, change and development as the needs of the community become clearer. The most successful communities are co-designed and developed with community members wherever possible.

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Engagement, co-design and community moderation on the Elefriends community at Mind

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elefriendsI’ve just finished 9 months working on the mental health peer support community Elefriends. The role was a maternity cover post and focused on community engagement as well as moderation training and support.

So what did I get up to?

Six co-design workshops with community membelefriends co designers

I organised and co-facilitated six co-design workshops with community members and local Minds. All the workshops had an online consultation component.

  • Two workshops to co-create community content and ‘themes’ functionality for Sport England funded project Get Set To Go.
  • co designTwo workshops to co-create community content and functionality for Big Lottery funded peer support project Side by Side
  • Two workshops to co-design a mobile app for the community. The Apple version is in the app store now.

I worked with agencies PAN and Yoomee to create and test content and functionality initially developed in the co-design workshops.

This included three animations to encourage community members to get more active. You can see the first one here.
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Developing youth resources with the Miscarriage Association and Brook

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Stage 1 – Online and face to face workshops with young people

“I’ve honestly literally never spoken about my experience with anyone since I left sixth form, this is the first (and possibly last) time – but I’m happy that I’m using it to hopefully help others”

I was recently approached by the Miscarriage Association to help them research and develop youth friendly online (and possibly offline) resources. Young peoples’ voices are missing and their needs are not being fully met by the Miscarriage Association’s current offering. But before we decided what to develop, we needed to do some research to find out a bit more about what young people were experiencing, what they want and – most importantly – why they want it.

Knowing WHY helps us get a deeper understanding of the need. Knowing that a young person wants online videos is one thing, knowing that they want them because they feel alone in their experience and want something to help reduce this isolation is much richer information. If we know this, we are in a position to find the very best way to meet this need.

Our hope was that the young people we worked with in this research phase would become engaged enough to stay involved and work with us through the development phases too.

Working in partnership

Our first step was to approach Brook. We’d identified that they had little online information about miscarriage and knew that for many young people Brook would be the first port of call when they needed help with pregnancy loss. Brook are redeveloping their website and resources so it made sense to work in partnership to share learning and ensure that young people were supported at every stage of their support-seeking journey. Continue reading →

Online consultation with Mind’s Elefriends community

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I first came across the Elefriends community after attending their online peer support training.Screen Shot 2013-10-29 at 15.21.24 I was interested in online peer support for adults and wanted to find out more about the impact of providing community members with peer support training. How does this affect their experience? I wrote about this training here.

Online community consultation

I really enjoyed working with both the community and the digital team at Mind so I was really pleased to be asked to do some consultancy work for them. At the time, Elefriends was moving from a Facebook page to a new platform. The team were looking to consult with the community both on and offline. This was to ensure that as many community members as possible got a say in the changes.

I attended the offline consultation days and then based on my discussions with community members I:

– Designed a three day online consultation to gather community members’ views on how the site should be managed
– Used interactive tools to keep the group engaged, and provided support to participants throughout the exercise

Recommendations, moderation guide and evaluation

I summarised the findings, to produce recommendations and draft guide for community managers

I also helped the team design an evaluation survey for their funders, which looked at how community members used the site to better manage their mental health.

At times, the consultation touched on sensitive issues, including the expression of thoughts of self-harm and suicide. Clare’s understanding of mental health, empathy and respectful approach has been a real asset to this project and I look forward to working with her again.

Eve Critchley – Senior Digital Officer at Mind