July 2020 Community Update!

Hello Community!

@Hope mentioned it is already the end of the month on a call today and it made me realize that we havent yet posted our community update. This is our 9th update since we started in November of last year. Im glad we are doing these updates as they provide more visibility into the work we are all doing and I believe they also increase alignment across our community.

A few quick updates with much more detail below. First, on the quality front, @EvelyneRose joined the admin team as a quality specialist. She has already worked closely with several of you to launch a few key initiatives that will significantly increase quality. We also wrote up the current ideas we are tackling here. We have already implemented several items not on this list and several more are specd out and will be added soon.

Next, the Leadership Development Program is off to a very strong start. A special shout out to @Aleks2 for signing on as a TA and for @QuietMagic for the help! We have already had 4 course discussions. I just posted the last discussion yesterday and finished editing the evaluation for Personal Leadership 101. The first cohort started in July. The next cohort will start in August. If you are interested in becoming a leader, then you can join the August cohort when will start with Personal Leadership 102: The Problem is The Path. All are welcome and you can sign up here.

We also had an awesome birthday party. Thank you to @Tazzie and @Gracey for hosting and putting on so many great events! Check out Tazzies birthday video here. I had a great time celebrating with all of you!

Last, we continue to make steady progress on the new app as well. We still have the goal of launching it at the end of October. There are still some key parts left to build and test, but it should end up being a very significant improvement over the current app.

H (Community Director)

Hello, everyone!

I hope youve all been well. I cant believe we are now one month into our third quarter! This year has been flying by.

Now that we are over halfway through 2020, I have been doing a lot of reflecting on how far 7 Cups has come. Looking back really puts things into perspective and helps inform the future. In just a span of 7 months, we have accomplished incredible things.

Weve revived both the Translations Project and the Content Volunteer Team. Weve introduced Sharing Circles. Were actively engaged on our social media channels (Twitter, Facebook & Instagram) running fresh campaigns dedicated to spotlighting the community (initiative here!). And this is only a few things, and isnt even including all the projects and daily collaborations from you, our community!

We are working smartly so we can only go up from here as we continue to move the needle. I have been hard at work behind the scenes scaling up our leadership through the launch of our Leadership Development Program. We realized that one of our weaker areas that needed to be strengthened was in the leadership domain, and so we decided to create a track to teach students the skills they need to confidently lead in our community. The goal is for every graduate to be plugged into a leadership role, and we like to think of this program as one where graduates can then in turn mentor trainees and keep nurturing this process.

This program is still in the early stages of evolution (and currently only for listeners), and we may be considering adding leaders to manage certain components of the track (similarly to other tracks leadership structure). If you have any ideas or would like to get involved, I welcome all feedback!

I believe our team is stronger than its ever been. I hope you can feel the sense of alignment in these community updates and that they convey how deliberately we are approaching problem solving and community building to the most robust free online emotional support platform. I am so proud of us! Leaders, listeners, members! You are what makes 7 Cups so beautiful.

Thank you for a great year so far!

Programs Update by @SoulfullyAButterfly

On the Translations Team front, we have been focusing on our remaining Translation Projects that included the Hindi, Spanish, and Chinese Simplified languages. We have progressed to now have 87,192 available translations for our 44 available languages - this allows us to stand at 50% overall project completion!

We are still looking for help with the final touches for the above-mentioned language projects. Moreover, we will be focusing on trying to complete language projects including Turkish, Indonesian, Arabic, and French for August. If you would like to help out in these or other languages please consider applying through this form

Our designated leaders continue to help coordinate the project. If you would like to step up and help out by being a designated leader for a language group, please PM @SoulfullyAButterfly

By the end of this month, we are hosting a fun live team event for the Teen team members, and in the future, have decided that forum meetings and events might be more suitable according to our team needs!

The Content Volunteer Team is doing really well as well! We have had our team improve the quality of several Question and Answer Pages as well as work on the Expert Mental Health News and Advice section.

Moving ahead, we are ready to onboard even more applicants as we have special ideas - these include the daily Thoughts and Reflections post which the community is invited to participate in. Several community members have also posted their own threads in this section, and the general reflective conversations including everyone in the community has been brilliant! We have invited our Therapists to join us as well, and you can expect to see these posts continued with the help of our Content Team members as well.

Moreover, starting mid-August, our Content Team will be bringing an exciting discussion-based book-club like meetings series! We will be reading and discussing the 7 Cups for the Searching Soul book. You can start reading it as after our discussions and your reviews, there will be a great badge you can attain!

Learn as much by writing as by reading - Lord Acton

Whether you join us by reflecting on thoughts or reading our ideas, we are glad to have great content for our community!

Hope/Laiba

A lot has happened since the last update and I am excited to share the progress made by Sub-communities, forums, teen community and the Internship.

Our sub-communities continue to do well under the leadership of Tazzie and the sub-community leaders. 4 more community mentors/teen stars joined the team since the last update. @StanDaMan78 joined the sub-community leadership team as a sub-community mentor leader. Additionally, Fireside chats continue to provide a platform for thoughtful discussions. Moreover, the General Support Sub-community gained 900 subscribers in a month. Moreover, the sub-community team celebrated more events revolving around, world listening day, LGBTQ+ Positivity in the Media, OCD| OCPD and Mindfulness & Self-Care. Lastly, the welcoming team reached 1025 welcomes across sub-communities.

On the forum front, @Mel and the forum team continue to work on the forum flag que to keep the forums supportive and a welcoming environment. Additionally, there has been an added focus on fast tracking forum leadership applications and providing a better experience for all those who are or interested in becoming forum leaders. Since the last update, 11 new forum supporters and 2 more global mentors joined the forum team.

It has been an exciting month for the teen community. We onboarded @TheAtticusFinch & @hopedreamlove as Discussions Team Lead and we are positive this will further support and grow the discussions team. Additionally, 8 sharing circle hosts completed their trial and received their badges while 7 more joined the team as a trial. Moreover, 2 more discussion leaders successfully completed their trial and 8 more joined the team and are working towards completing their trials. The teen only zone sub-community is doing well! @AstronomySkies joined the team as a community mentor leader. Ice-cream socials continue to thrive (Thanks @Tazzie and @hopedreamlove).

Lastly, Internship continues to get a rise in applications. Since the last community update, 157 listeners joined the internship in the trial period while 124 listeners successfully completed their Internship trial and became active interns. To accommodate the rise in interns, 3 new intern mentors/teen stars joined the internship leadership team. Last not least, 30 interns are expected to graduate this month which is the highest number (per month) we have seen in the past few years. We are excited to see the internship growing and are incredibly grateful for our internship mentor team that continues to go above and beyond in supporting our interns.

You may remember Project Tulip that we announced last month, 61 listeners with a total of 81 nominations received the tulip badge for the month of June. Stay tuned to see the list of July awardees!

Evelynes Quality Update

Having started mid-July, Ive had a busy first two and a half weeks! I am still learning the ropes, but I have created a forum section called Evelynes Gazebo where you can visit and leave me questions or ideas, and I will post announcements. I have created a Works In Progress section where you can see what Im up to in July and August. It shows what I am currently doing and what I have completed. As I am launching two big project pilots in the next month, most of my time is spent doing that, answering PMs, and creating forum posts in my section to keep the community informed in a transparent manner.

I am currently working on launching a version of the Anonymous Evaluations Project that was around in 2016. We are still combing over feedback to figure out how to best incorporate as to take all thoughts into consideration. We will post an update when we have determined what were going to try. Please leave any constructive feedback you have here!

I am also working on a New Listener Support Team pilot with help from other members of leadership. This team will basically be new listener trainers. They will help new listeners learn the ropes of listening and the site. The new listeners will be prepared for chats at the beginning of their journey to complement the onboarding training that all listeners take. At the end, they will get a badge when they have completed the training, demonstrating that they have learned the basics. Right now, we are going to be piloting a simplified version of our idea to see if it is effective. If the program seems to work, we will roll out a more detailed program after that. If youd like to help partake in the program as a listener, please sign up here.

Aside from that, I have posted a forum post here dedicated to helping members and listeners report effectively to increase quality and safety. We are also consistently onboarding Quality Mentors every 2 weeks, and have seen a lot of interest since the announcement of our quality initiatives.

Its only been two weeks, so thats all I got for now, so while it looks short, a lot is going on to improve quality.

Obs

Time always reminds us to make progress: keep moving forward. And, so we are! There is no shortcut, you have to take steps to make the progress. On that reminder, here is the progress we made.

Announced Updated Behavioral Rating System: We had originally launched this in 2016 and recieved community inputs to make necessary changes and then updated it. We heard again some feedback and took into account to update it and re-emphasized as we moved forward. It is our third version and we will keep iterating as we make progress. The objective of this system is to streamline the reporting process and keep you well informed. We want to ensure one getting proper reminders and guidance to improve and behave well with everyone in the community.

Listener Quizzes: In an effort to keep everyone informed and aligned with our guidelines and protocols, we introduced Listener Quizzes that any listener can take and test their knowledge and have all listeners well synced with community guidelines. We rolled out a quiz on general participation and safety and reporting so far. I am glad to see how everyone liked and find them informative. We will keep rolling out more quizzes to keep our listeners updated with community rules and regulations for participation and support.

Sharing Circles: A form of support session where members can share their thoughts in a turn-based uninterrupted environment customized as per our community needs. We started these sessions in the end week of March but with its demand, we scaled up and brought more sessions. In July we scaled up to 8 sessions for adults. You can learn more about them here and here! We appreciate the efforts of our participants, discussion leaders, moderators to like them. We are working on scaling up these sessions to ensure everyone is able to join in and participate in these sessions and feel supported, acknowledged and better. Also, @CheeryMango & @CheerfulRose joined us as Support Team Leaders for Adult Sharing Circle Team to help us with supporting the team of discussion leaders and community.

Group Support Team: Great news! The GS Team expanded and became stronger to ensure better coverage to the community needs. We onboarded @VickyP as Mentor Leader. She will be helping us building and strengthening member discussions/ support teams related aspects. Also, @24Help1 & @smolecho joined the team as project agents to help us with the Room supporter applications (teens) to process them quicker. 4 Moderators and 13 Room Supporters announced as well. To ensure a better communication with our team, we added a Group Support (RS & Mods) Dash as well. So, we are gradually building a stronger and active team to provide all support and help to the community.

Listener Coaching Program Announcement: To provide more and better quality support to anyone who needs listener coaching, we made certain changes in the program to meet the demands and ensure more supply of active listener coaches.

Interactive Mock Chats Catalog: We announced creating a catalog of mock chats videos. These videos will be available on 7 Cups Youtube channel. These mock chat videos will provide you a basic idea and a learning experience on how to handle a specific chat effectively. The chats recorded are for representation purposes only. The listener and member accounts used in the video are of the volunteer who stepped up to help us record the mock chat. We are thankful for their help and support. We recorded a couple of videos on how to handle basic chat, how to handle troll chats (will be available on Youtube soon). We took into account your suggestions for videos on different topics and working on getting them recorded.

Appreciation: We are grateful for all the efforts and contributions made by each one of you. Yes, each one of you are part of the team and your efforts help to keep the progress needle moving on. We appreciate all your efforts. We are working on different ways to express our gratitude for all you do for the community. We announced the Discussion Leaders Spotlight (June 07-July 26). We are working on compiling the list of highest contributors for July to feature them in our Monthly Spotlight. We started this initiative last month.

At the last but not the least, I am thankful to each one of you for all wonderful support and work to build the community. It reminds me of an event to share that someone asked me once, How is a wall stronger? And, I replied to them that you are seeing it as one wall but if you closely notice, it is made up of several bricks. Bricks of different sizes.

So, you are similar like bricks. Your support and contributions might be in different forms and sizes but each one of you is valuable because you are a significant part of the community. And, we are in the process of building a community that everyone dreams of. We are making progress! Thank you!!