We partner with a growing number of organizations that host or fund scientific communities to advance their work in a variety of ways. You can hire CSCCE staff to provide one-to-one or senior stakeholder consultancy to support your community or member-focused projects. We can additionally create custom trainings for your organization, including private cohorts of our existing courses.
How we work
Our staff have deep expertise across a range of areas relevant to community building, including program development, technology selection, launch and adoption, content creation and strategic communications, project management, member research, and community strategy development.
We enjoy bringing that expertise to a wide range of projects by building thought partnerships with our clients – who frequently re-engage our services. By getting to know you and your community, we find that we’re able to co-create solutions that will be more successfully adopted. That in turn helps you to take a more sustainable and impactful community-engaged approach in your work.
We are a small team, and so we do limit the number of clients we take on each quarter. If you know you are on a defined timeline for your project, please contact us as soon as possible to ensure that we can meet your deadlines and expectations.
All of our projects begin with an initial consultation to find out more about you, your community, and how we can help. To schedule a meeting, please contact training@cscce.org.
How you can engage us
There are three primary ways that we can set up a client relationship:
- You could hire us as consultants – We can set up a fee-for-service agreement through our fiscal sponsor Community Initiatives and then deliver agreed-upon outputs or activities over a fixed period of time.
- You could write us into your grant as a subcontractor – This also works well for working with us on a defined output or activity such as providing trainings for project participants or for program development support.
- We could co-author a grant together – If you’re interested in going deeper into any aspect of community building in STEM, we could work with you as co-PIs to write a grant proposal.
For the latter two options, please consult with us as soon as possible in the grant preparation phase so that we can offer input on both the activities and budget.
Types of consultancy
We are currently working on describing a collection of core consultancy offerings to make it easier for you to select from a range of ways to work with us. Some examples of our past work include:
Community strategy development
- Designing and running a focus group to understand member needs around a new community-focused project.
- Planning and launching a community of practice on Slack.
- User persona research – determining your members’ needs and how to create effective, empowering programming that meets those needs.
- Aligning existing resources (e.g., recorded lectures, slide decks, and blog posts) with an engagement or communications strategy.
Technology
- Technology selection for communities – identifying the technology needs of your community members or collaborators and how to get the most from that technology.
- On-boarding communications – planning the first steps in the journey of new online community members.
Culture
- Identifying and describing orienting values in communities and teams.
- Creating community guidelines – and escalation guidelines.
- Conflict resolution and team-building – exploring styles of conflict, stakeholder engagement, and planning for successful collaborations.
- Systems thinking and working with systems archetypes.
- Burnout, self-care and enjoying complex, networked roles.
Meeting planning and faciliation
CSSCE staff are highly experienced at planning and facilitating events – both virtually and in-person. We work with clients to design and deliver interactive, engaging meetings – especially where there is an emphasis on community-building. Specific examples of projects include:
- Support with planning how to translate an in-person annual meeting online.
- Planning and facilitating of a workshop for members of a new community of practice which includes multiple topical working groups.
- Planning and facilitating an iterative strategic planning process for a new community via a series of workshops.
Our clients
Clients we’ve worked with include:
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We’ve also been included in grants from the following funders:
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Testimonials
I learned about CSCCE just at the right time as we began transitioning away from a traditional marcomms approach to a community engagement approach. The CSCCE resources, staff, and community have since become an invaluable resource both for tactical tips and for a strategic sounding board. I recently contracted with CSCCE to help recruit a senior position and the advice was vital; we wouldn’t have succeeded without their consultation.
Ginny Hendricks, Crossref
To sustainably advocate for open science, greater integrity and equity across science, eLife Community Ambassadors must truly connect with the communities around them. The CSCCE team delivered two excellent training sessions enabling each Ambassador to uncover their own community engagement strategy. Lou and Camille’s valuable insights, flexibility, and personal manner made it a very enjoyable experience that I would highly recommend for all community champion cohorts.
Ailís O’Carroll, eLife
As a new community manager of a relatively new project, it can often be daunting to set and manage expectations. I had already discovered important resources and tools through CSCCE’s fundamentals course and their community of practice, but partnering more closely with CSCCE has been invaluable. Their guidance fundamentally helped me develop an approach to community management with built-in flexibility. This was transformative not only for the success of the programs, but also for my own personal development. I’ve been so lucky to have CSCCE as a thought partner since day 1, and I’m excited for what else we can co-create together.
Pajau Vangay, National Microbiome Data Collaborative