CEFP Project Teams

Project overview

In 2017, the Advocacy Ninjas team surveyed scientific community managers to understand how they run an ‘ambassador’ program or similar activities to empower community members to become more active in a community’s mission. The community managers reported the support and benefits they offer to community members, as well as the practicalities involved.

To understand whether these programs are successful and sustainable, it is important to also understand what the community members themselves report as the benefits of these programs, why they sign up in the first place, and what helps or hinders their continued contributions. The Busy Bees team designed a survey aimed at the most dedicated community members (such as ‘ambassadors’, those who actively contribute to the community beyond consuming content) in science-related communities, whether or not they have a formalized ‘ambassador’ program.They hoped to understand whether formalizing a community member’s role as an ‘ambassador’ or other title facilitates contribution.

Team Members

• Toby Hodges
• Naomi Penfold
• Korie Twiggs
• Kathryne Woodle
• (Lou Woodley)

OUTPUTS

• The team presented preliminary findings from their survey the March 2020 community call.

Project overview

Communities gather at events, big and small, in-person and online. But how do we, as community managers, ensure that the events we organize truly foster and nurture our communities? The “CALM Events” project team tackles this question by looking at the planning logistics; the content and how it is presented; diversity, equity, and inclusion at events; and the metrics gathered around events, all under the lens of building community, increasing community engagement and fostering connectedness.  

Team Members

• Chiara Bertipaglia
• Arne Bakker
• Ann Meyer
• Leslie Hsu
• Liz Guzy
• Megan Carter

Outputs

• The team created a guidebook for building community through events, which is available for download here.

Project overview

We are creating a series of quick references with practical considerations for how to incorporate the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion in scientific community-building and the community manager role.The quick reference topics will include marketing & communications, co-creating & collaborating, multilingual communities, recruitment, and meetings/events. Each quick reference will feature an overview, a story that demonstrates why viewing the topic from a DEI lens is important, a list of best-practices, reflection questions, and links to other resources.

Team Members

• Kate Baker
• Ellen Bechtol
• Rayna Harris
• Camille Santistevan

Outputs

• The team created 4 DEI tip sheets to provide starting points for discussion and reflection. You can find the sheets on the DEI resources page.
• They also hosted a CSCCE community call in April 2020 where the tip sheets were the focus of small group activities.

Project Overview

Scientific community managers regularly engage with their members to learn more about community needs &/or demographics, to plan or evaluate community work or programming, or to understand and address specific issues or opportunities.  The “Research Community Assessment Through Surveys (R-CATS)” working group is currently exploring the survey tools and methods that have been previously used by members of the CSCCE CEFP cohort, compiling recommendations and best practices for community survey use, and developing a bank of categorized survey instruments and questions to serve as a resource for other scientific community professionals.

Team Members

• Julianna Mullen
• Brit Myers
• Tom Quigley

Outputs and Ongoing Work

COMING SOON: Menu of community survey questions- survey bank of full questionnaires that have been used by community managers- general overview publication discussing the use of surveys for research community management

Project Overview

Sci Comm Stories is a podcast by scientific community managers, for scientific community managers. Our first season features five episodes where guests will share the stories of the challenges and successes of this emerging profession which supports thousands of scientists across the globe to connect with each other and do better science. We want to enable the voices of our peers in scientific community management and bring support to the role of the community manager within scientific organizations. 

Team Members

• Arielle Bennett
• Shane Hanlon
• Serah Njambi
• Jessica Rohde
• Jen Shook

Project overview

The role and core skillsets of the scientific community engagement manager (SCM) are currently poorly defined, which can hamper the communication of the value that the role can bring. It can also make writing job descriptions, identifying training needs, and evaluating success of a new hire challenging for supervisors and funders. Furthermore, the role does not always fit well into a traditional org chart, with the SCM frequently strategizing across traditional organizational silos to act as a change agent, while also carrying out day-to-day tactical tasks. The Catalyzing Cultural Change (C3) project team is working to define the skills and core competencies for scientific community engagement managers, as well as uncovering insights about the positioning and emerging expectations of the role.

Team Members

• Jennifer Davison
• Andreas Leidolf
• Malin Sandström
• Elisha Wood-Charlson
• Lou Woodley

Outputs and Ongoing work

The C3 team has so far produced a skills wheel of 5 core competencies of scientific community engagement managers, with 9 skills associated with each competency. The core competencies are Interpersonal, Communication, Program Management, Program Development and Technical. The team has also created an accompanying skills glossary with examples of how the skills are deployed in different organizations.

The team presented their preliminary work at the Science of Team Science 2017 meeting and Woodley and Leidolf ran a session at the NSF EPSCoR national meeting in November 2017.

Project overview

As a community grows, a natural progression can be to scale the community activities through community leaders, local ambassadors or other community members acting in leadership roles. Depending on the community, these roles may be voluntary, rewarded via training, free swag or other endorsements, and there may or may not be eligibility requirements in order to become an ambassador. Little is understood about these programs within scientific communities and so the advocacy ninjas project team devised a survey and authored a resultant report so that other community managers could use their findings as a guide to launching and improving advocacy programs for their own projects. 

Team Members

• Melanie Binder
• Stephanie O’Donnell
• Heidi Olds
• Allen Pope
• Gabrielle Rabinowitz
• Rosanna Volchok

Outputs

• This project team conducted a survey of scientific ambassador and advocacy programs and produced a short report which outlined some links between size, funding, and training and program goals, scope, and impact.
• The team also presented on the March 2020 CSCCE community call.

Project Overview

One of the big challenges for scientific community engagement managers is how to evaluate whether their community engagement activities are successful and to succinctly communicate this evaluation and any recommended strategic changes to key internal and external stakeholders. Which metrics to measure can depend on the model that you’re using to evaluate your community, which in turn is influenced by your community’s goals. But if you have incomplete information, or have never carried out a robust community evaluation before, where should you start? The STEEMI team worked to identify the metrics and models that were currently in use within their own organizations, synthesizing this information into a hybrid model for a poster at the AGU Fall meeting 2017.

Team Members

• Rebecca Aicher
• Amber Budden
• Stefanie Butland
• Melissa Varga

Outputs and Ongoing Work

The team produced a poster, “What’s in a Number: How we Measure Community Engagement“, for the AGU Fall Meeting in 2017,  as well as case studies about the metrics that they were measuring for their own organizations. 

Project Overview

Many scientific community engagement managers are responsible for producing content in various forms. From creating podcasts to issuing press releases, sourcing and editing a series of guest blogposts to hosting webinars, content is vitally important to engage community members on a regular basis. The Content on Content team identified that there are no resources currently available specifically for scientific community managers and so set about creating a manual of best practices for content creation.

Team Members

• Joshua Knackert
• Marsha Lucas
• Katie Pratt
• Stephanie Vasko

Outputs and Ongoing Work

The team worked with other CEFP2017 Fellows to produce the first draft of a Content Manual will be published soon.

The manual may be continued by future CEFP Fellows.

Project Overview

The DEI project team formed after the conclusion of the CEFP2017 fellowship year when several Fellows identified that they would like to produce a set of resources about creating and nurturing diverse, equitable and inclusive scientific communities. The team has met monthly and produced an ongoing blog post series. 

Team Members

• Jennifer Davison
• Joshua Knackert
• Marsha Lucas
• Yasmin Marrero-Garcia (non-CEFP Fellow)
• Rosanna Volchok

OutputS

You can read the series of blog posts that the team produced here. They include:

• Community guidelines – a key component of your diversity, equity and inclusion toolbox
• Curating diverse content that represents your community
• Including under-represented community members in planning for diversity, equity and inclusion.