August 2023 Community Update!

Dear Community,

We had a very productive month in July! The highlight for me was our birthday celebration. A very big thank you to @cheerymango and all who participated in the video. I felt it was our best one yet and really captured the essence of 7 Cups. And another big thank you to all who participated in the posts on our values, led the numerous activities, and to everyone that participated! It was like a holiday celebration!

It was also our biggest month for product and engineering as well. The teams were on fire - launching chat v2, new Noni, Just-In-Time-Training and much more. Another big thanks to all the leaders and listeners that helped us iterate on these ideas before launch. And thanks to everyone for the constructive criticism to help us make them all better quickly. Much appreciated!

Look for more progress this coming month. We’ll be releasing several changes that should help quite a bit on quality and content development.

H

This has been a very productive and fruitful month for advancements to our platform, and of course our 10th birthday! I hope you’re enjoying Noni 2.0 and looking forward to the official rollout of the JITT initiative specifically tailored for listener quality and training support.

Thanks to everyone who submitted feedback to our quarterly survey. This data helps us measure where we land at the end of each quarter and hone in on any weak spots to address. Out of all your responses, we averaged 7.1 out of 10 on overall morale/health (up from 6.9 last quarter). We received a lot of good insightful feedback, and we’ve been collecting your suggestions to see what we can implement in the future. Feedback is also being distributed to the appropriate leads to continue to up our game and strengthen our commitment to you, our community. If you wish to follow up on anything specific you shared via the survey, you’re welcome to PM me.

I’m excited to announce that thanks to our newest Ambassador @Tommy, the Rising Star Program has been revived! This is a nomination and scouting initiative that aims to reach users who have got the enthusiasm for giving more to 7 Cups. It is created to help identify potential, guide people toward opportunities they may not know exist, and mentor those who don’t know how or where to start. We’re looking to recognise potential at all levels, whether you’re nominating a fantastic listener who is not yet verified, you have identified a potential Project Agent, or you want some help to find the perfect leadership role for yourself. There are no limits as to who you can nominate or what you can nominate them for. We are here to support you and help be part of your 7 Cups leadership journey. As a thank you gesture, we will be awarding 150 cheers to anyone who nominates an individual through this program. Tommy is also looking for people to make this a scaleable team. Read more about how to nominate someone and how you could sign up to help here!

Laiba

The first half of the month had been focused on celebrating 10 years of 7 Cups, what a great 10 years it has been! We also took part in the birthday celebrations by celebrating 10 dedicated academy leaders as part of the appreciation activities. In academy news, 3 new academy mentors joined our team. Additionally, @Comphi joined the Leadership Development Program as a mentor leader. Apart from our continued focus on strengthening leadership within the academy team, it has been mostly business as usual.

Moreover, we launched two new sessions for teens to participate. Mindful Mondays and Fantastic Fridays! The very first sessions were hosted last week and we had a good turnout. The sessions can be attended by adult teen listeners. Info on the sessions can be found here. If you are a teen, do drop by our sessions in Hope’s Office (a room opened a few minutes before the sessions time)

• Mindful Mondays - 12:30 - 1:30 PM ET on Mondays

• Fantastic Fridays - 12:30 - 1:30 PM ET on Fridays

Obs

On the Group Support front, we introduced a new initiative– Exploration Garden. The goal if to encourage participants to support questions and reflections to support sharers more. Questions help one understand and get better clarity in their thoughts and feelings. These chats are dedicated to the giving and receiving of support and exploration in a turn-based setting where each participant has the chance to share and explore their thoughts and emotions. Other than this, also two new sessions initiating from this week: Healthcare workers support and Relationship Support session. Also, we updated training aspects of room supporter and moderator role. We will share more about it in a separate post during this week.

We restructured the categories of Safety Community and simplified it for easier navigation. Also, revived safety quizzes to learn and be aligned in our safety efforts as a community.

On the chatroom track front, @Beck1 (adult) and @TabbyCat97 (teen) joined as mentor leaders for discussion team. While, @Jenna introduced Peer Support request form to scale up the peer support for listeners.

A big thank you to entire leadership team and community for collective efforts on various developments & progress and continued to support each other. T h a n k Y o u!!

Evelyne

We have done some restructuring on the Safety front. @KristenHR has been added to SPOT as a PA focused on data tracking and team communication. They have recently done a survey of feedback from the whole team in an effort to be attuned to the needs of the team. We have also completed one highly requested item- to remove the quota from the Safety Patrol badge.

Active Listening Team will be increasing outreach and team leadership in the future, creating more opportunities for Listeners to practice their skills.

Care Team- @Beck1 @SnowTabby and @RainbowRosie were all announced as joining care team. @AcatalepticShadow is a new leader. They had a Care Team Party on Teen side. They also had Peer Support and Care Team and Chat Support and Care Team Collaboration posts, plus 3 new guides!

Anonymous Evaluations- The Anonymous Evaluations Team has evaluated nearly 200 cups across 7Cups. The coding will be enhanced to gain a greater insight into the experience, and this will be used soon to collaborate with teams within the Quality sector to provide support for listeners to build up their skills.

SoulfullyAButterfly

This month was a big one with 7 Cups turning 10, with many collaborative events across the community. We rolled out Chat 2.0 after several bug fixes, alongside updates to Noni and a new JITT feature for listeners. We encourage you to try all these new product updates and continue to send feedback on how it went.

The content focus to help grow new communities at 7 Cups has been going well. Our call for new community leaders led to many interesting applications which will soon be replied to since we have aligned these new project ideas with existing leadership structures.

During this month, we have also reviewed the Q&A team and will be reviving the Question Approval role during the first week of August.

To express interest in content related roles, feel welcome to PM me!

CheeryMango

I have had the pleasure of onboarding our newest ambassadors, @tommy and @theriverissinging to the subcommunity domain. They are been working alongside the team and I for quite some time so I have no doubt that they’ll continue to do great things in this new role. They will be overseeing forum leadership and forum moderation and quality respectively.

It has been a great month in terms of forum leadership. We have onboarded 1 new PA to support with subcommunity leadership, 3 Community Mentor Leaders, 2 Community Mentors, and 9 Forum Supporters. In addition, we have introduced a new outreach committee to help identify potential forum leaders. Lastly we introduced the new forum pocket handbook.

A friendly reminder for all forum supporters, community mentors and community mentor leaders are asked to fill out the Subcommunity Leadership Check-In Form for the month of July so we can keep updated on what’s going on in your team and roles and see how we can offer our assistance.

Lastly, if you notice or experience any difficulties while using the forums, please help us to track and report any bugs in this thread. Thank you for your continued support and here’s to what the new month brings.