Serena Snoad is today’s guest, she is the Online Community Manager at Alzheimer's Society. She has been a community professional for 11 years and she helps run the CMX Connect Chapter in London!. Serena shares how she runs a huge community team, gets budget, creates scalable systems and tells a heartwarming story about a woman with Alzheimer’s finding a support network.
Serena Snoad is today’s guest, she is the Online Community Manager at Alzheimer's Society. She has been a community professional for 11 years and she helps run the CMX Connect Chapter in London!. Serena shares how she runs a huge community team, gets budget, creates scalable systems and tells a heartwarming story about a woman with Alzheimer’s finding a support network.
Too Long; Didn't Listen
Derek Andersen:
Welcome to the C2C podcast. I am your host Derek Andersen. After holding my first event in 2010 I went on to create Startup Grind, a 400 chapter community based in over a hundred countries. Along the way, I discovered the greatest marketing tool of all time, your customers. Yet I couldn't find anyone sharing how to build a community where people could experience your brand in person or at scale. On this show, we talk with the brightest minds and companies on the planet about how to build customer to customer marketing strategies and create in-person experiences for your brand and customers before your competitor does. I'm excited to have our next guest, serena Snoad who is the online community manager at Alzheimer's Society. She's been a community professional for 11 years and she helps run the CMX Connect chapter in London. Serena will share how she runs a huge community team, gets budget, creates scalable systems, and so much more. Take a listen. Serena, can you describe what Alzheimer's Society is and what you do in your role?
Serena Snoad:
So we're a nonprofit in the UK. So, we're focusing on policy change, funding research and providing information and support for people effected by dementia, which is one of the diseases that Alzheimer's is. So my job is actually to oversee the online community Dementia Talking Point. And so, what we do is we provide peer support and information for people with dementia, carers and families. So they kind of bought part of the organization's service offer. So, we sit alongside the helpline and the information and other services.
Derek Andersen:
I know you did a total rebuild of the community at Alzheimer's society. Can you briefly describe how you went about putting that plan together for rebuilding it?
Serena Snoad:
Yeah, that was just over two years ago. So, the software platform we were running was reaching the end of life. So, we had to move and we thought that would be a great idea to kind of rebuild the community at the same time. So, we took a user needs focus. We were looking at what the community had told us they needed or what didn't work well. And so, we put that into our requirements list so that we selected, we built and we tested with the users right at the center of the process. And then, to take that forward, we then tested it with our volunteers and with a small group of active members just to make sure we were on the right track, make sure we involved them in the process. And the project actually took over a year and quite a lot of work, but by doing it that way, it meant it paid off really well.
Derek Andersen:
What did you learn from it that surprised you? Were there things that, did you have hypothesis about how something would work that didn't work? Or once you got it live, you know it's sort of, maybe it worked better than you thought. What did you learn from it?
Serena Snoad:
So yeah, so always do your test migration. Big, big learning thing. With the first test migration, we failed wildly and we went, we thought, Oh no, this is not going to work. And then the other thing was, just to make sure your documentation, your FAQ's or the time you spend on the bringing people up to speed, I think that's something that we learned was really, really important in that process.
Derek Andersen:
You manage a team of 17 staff members and lots of volunteers. How did you grow the team so big and what do you suggest listeners do to grow their own community teams?
Serena Snoad:
Well, we actually needed to grow the team as we scaled. So we've just hit 70,000 community members this month. But when we started, obviously we just had a very small team. So, there were volunteer moderators and one part time member of staff back in 2003 when the service started. And now, we have 5 employees and 12 volunteers. So part of what we did was to build influence in the organization. So as the community grew and as our influence grew, we were able to kind of demonstrate the value of what we did and then the charity was able to secure funding to expand that. So as the committee grew, we were then able to then create another volunteer role to help with welcoming and flagging issues. And, that's been incredibly helpful for us.
Derek Andersen:
Serena, you mentioned that you have over 70,000 community members, which is incredible. How did you go about building that number? Did you start from scratch? Did you have a base to start from and how do you grow it on an ongoing basis?
Serena Snoad:
Yeah, the community started back in 2003. It was actually a volunteer that approached the nonprofit and said, I want a space for people affected by dementia to be able to talk about what they're going through. And so, the organization took it on as a kind of a community service right from the beginning. And so, it's been promoted alongside all the other work that the nonprofit has done. So, we've been very fortunate in that respect. We are able to command a very small promotional budget to do some work around promoting the community itself. But, we also have the ability to promote alongside other services too.
Derek Andersen:
So, as an 11 year veteran of community building, you're kind of one of the OGs. I thought, I've been building community for about the last 10 years, so I'm sort of in the same camp. But what do you think is the number one skill that new community managers need to learn in order to be successful today?
Serena Snoad:
Yeah, for me, I think to succeed in community you need to know how to meet the needs of the community and the organization. So, empathy for me is a really underrated skill, which a lot of people in business consider like a soft skill or a nice to have. Actually, it's about learning how to really understand people and how to speak their language. And that means the empathy can supercharge so many tasks from issue resolution, getting buy in, building influence and supporting people. So, it's really a key skill.
Derek Andersen:
It's a great thought. And the fact too, you have people that are volunteering or giving their time just to build the community and the thing I used to always say at startup grind was you can never yell at a volunteer, which is a really sort of, Silicon Valley way maybe to say, have empathy. But, it's just like you've got to put yourself in these people's shoes and they could be doing a hundred other things and they're actually helping you and so you need to have empathy. You need to put yourself in their position and do whatever you can to help those people and to be thoughtful and look after them. And I think that's a really great insight. And, it probably online, offline, all sorts of different types of community building that you can sort of flex the empathy muscle. You work a lot with internal stakeholders. How do you get support to grow your team and to grow your program?
Serena Snoad:
I think for me there's something about recognizing that when you're working with stakeholders it's about mutual benefit and relationship. So I think for me the best way to get support is to demonstrate the value that the community can bring to their programs or projects. So, we work with other services to showcase the benefits of our community and to learn what they offer so we can promote each other's work. We call that kind of cross referral. We find storytellers and we gather insights for the mock comms and the policy teams because for them, there's a really clear benefit to putting the voices of real people at the heart of what we do and that's something where I think community can really give you the honest view of what people think.
Derek Andersen:
You also have experience creating and managing budgets and I think since most community professionals typically have very small budgets, how would you suggest someone go about trying to get more budget for their community programs?
Serena Snoad:
That's a great question. I actually think it's pretty dangerous when organizations think that digital community was free. When you prove that you can generate something of value to an organization, I think that's where you start making a case for resources so you can keep generating that value. But for me, the community I manage, delivers a clear benefit to the outside of society and we provide a peer support service that can be accessed by anyone. We've got lots of great stories and really strong data from our annual community survey. And as a result, that's a perfect opportunity for a corporate funder in particular, to put up quite a large amount of money behind it, a deliverable, tangible service. And the same way with individuals being able to invest in bringing people together. There's something about investing in community.
Derek Andersen:
Yeah, that's a great thought. And you know, I think from, if I'm reading between the lines, if somebody is saying, Hey, this needs to be free or this should be free or that person, that leader just has a total lack of understanding of the power and the capabilities and of what building a community can do and what do you do if that's who your manager is? Like, what do I do? I mean, how can I turn the tide and move people from being in one position to another? And you've been doing this for 10 years, so you've probably gone in waves of dealing with people like that and then people that get it and people that don't get it, people that don't get it.
Serena Snoad:
Totally. I think it goes back to empathy, what we were talking about earlier, the idea of speaking the language. You find out what really drives those people. What is it that they really want to kind of generate? What sort of thing, what sort of change do they want to bring about and how can the community help deliver that? And generally, there'll be a way that you can try and demonstrate buy in.
Derek Andersen:
I think building robust processes is one of the keys to scaling a community. Can you share how you've built processes for your community and, or what types of processes you've built?
Serena Snoad:
Yeah, so for me, when you have an active online community, you need processes to keep things running smoothly. So for the community that I manage, we support people who are vulnerable and going through difficult circumstances. So, because we have a duty of care to our members and to the organization, that's why we have tough processes to meet two important aims and that's to look after the community and to protect the organization from risk. So for me thinking about developing processes, you've got to be clear how each of the roles will work together within your team. And that way everybody knows their part to play, what they focus on, who they escalate to. And then, when you're looking at designing process models, you've got to do things like thinking about handling safeguarding issues, handling moderation, and that whole idea is to kind of look after the community and look after the organization.
Derek Andersen:
You don't just focus on growth metrics, you also actually track the impact of the community. How do you do that? What does that mean?
Serena Snoad:
For me, growth is a valid metric for sure. You're always going to need growth to mitigate turn. But really, the idea of measuring impact is to show the change that the community makes. So for me, the question is what difference has this community made to a person's life? What questions have we answered? What problems have we solved? How do we make a difference? So, we ask questions like that in our annual survey and it's really inspiring to see the type of responses you get and to know the difference that we make. And, that's the real kind of demonstrable kind of power of what we're doing. And it also makes the tedious side of management much easier to look back on more pleasant things.
Derek Andersen:
Is your main consumer someone with Alzheimer's? Is it somebody, is it a family member or is it practitioners? Like, who do you mostly service?
Serena Snoad:
Yeah, our annual survey shows that about 90, 95% are carers or family members, but some people will be a carer, but they don't identify as carer. But, less than 5% of people with dementia. And we're working on changing that. We'd love to hear, see more people with dementia using the community.
Derek Andersen:
My grandfather, who was sort of almost like my second dad, passed away 20 years ago of early Alzheimer's, sort of onset Alzheimer's and dementia. And he, you know, I just remember at that time, which sort of predates the internet, but it does not predate the internet, but it sort of, predates internet as we know it. But I just remember, as that started to unfold in our lives and in his life that we just, it was just confusing and it was so difficult. And you sort of, here's this person that you've known and loved and changing before your eyes in many respects. And I think about today sort of, being in a similar situation, seeing the work you all are doing specifically online, in the community that you're building, I just think, how much better we would have been supported and would be supported today.
Derek Andersen:
And, having a community like yours to, as a family sort of goes through and as millions of people go through that and have family members going through this sort of very, very difficult disease, incredibly tragic and difficult thing to deal with. And so, personally can imagine, and I love to hear, I'm sure you have hundreds of stories, thousands of stories, but, is there any stories that come to mind in your mind of things that you, your community, impact your community has had on specific individuals or families?
Serena Snoad:
Absolutely. We were really surprised in our annual user survey. We asked the question this year, would you be prepared to share your story? And we saw a handful of people who have come back, 38% of people filling in the survey said, yes, I'd love to share with us and I'm thinking, we've got all these people, what do we do? But one from a couple of years ago, a lady called Sarah who walked out of her doctor's surgery and she had a piece of paper in her hands and when she opened it up, they'd written down vascular dementia. They hadn't even told her in the room that she had dementia. Her family weren't really that nice. She was pretty much on her own. She went online, she Googled, she found the community. She then found local support. She made the best of it. It was the community that was really there for her. She actually, it helped her kind of have confidence to try new things. So she learned a new hobby. She took up photography and she's been able to kind of make photography books and she does memory books with people.
Serena Snoad:
When she was feeling a little bit worried about a journey she had to make, she went on the community and asked people for help and they were there supporting her and giving her kind of advice and encouragement. And so, that was really her friendship group. And for me helping people like Sarah who don't have anyone else, that's what we do.
Derek Andersen:
Yeah, that's incredible. And, I think a lot of us, we work in business and I think it's easy to sort of, okay we're trying to sell some product or something and, but at the end of the day, we're with people that are in community, we're really trying to bring more fulfillment into people's lives, bring more connection or take on the loneliness epidemic and maybe fill some of the education gap that exists in people's lives. And, to hear a story like that, and that's again, one of thousands of stories, I'm sure if you got 30 plus percent of people filling out the survey, that's, I mean, the people really are, must be impacted by it in the great work that you and your team are doing. So we need to figure out how to get it from 17 to 34 or something. I'm impressed by how big your team is and what you're doing, but we need to do more. So, it's incredible. Tell us, I'd love to hear about a community that you love and why do you love it?
Serena Snoad:
Yeah, so outside of work, I really love to travel. I'm referring it to as my freedom of movement tour at the moment. I love going to European cities in particular and TripAdvisor has been incredibly helpful in the last few years. It's quite easy to, [inaudible 00:14:51] count the really honest reviews, people who are giving you the real deal about a place. And for me, being able to balance that with what the travel bloggers and travel guides say, you get a real sense of what's the city going to be like and what are the places I really need to get to.
Derek Andersen:
I know most of your community work has been online, but you've recently taken up the London CMX connect chapter, which we're so grateful for. But I'm just curious, where do you see this sort of trend of in-person sea to sea communities going and sort of what you've learned from running that group?
Serena Snoad:
Yeah, I've been on the CMX connect team in London for six months now. Just fabulous. And a couple of years before that I was running some in-person events that were more of a community of practice. So for me, there's something about just having in-person meetups because, you build those more kind of personal connections and there's something about fostering that trust more quickly. So that trend of in-person community, I think it's going to become more important because they're going to act as a counterpoint to the remote and distributed work culture that we're seeing more and more of. There's something about meeting with people locally so that you prevent people becoming disconnected. You prevent people becoming disengaged. There's something about if organizations can crack doing online and offline really well together, then that's going to be really powerful.
Derek Andersen:
Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you'd like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod, again, that's B-E-V-Y, L-A-B-S.com/pod.