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Building our communities: what is really involved and why do we love them?

We ran a survey with our internal community managers to understand how they spend their time and what leads to success. Why we love building community. Our education and research communities are a lifeline for thousands of professionals. They create spaces for people to connect, learn and support each other covering different topics around the […]

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Champions Co-creation Digifest Top tips

Podcasting at the Digifest community hub

With plenty inspiring education and research communities, the community hub at Digifest 2024 introduced a podcast area to capture conversations about what motivates them. In this blog, learn how with the support of Jisc community champions, we prepared the podcasts and tips so you can try your own. The podcast buzz Hosting podcasts during the […]

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How the right values and strategy help shape our communities

How important is having the right values in your community? Do you have a common vision? How do you know when you are meeting your community’s needs? Our community member’s time is precious, with their attention constantly divided our communities need to be useful and relevant. With the right strategy, we put community members at […]

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engagement Top tips

How innovation helps our communities

What does it mean to innovate? What happens when communities are free to experiment? I have been tackling these questions to look at how we support community growth in education and research, raise their profiles and keep ahead of the next big thing. Community rarely grows without experimentation. Trying new things can be daunting, but […]

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Co-creation Top tips

Collaborative content projects – what we’ve learned so far

I have been interested in how to co-produce content with communities for a long time. I know that there are many benefits of facilitating communities, as a space for conversation, mutual support, and learning, to name a few. For me there is something about producing collaborative content that takes it to another level. My first […]

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Tips for using Microsoft Teams as a community platform

The right platform can make or break a community. For many education and research communities, Microsoft Teams is a common choice. It allows users to collaborate internally and externally, chat, host events, share documents, and create engaging pages to share information. No platform is perfect, but Microsoft has been improving the functionality and capabilities within […]

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Providing safe spaces for conversation and support (with MFA)

Our trusted communities help members to learn together, provide peer-to-peer support, and empower them to make informed decisions. It’s important that we keep providing a safe space to convene community conversations and for you to share resources. To maintain these community spaces, we have decided to enable multifactor authentication (MFA) for all shared Teams spaces […]

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engagement Top tips

Tips for facilitating online community meetups

I was recently asked to run a workshop for community facilitators to help with fresh thinking about facilitating online meetups. These are people who regular facilitate meetings of our members, and want to keep improving what they do. They are looking to avoid those ‘tumbleweed moments’ and maximise engagement. When writing the session, I turned […]

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engagement Top tips

Connecting with community managers at the community (un)conference.

This month, I attended my first community (un)conference to connect with like-minded community managers from different industries, share ideas and learn about other community groups. Hosted by James Cattell and supporting community enthusiasts the community (un)conference lets attendees collaboratively build the agenda on the day with lots of discussions on hot topics. Here is what […]

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engagement Top tips

Community spotlight: Engaging with Jisc’s research community around the UKRI Open Access policy

  UKRI launched their new open access (OA) policy in April 2022, and Jisc committed to work with UKRI and the research sector, including a diversity of research organisations, researchers, research support and management offices, and representative bodies, to develop an understanding of the challenges around open access, to share and develop best practice, and […]