May 2021 Community Update!
Dear community,
Hope you all are well and that it continues to warm up where you are. It has been unseasonably cold here.
Here are a few things on my end!
One, please download the new version of the app. There are many community updates that make navigating the sub-communities in the app a world better.
Two, we are beginning to design new dashboards for members and listeners. They will feel more calm with less colors and things calling your attention. I’ll share the designs soon.
Three, we will soon be adding an abbreviated version of the wellness test to the onboarding process when you sign up for 7 Cups. This will allow us to better understand how to help AND, more importantly, personalize the service so that we can better help members. Here is a quick analogy. Have you ever been to a food court in a mall? There might be ice cream, burgers, pizza, chicken etc. Your job is to find a table and then go and get all the food you want to bring it back to your table. The onus is on you to go and get the food. What if you could walk into a food court and people just brought the food over you liked? Wouldn’t that be cool? That is what we are going to do with personalization. Early innings now, but it’ll get smarter with time. I’ll share more as we hash things out.
Heather (H)
Hi, everyone! Three things from me!
1. We’ve been thinking more about how we can bring more recognition to our hard-working listeners who take such good care of our members. We have come with a way to highlight listener reviews via forum posts, and we call this campaign Daily Reviews.
Every week I will make a new forum post, listing the number of positive reviews we received last week as well as how many we have received so far! In the forum replies, we will post listener reviews that show up in the Positive Reviews section (found on the bottom left-hand side of your main page: https://www.7cups.com/listener/)
I’d like to ask for your help copying these reviews over whenever you see them, including their tag, so we can give them hearts and appreciation! Only as a collective community can we keep this appreciation chain going, so please pitch in when you can!
And to give you a little extra incentive, you will receive 20 cheers for each batch of reviews you post!
Please check out the subforum HERE.
2. We have heard your signaling for more face time with the Community Team, and I am very excited to announce that the admins will be popping into the rooms on a regular basis to say hi to you all! We may be opening a Free Hugs room or doing listener check-ins or simply chatting in the rooms. These are the dedicated days you can expect to see someone on the team:
Monday
Check-ins from the @7CupsCommunity account
Tuesday
@SoulfullyAButterfly
8-9 AM ET
Wednesday
@Hope
1-1:30 pm ET (Adults)
1:30 PM - 2 PM ET (Teens)
@Tazzie
After 7 pm
Thursday
@EvelyneRose and @Heather225
Saturday
@ASilentObserver
Keep an eye on your alerts as we’ll be setting them when we’re around! We look forward to spending more time with you!
3. We onboarded a brand new Ambassador this month! Please congratulate @Asher (previously Asherwolfice) and find out about the domain they are serving in in this post!
Laiba
In the past month, productivity hour was launched to facilitate academy trainees in their academy work and it ended up being quite productive for even the rest of the community. Furthermore we worked on adding academy program overview videos for academy programs to help trainees better understand the program requirements. An overview video was added for Building Community and for the Quality Leadership Program. These are accessible to trainees who apply for the program. We also updated the Best Practices guide for listeners to make it more clear and understandable.
Additionally Remembering our purpose discussion series was launched and the response was incredible! I thoroughly enjoyed hosting and seeing others host. You can see the ones scheduled on our community calender. Moreover, we launched academy testimonials form, entries from which are being featured on our LinkedIn. We also launched video shares to be shared on youtube and other social media platforms. Lastly a plan ahead post was made for users who are interested in the academy programs but need more information or guidance.
Obs
May was the month of challenges and events. We organized and hosted events like, “Sharing Circle Birthday Party”, “Find Lulu in Rooms”, “5,4,3,2,1 Challenge” and so on.
While on the Listener Chatroom news, we scaled up the Listener Check-ins to 4 slots to bring more support and guidance for our listeners.
On the Group Support Leadership News, we onboarded 5 Mentor Leaders and more Room Supporters, Chat room Moderators and Chat room Mentors!
And, we supported 2361 members in the Sharing Circle Room, 1570 members in the Support Room 24/7, 1378 listeners in the Listener Support Room & 600 Teen Listeners in the Teen Listener chatroom in May so far. We look forward to connecting and supporting more members and listeners in June.
Also, our community mods have helped us to initiate hourly Support Check-ins program and currently we are covering it almost every hour, and now members are getting therapeutic support from the community mods and also from our experienced volunteer leaders in support room 24/7.
Tazzie
With support from ambassadors, team members and sub-community leaders, sub-communities have continued to flourish in several ways.
This month, we onboarded 12 Project Agents, hosted Member Appreciation Week, and Answerathon
Special thanks to @CheeryMango and the Needs Reply Team for their contributions and support with making these events successful!
Our leaders and team members @Mel @tami150 @listeningsarinn @bookworm274 and @ouiCherie have been hard at work with training and onboarding new leaders! Please join us here to congratulate our newest forum supporters, mentors and teen stars!
We are moving forward with hopes of relaunching a team with new twists for the community! More updates will be shared soon. Please stay tuned!
Programs Update by @SoulfullyAButterfly
Content at 7 Cups and our social media pages has largely been influenced by the social aspect recently - we proudly joined the first ever Mental Health Action Day as a partner and got to turn awareness into action. Our CDM trainees also work on learning the power behind graphics and other social media tools and presentations, and our own Team Lightship has resulted in enhanced outreach and support.
Moving onwards to June, we aim to launch a Marketing Assistants role which will have a select number of positions to apply for.
Until then, we are further expanding the strength of Lightship through Lightship Assistants as well a new Lightship leader! Congratulations to @DreamTouch on becoming our newest project leader.
These efforts will help us continue to spread support and spread word about the community!
Our Translations Project continues to be another opportunity for those interested in globalizing mental health awareness and support: you can apply for either the app or site projects!
Evelyne
We are seeing some big changes lately on the Quality front. The Anonymous Evaluations Team is growing and continuing to improve quality in listeners. Interested in getting involved? Contact me at @Evelynerose.
Safety Awareness Team has recently taken on @LuLuRings to head safety discussions. We also have @Sher217 heading safety quizzes. Want to get involved? Contact @Power!
The big project I’ve been working on is a re-launch of the Listener Coaching Team starting June 1st! @Mango3 will lead the Listener Coaching Team forward with some new policies and a focus on quality over quantity and skill building.
We also took on 5 new Quality Mentors and continue to review applications.
@GlenM
Thank you very much for keeping us updated on these constant improvements and new developments. It makes us feel more included, and thus strengthens the sense of community and belonging that is a key characteristic of 7 Cups.
I daily perceive constant efforts from you, “top leaders”, to make 7 Cups better and better. There are always improvements here and there in all the areas where I do work or am in contact with.
Instead of just managing the areas under your respective responsibilities, which is a lot of work, enough to overwhelm the average person (like me), you take the initiative to create new things, improve and refine the existing ones, and thus increase even more your already huge workload.
You show your passion and love for 7 Cups, in the huge quality work you do daily, and these creative and clever ideas and projects you so often put into practice.
I have a couple of humble suggestions, a lot less important than these initiatives, that are based on my recent experience with the website.
I feel that this platform is working slower than usual, particularly at peak hours. Besides waiting more while doing common tasks like reviewing the needs reply queue, or browsing the forums, I have got error message screens, for example, after posting check-ins with tags, and the tags are not processed. Members in 1-to-1 chats have complained of problems with the review form. Members in the forums have asked me to find "lost posts", or even entire forums. This never happened before to me.
It looks that the server has been working slower than usual recently.
What I suggest is explaining everybody about this, acknowledging this issue. For example, sending a notification and a post saying "Since we launched the new app, many more people have become members, and our servers have to deal with a lot more people than before" or "We are moving to another server" or "We are improving the software that runs the site" etc.
Another suggestion is to have a "Technical Status" page, like many platforms have, where the technical team can post the status of the servers, programmed maintenance times, uptime statistics, anticipated slowdowns, etc.
I hope you don't find these suggestions offensive, but as well-intentioned contributions to this Community.
Thank you again for the huge work you do, for the passion you put into it, for your creativity in devising new ways to improve 7 Cups, and for taking the challenge and the added workload to make them real.
All the best to you all !
Marcelo.
@WelcomeToChat Thank you, Marcelo, for your kind words and recommendations! The forum has been slower these days for sure and we need to make things more efficient. Is the slowness just on forum posts or in other areas as well?
@GlenM
Thank you Glen, for taking the time to read and answer my post.
I feel that the forums have been the most affected by the slowdown. I haven't felt any slowness in group support chats. 1-to-1 chats and PMs seem to be working slower than usual, but without affecting their functionality.
All the best !
Marcelo.
@welcometochat, I talked with our engineers about this today and we hope to optimize things in the next several weeks. I’ll keep you posted!
@GlenM
Dear Glen, thank you for your message !
I'm glad that the system will soon get back to cruising speed.
7 Cups deserves all the love and enthusiasm from its computer servers 
thanks for the update. I appreciate all you give to make 7cups a more supportive place.
@soulsings and we appreciate you!!! Lisa brings you up at least 1x a week!
@GlenM thanks for your kind words.
The more I practice people skills here at 7cups the more I see this is a building relationship site, even if it is only for one chat or a forum post. Treating people like family shares the love and caring many are searching for.
@GlenM Thank you for the updates 👍
Where can I find the new version of the app?
@honestAcres4401 i guess they mean, they have updated the app
@GlenM amazing update!!!