Creating the Squiggly Career Advocate Community

A year ago, Sarah and I decided to create a community of 100 squiggly career advocates - a group of people who were passionate about making careers better for everyone. Our aim was to accelerate their impact by sharing our insights and connecting them together.

This week, our advocates graduated from the programme and, as we decide where we go next with the community (an alumni? another 2022 cohort?), it felt like a good moment to reflect and share what we have learnt to support other people who may want to create a purpose-led community.

Creating the community….

We used the interest in our TED Talk to promote the community, created a limited number of places (100), had a clear process for applying and simply communicated the ‘what’ and the ‘why’.

Here is the webpage we created:

…and a summary of how we structured and supported the community:

Applicants answered a series of questions to apply, which were reviewed against a community membership criteria. We had over 500 applicants and selected 100 as Advocates who were sent a certificate to welcome them.

What worked well about this approach...

• Connecting to a moment in time - the energy around our TED talk helped us to get the message out. It's worth exploring whether there is a global/national event that connects to the purpose you are driven by that you can use as a springboard for interest in your community.
• Creating pride in community members - limiting the number of people and having an application process can increase community identity and pride in belonging. It's worth thinking about how you can use branding (e.g. a memorable name for the community) or hashtags (e.g. #squigglycareersadvocates) to reinforce that.

What would have been even better it...

• Clearer application questions – our questions were too generic which made selecting 100 people from 500 applications harder than it needed to be. It's useful to think about what one simple question would help you to identify if people were committed to the purpose you are passionate about.
• Social assets for members to share on joining the community – the certificate was a tangible way for us to welcome people, but social assets (a digital certificate) would have allowed them to more easily share their pride with others in support of their personal brand and to raise awareness of the purpose of the community

Keeping the community connected…

Originally, we used Thinkific as the platform for our community. Our intention was for this to be the ‘home’ of connection, conversation and content between the virtual learning sessions.

In reality, it didn’t work well and over time our live learning sessions (delivered via zoom), email and whats app become the tech that kept the community connected.

We also trialled:

• Cohorts – groups of 4-6 with the intention of deepening the relationships between people. We had mixed success. Some Advocates based outside of the UK found it helpful as they couldn’t attend ‘live’ sessions, but could watch-back and discuss together. For others though, there wasn’t enough commitment within the groups to create the connection to make them meaningful.
• Self-organised project groups – we shared two themes (‘develop every day’ and ‘squiggle and stay’) and suggested people who wanted to contribute to the thinking on these areas formed project groups to share insights and ideas that could help others outside of the community. Again, mixed success. Conversations did happen, but as community leaders we needed to create more structure about how those insights would feed back into the broader community.

Going forward, we’re experimenting with Microsoft Teams and Circle as platforms for community connection (other ideas welcomed!).

Measuring community impact

From a quantitative perspective, when we reviewed our community impact vs. our intent:

• 89% of the Advocates felt more connected to other people who share a passion for developing people's career
• 95% of the Advocates who responded to our survey said that they felt better able to support people with their career development as a result of being part of the advocate community

So, we achieved what we set out to!

We also asked our Advocates what they had felt the personal benefit of being part of the community had been. They told us:

• Inspiration from people working in very different industries (Advocate: Eleanor Steele)
• Confidence, credibility, resilience (Advocate: Lizzy Moroney)
• Different insights from different fields and different job roles (Advocate: Helena Young)
• Sharing ideas/best practice/what people have done that’s been useful (Advocate: Bobby Dhadda)

...and they shared what we could do differently to make the community more impactful:

• Having accountability partners to connect with post training sessions to discuss how we will apply the learning and what we will do next (Advocate: Surinder Phuller)
• More content that we can use to promote squiggly rather than just sharing (Advocate: Pritesh Chauhan)
• Meeting people in person (Advocate: Claire Grove)

What can we all learn from these insights?

• Communities scale virtually, but there is still a desire to meet in person when possible
• Communities are willing to spread to word, but you need to make it easy for them
• Communities want to take action, but accountability needs to be embedded

We’ve learnt a lot from the Squiggly Career Advocate community over the last 12 months and I’m intrigued and excited by what we can do next.

If you’d like to learn more about building community beyond this article, listen to this episode of the Squiggly Careers podcast or download or Squiggly Career podsheet.

If you have any questions about our experience or the work we do to make careers better for everyone, please leave them in the comments or drop me a DM!

Helen

www.amazingif.com

#conversationsforchange #squigglycareers