Lauren Uyeno is the National Director of Professional Groups at Workiva. We spoke about how she created a user group within a community to help her organisation work with ESG, which stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. ESG encompasses the measures and strategies that companies are taking to act responsibly - for example, when it comes to sustainability and having a diverse and inclusive workforce.

In this conversation, we dove into what user groups are, how to create and run them and how Lauren uses her community-building skills to lead in an area where she is not an expert herself.

In this podcast, Lauren and I talk about:

• Challenges she faced when bringing together multiple communities based on different platforms and how she increased discoverability
• What the process of starting a new community or user group while ESG and sustainability are just starting to gain interest looks like
• What makes user groups so valuable
• How to use community and user groups to help companies work with new rules and regulations that are impacting their industry
• Ways to balance an in-person user group with an online community and keep everyone on the same page
• How community building differs from what most companies are used to and why it is the business model of the future
• What it takes to build and nurture a community

Where to find Lauren:

• Website
• LinkedIn

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Podcast and show note production by Nives Kurjak. Click here to get 10% off your podcast production for life.

Jen Sherman is the Community Manager at the Advance Women’s Expert Network - the premier networking group for female consultants, coaches and done-for-you service experts.

Originally a School Social Worker, Jen leaned into her strengths and experiences and applied her background in understanding people's needs and her passion for being a connector to support a community of women who want to accelerate the growth of their businesses through the power of relationships. Jen has been working at the Advance Women’s Expert Network since its launch in February 2021. In her time as Community Manager, she has taken the community through several phases of growth.

Today, Jen is going to talk about her top three approaches to making sure members want to stay because they get so much benefit out of the community.

In this podcast, Jen and I talk about:

• How a regularly occurring orientation process is impactful for retaining members and how that process is structured and personalized
• Finding the right balance between automation and personalization
• What are some aspects of the orientation process that help make members feel seen and valued
• How attending an orientation plays a part in higher member engagement later on
• What the benefits are of a personalized direct reach out vs an automated email when getting members to upgrade their membership
• The differences between a standard membership and a tiered membership system as well as what the transition process from one to the other looked like
• How to deal with objections when members are leaving the community in a personalized way and offer support

Where to find Jen:

• Website
• LinkedIn

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Did you enjoy today's broadcast of the Thriving Community Show? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Podcast and show note production by Nives Kurjak. Click here to get 10% off your podcast production for life.

Rush Sadiwala is the CEO and founder of Framework, building software dedicated to helping people run online challenges. Framework makes it dead simple to build, launch and operate - with hundreds of challenges taking place in the last year, meaning over 250,000 people have completed a challenge powered by Framework. They’ve worked with brands and organizations such as Columbia University, Chris Haroun (#1 ranked Udemy instructor), Annie Grace (#1 ranked sobriety author) and SugarAddiction.com

As we know, communities are multi-faceted and are more than just an online forum. Running a challenge could be the perfect tool to add to your membership as a way of boosting or refocusing engagement as well as bringing new members into your community. Let’s find out from Roosh what it takes to create a challenge and how it can fuel our community with new energy.

In this podcast, Rush and I talk about:

• What is a challenge and different types of challenges
• What community engagement looks like based on the length of the challenge
• How Framework software makes it easy to set up a challenge and not worry about updating it constantly
• Examples of some successful challenges that were completed through Framework
• What makes a challenge such a powerful tool for goal achievement and community building
• Why Rush recommends that everyone should run a challenge at least once and how that can benefit their business
• How Framework has simplified running a challenge, compared to running challenges through Facebook groups
• How running challenges is a great way to generate and nurture leads
• What the challenge creation process looks like on Framework

Where to find Rush:

• Website
• LinkedIn

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Did you enjoy today's broadcast of the Thriving Community Show? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Podcast and show note production by Nives Kurjak. Click here to get 10% off your podcast production for life.

Haseena Patel is an author, mind-body-spirit breakthrough coach, international speaker, yoga instructor, Akashic Records reader and teacher, poet and peace-builder. She lives and grew up in South Africa and she shares her personal experience of the inequalities of Apartheid.

Her upbringing has influenced her work with diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, and she applies her learnings to the two communities she now runs. She is co-founder of Leave No Girl Behind International, an organisation that empowers girls worldwide through leadership programs, and co-creator of the Bubbles Beyond Borders global campaign for gender equality, which focuses on holding summits to build self-worth.

In this podcast, Haseena and I talk about:

• How to build genuine relationships by discovering our commonalities and finding strength in our diversities
• Stories from her life that were sparks that led to her interest in building communities based on the DEIB principles
• What questions to ask people to find commonalities and connect on a deeper level in any conversation
• How to find common ground and understand each other's choices even when we disagree
• Why looking inwards and finding gratitude helps with raising the vibration of our interactions with other people
• How to learn from our diversity and approach disagreements with sensitivity to other people’s experience
• What steps can we take to give others the space to live out their truth during interactions

Where to find Haseena:

• Website
• 30-day experience of UN-Breakable Tribe

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Did you enjoy today's broadcast of the Thriving Community Show? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Podcast and show note production by Nives Kurjak. Click here to get 10% off your podcast production for life.

Haneefah Abdurrahman Lekki is best known as a tech community builder, passionate about the improvement of tech communities in Africa. She is the Programs and Community Manager at Ingressive for Good, a nonprofit organization with the mission to create and increase the earning power of African youth through tech training and resources for the growth of the African startup ecosystems.

She currently manages the Ingressive for Good student Community of over 55,000 students. As well as the Ambassador program which has grown to over 100 Ambassadors across Nigeria and Ghana. Because of this work at Ingressive for Good she won the 2022 CMX Community Professional of the year award.

She recently started a Community for Community Builders in Africa. The first of its kind. It’s called Community for Africa.

In this podcast, Haneefah and I talk about:

• The process of building the Ambassador program and the values that guided this process
• What platforms work best and are used the most by the community members
• How the Ingressive for Good Community has grown exponentially over just two years and Haneefah’s plans to expand further
• How all meetings and events are kept branded under the Ingressive for Good umbrella, using guidelines and playbooks
• What the benefits are for Ingressive for Good community members and the support they receive to further their education and professional life
• Who can join the Ingressive for Good Community
• How seasonality (eg. holiday season, exam season) affects the activities within the community
• What Haneefah’s tactics are for boosting engagement

Where to find Haneefah:

• Website
• LinkedIn

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Did you enjoy today's broadcast of the Thriving Community Show? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Podcast and show note production by Nives Kurjak. Click here to get 10% off your podcast production for life.

Myriam Hadnes is a behavioral economist. In fact, she has a PhD in this area. She is the host of the “Workshops Work” podcast which has been running since 2019 with over 170 episodes. The podcast is ranked by Listen Score as one of the top 10% most popular shows out of almost 3 million podcasts globally,

Myriam is motivated by the vision that we can change the world, one workshop at a time.

She curates the "Never Done Before" Facilitation Community. This community was born from the pandemic and has since grown into a paid membership community of 250 from all around the globe.

In her work, Myriam applies scientific insights about human behavior and group dynamics, along with her learnings from experts on her podcast to improve collaborative work..

In this podcast, Myriam and I talk about:

• What it takes to create a self-managing community and how she was able to make that happen
• How to empower community members to host sessions and take initiative
• The story about how the “Never Done Before” community evolved from a festival
• What the onboarding process looks like for new community members and the personal touches that Myriam adds to this process
• Why Myriam doesn’t ask new members to introduce themselves to the community as soon as they enter and what she asks them to do instead
• How she makes it easy for community members to meet each other
• Ways to help potential members decide if the “Never Done Before” community is for them or not and why it’s good to define this
• Why it makes sense to charge a fee for the community membership and how that adds value

Where to find Myriam:

• "Never Done Before" Facilitation Community
• “Workshops Work” podcast
• LinkedIn

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Did you enjoy today's broadcast of the Thriving Community Show? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Podcast and show note production by Nives Kurjak. Click here to get 10% off your podcast production for life.

Seema Jain started out her journey working with cultural understanding when she launched a Culture Day program for Marriott International in 2014. She designed it to be an innovative program to help market teams be more culturally competent when working with multicultural guests.

The Culture Day program grew from 7 to 35 presentations per year, with a library of content for 14 different cultures and Seema was traveling all over the world to help others lead with a global mindset. Due to the pandemic, Seema was furloughed and it was then she realized she could be sharing her knowledge with other companies and industries around the world, so she founded Say-va Global to help organizations become more culturally competent.

In this podcast, Seema and I talk about:

• Her background and range of experiences that lead her to start working with cultural competency
• How appealing to different cultures of hotel guests lead to an increase of number of guests as well as revenue
• Why something as simple as providing guests with foods from their home country can do loads for overall guest satisfaction
• How she successfully integrated her cultural competency program into 4000 Marriott hotels and later to a range of different companies and businesses
• Ways in which cultural awareness and cultural literacy aids community building goals
• Her advice on becoming culturally competent and her favorite cultural competency story
• An inspiring acronym she created of things to strive for when working with people of different backgrounds

Where to find Seema:

• Website 
• Linkedin

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Did you enjoy today's broadcast of the Thriving Community Show? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Podcast and show note production by Nives Kurjak. Click here to get 10% off your podcast production for life.

Anamaria Dorgo is Head of Community at Butter and Founder of the L&D Shakers. Butter is a software platform where you can plan and host virtual sessions. The L&D Shakers is a community of practice for Learning & Development professionals. She joined the Butter team in June 2021 and has built their facilitation community from the ground up.

She works with a core community team of 6 community members to bring workshops, webinars, AMAs (Ask Me Anything Sessions), and other types of events to the community. They curate an ever-growing free library of facilitation resources and support Butter’s users in getting educated on how to make the most out of the product.

In this podcast, Anamaria and I talk about:

• How to stay top of mind to community members and how having a community core team was key to achieving that
• Forming the community core team and determining the number of members of the core team in comparison to the size of the community and other factors
• What the decision making process looked like when it comes to defining the tasks that will be expected of the community core team
• All about AMAs and how using them within the community helps diversify conversations and provides asynchronous learning opportunities
• Some simple, but effective ideas that make a big difference in making new members feel welcome as well as encourage members to learn more about each other
• Why the community space was designed specifically to provide value for both users and non-users of Butter

Where to find Anamaria:

• Linkedin
• Website

Subscribe to Thriving Community Show on iTunes

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Did you enjoy today's broadcast of the Thriving Community Show? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.

Podcast and show note production by Nives Kurjak. Click here to get 10% off your podcast production for life.