January 2021 Community Update!
Dear Community,
Hope you all are well! It is freezing here today at 25 degrees fahrenheit (-3.8 celsius). Around this time of the year I start looking very forward to the warmer weather and the spring.
This last month was a big month for us!
We released our new app that you can read about here. I believe we have addressed 90%+ of the concerns that were brought up in this thread. Please download the latest version and let me know in that thread if you are still having any issues. We are making a list of all challenges and ways we can make it better. We are also focusing on fixing android bugs. The release was a strong start, but we have more to do. Look for translations to arrive soon!
We also worked really hard on the 7 Cups Academy. Dean Laiba is at the helm! Our educational programs have been significant for our community and I believe that our collective work through the Academy will be transformative. I’m excited to see it unfold.
One last update on the growth path playlist. This is a new feature that we have been working on for several months. This will allow trusted members, listeners, and experts to create their own growth path steps and entire growth paths (it’ll also work on the listener side with progress path steps and progress paths). I can’t wait to see what our first 7 Cups community path looks like - one where we all add to it in order to better help one another. I imagine it as a sort of greatest hits growth path filled with nuggets of wisdom, good videos, and encouraging music.
Heather
Hi, everybirdy! Hope everyone’s new year is off to a good start! As Glen mentioned, we’ve been building out the 7 Cups Academy, program by program, to offer listeners higher quality training and professional development. We’ve made some big changes within our team to support its evolution (see Laiba’s update for details).
In LDP news, we have onboarded two new leaders: Asherwolfice as LDP Mentor Leader and competentParadise6344 as a Teaching Assistant! (As always, if you are a Verified Listener who wants to participate in the Leadership Development Program to learn how to get into 7 Cups Leadership roles and earn professional development, please swing by the LDP subcommunity to find out how).
And lastly, in an effort to streamline the quality of L/M 1:1's, the Community Team has been designing a best practice guidance checklist for listeners to utilize to better support members.We need your help with trying it out and getting feedback from you (both as listeners and members). Please visit this post to view the guide and weigh in! (And here’s a follow up post to address some of the questions you asked already!)
Laiba
It has been an eventful month for us! We launched the Building Community Program. It familiarizes the trainees with the basic knowledge in creating and growing online communities and enrollees practice their knowledge by supporting sub-communities of their choice. Additionally all of the 7 Cups academy courses now have their own sub-communities!
On teen front, we launched a celebrations project that celebrates teen birthdays and cups days. Additionally, a lot of teen leaders successfully completed their trials and became official leaders within their projects! The teen daily check-ins, birthday and cupsvarsay project along with the teen discussion leaders team now have strong leadership. Moreover, we had a fun ice-breakers week long challenge in the teen community room.
Last but not least, As I will be shifting my focus to oversee the 7 Cups academy, our very experienced sub-community ambassador @Tazzie has stepped up to become the sub-communities coordinator. We have also onboarded @Mimi (a strong supporter of mental health and teen advocacy) as our teen coordinator. Please give them a warm welcome
Evelyne
We are launching some exciting programs! We are starting the 7CORE account that will help educate the community on best practices for reviews, blocking, etc. They will be reaching out to listeners one on one as well and are open for questions or concerns. If you have a specific account related question though, please email community@7cups.com.
We also are launching a Verified Listener point system. After reports of verified listeners not having appropriate behavior befitting their badge, we are going to be making sure that they are behaving properly and taking action if they do not.
Lastly, we are still ramping up the Safety Awareness Team. They are currently creating quizzes and discussions on best safety practices and proactive safety awareness.
SoulfullyAButterfly
On the Content side of things, we launched the Content Development and Marketing (CDM) Course as part of the 7 Cups Academy - this course will prospectively help produce both onsite and social media related content for the community whilst helping spread awareness and support.
As for the Translation Project, we have been trialing a translation project for the new 7 Cups App - the team working on completing a translation in the Hindi language has been doing great under the proactive leadership of @JoeyTribbbiani - to find more information and to aid the completion of this project, apply here
Obs
On the group support side, we launched the Group Leadership and Dynamics Development (GLDD) Program. It is one of the courses offered under 7Cups Academy. It focuses on providing learning experiences and knowledge about group dynamics and structure. We are thankful to our initial batches of trainees who are finding this program useful so far.
On the Listener Chatroom side, we introduced the Listener Daily Checkins (Adults) which are short checkin sessions at 9 am & 6 pm ET. These sessions are a way to reflect on our day as a listener and share it with each other in a 30 minutes session. I am glad to see how listeners are enjoying these reflection sessions. We will be adding more types of sessions like this to provide quality support and chat room experiences. Please stay tuned for more announcements and updates in the next month.
On the quality and safety side, we launched the Verified Listeners’ Behavioral Tracking Process where community users, leaders can report a Verified Listener’s behavior which do not meet the quality norms and community guidelines. The process will work as per Behavioral Rating System.
We are working on strengthening and structuring the group support activities and roles to ensure we provide the best experience for our members and listeners in the chatrooms. I am grateful for all the patience and support you are providing to us. Thank you for being part of the community.
@GlenM Thank you for sharing - it is exciting how we have so much to look forward to this year and how the first month has already seen lots of progress. So exciting about the admin team growing too!
@GlenM
Hey I've some concerns regarding the new app and the update:
1) Add the M or L feature in front of chat name to distinguish members from Listeners in chats.
2) As a Listener, it's very difficult for me to update my bio as I've to do that In HTML format in app.
3) For Listeners: community Leadership positions are not mentioned.
4) For Listeners: there is no way to view their own profile (you can only view through browse Listener)
5) We can't access My progress path, my impact in the new app.
6) Listeners can't see the list of newly joined members (so proudly proactive badge is losing its essence)
Besides all this concerns Kudos to all the Developers.
Great work Team 😄
@JoeyTribbbiani thanks for checking out the new app and for providing this contex. There is a lot more to do. M and L differentiation happens b/c proile images are square and L profile images are circle. The other thing to consider about the app is that it is designed to be a streamlined version of the site, so it won't ever be able to do all that the site does, but we do want it to be able to do all of the important functions. We'll keep making progress. One step at a time!
I'd love to see an option to easily access our previous (forum) posts. There's a list to show threads you created, but no way to track down all the places you've posted, unless you remember exactly what forum and what thread. A way to view notifications and not remove them unless we remove them ourselves. Often times I get a notification to a quote response in a thread. Once I click the notification, I can't get back to it. Once clicked it removes itself from my notifications. I'm forced to respond then and there or I may forget. (and back to point one, I can't find my post to easily navigate back to respond when I'm good and ready)
@doeji
Good points🔥🔥
@doeji
@GlenM
Great point, it is always frustrating when you click a "You were tagged in a post" notification then you later come off it and want to find it again but can't because it disappeared from notifications. It would be so much easier for everyone if we had a permenant lasting 'Posts you've been tagged in' section. Other than that and some other concerns raised by others posts, the app and updates look amazing. Amazing work from all the development team!
@doeji thanks for this idea. We are looking into it!
Thank you for the updates !
It feels great being "on the know" about where the Community we belong is moving.
All great news !
Congratulations to our leadership !
Hello.
@WelcomeToChat awesome! thank you for the support!
@GlenM I think there is a lack of communication among subcommunity leaders. There is also a significant lack of infastructure we can use to communicate. It would be helpful is leaders could have on-site groupchat.
@StarlitSky4762
Hello! I welcome you to start a thread under your subcommunity team's forum space here!
You have the option of requesting a booking for your team's meeting. We have the Subcommunity Leaders room.
@Tazzie We use that but it's very slow. I also don't know how to use the Subcommunity leaders room. I was never trained on that and didn't read see any guides. I didn't even know it existed.
@StarlitSky4762
We can discuss the details in a 1-1 and I can walk you through the process.
@StarlitSky4762
Tagging our new subcommunity coordinator @Tazzie so she sees this :)
Hello all, I have been a therapist on 7 Cups for 4 years. It has been amazing to see it grow into such a big, healthy community. It is really interesting to read all that has been going on in 'the background'... you are all doing such great work. Maybe there is some way that some of us therapists could be more involved?
@TanyiaHughesAdvDipPsy thank you for your work and for helping to support our community!
@TanyiaHughesAdvDipPsy thank you for your work and for helping to support our community!
❤️❤️
