Reaching the 10-year mark working with online communities & internal communications.

I’ve spent almost 20% of my lifetime, working for the ICRC, and 3650 days working on online communities. Here are some of my learnings.

I joined the ICRC after a tragic incident took the life of 4 young friends of our families in Mexico. During the ‘war against drugs’, they were at the wrong place at the wrong time and they paid it with their lives. I wanted to work for the ICRC to learn more about how an organization works in countries affected by armed conflict and other situations of violence.?

I knew I would not be working directly in my country to ensure neutrality, so I put all my efforts in helping the ICRC be more efficient by helping it connect our collective intelligence via online communities & networks, using AI when relevant. That has been my main motivation over the years.

I really enjoy working and growing with people, seeing them evolve and develop new skills. Exchanging with them, sharing insights, seeing them grow. That’s one of the reasons why I really appreciate working more on the internal communication/ knowledge & change management side than on external comms. Through my work I aim to co-build solutions with our colleagues and partners, using design thinking methodologies and interactive workshops that enable all participants to raise their ideas.

I care about going the extra mile to ensure each participants' voices are heard.

8 years and half later, here I am.

2021 was a year of business analysis: putting up together with our team the Engage vision to enable collaboration & engagement for ICRC staff and our partners. It has been the most extensive analysis I’ve done with the help of many units, regions and external consultants and annual reports such as Lecko, Swoop, The Community Roundtable, Forrester…?

We used design thinking to build a program that resonated with our colleagues and partner’s needs.?

I learned from Richard Millington that it’s 72% cheaper to solve an issue via a community than any other support channel, and this confirmed my commitment to invest in online communities for non-profits. I also learned from the Microsoft Community Answers how to structure a mature support community with multilingual translation and documented it for future community managers.

On the personal side, I learned how to paraglide and also increased my rock-climbing level from 6a to 6b+. Rock climbing literally puts you out of your comfort zone on each new route. I was able to do so, since I work at 80%, it’s a sweet spot for work-life or work/rock balance. Here's a snapshot of what you can discover while rock climbing in Kalymnos, Greece.

?2020 brought the world Covid, and with that I was tasked on a Thursday to accompany the rollout of a major software collaboration solution in our organization within a week. Starting next Monday at 9am I was getting trained and I started teaching 150 colleagues in the same afternoon. That’s adaptive change management. Adoption grew from 100 to 8000 connected colleagues within 6 months. I got training through my network from the Orange Trail team and I’m grateful for that. Our internal online Communities doubled their engagement in that year. The number of views for the communities were 10x higher than 3 years earlier reaching 900K views of our 112 active communities. I also got to practice more design thinking processes in Nairobi and Geneva.?

Before the covid waves hit, I co-hosted an Unconference at ICRC where we co-designed the sessions with the participants, it was our EdCamp. We explored three areas: HR, change & community management with over 40 professionals from the region.

In that year I also started a business. The first intention aimed at building an online academy, but I had more clients asking for my consulting services, so I took the decision to pivot after 6 months towards Digital workplace consulting and online workshop facilitation. 9 months after this adventure started, I realized I was spending too much of my time working and handling all the admin part of the business. So, I chose to find a rock-work balance and shut down the business to go rock climbing more often. I kept my work commitment at ICRC.?Life should be lived today.

From rock-climbing I also learned the value of trust: you literally trust your life to your partner who’s belaying you, if you fall you need to trust that she’ll catch you. That’s the type of trust I seek to build with my managers, sponsors and team members. If I’m going to take risks in trying new engagement initiatives, I need to trust that my managers will have my back when we defend these initiatives to the wider organization or senior leadership. And as in rock-climbing, I’ll provide ?the same support later on.

2019 was a year of transition, as we moved on to new communication teams. It was a difficult year for many. I also started working on other skills linked to Liberating Structures: hosting more interactive workshops that proved highly useful when we moved to full remote workshops in 2020.

I learned a lot from Daniel Stillman on conversation design and from Seth Godin’s altMBA program.

During that year I also took a course on Co-active Coaching that helped me move from a mentoring approach to a coaching mindset. It was also a year when I practiced design thinking to re-imagine our communications teams and co-build a new setup. Learning by doing Organizational Design with a great team of facilitators.?

2018 saw the opening of two internal networks that I pushed for at the ICRC: our Communities and Ask the ICRC system that uses AI to help us find the most suitable expert. It was a multi-year effort to bring them alive as I started planning for these since 2014.?

In that four year process I learned how to influence C-level decision makers though stakeholder mapping and empathy maps.??

We were aiming at launching 10 communities within the first year and we had over 80 within the first six months. We published our Community Manager manual that has been used by several other organizations to plan, launch and manage their online communities. I had the privilege to work on these efforts with a great manager, Laurence Bozetto and had a really strong sponsorship from Brigitte Troyon.

A highlight of that year was the conference and series of workshops where I invited Celine Schillinger to give a keynote with her 10 learnings on change management. Her approach to change management is a lot more engaging and richer than the traditional Prosci methodology. That’s why the conference was called Change & Community management. I wanted to bring a more engaging and community driven approach to how we drive change in our organization.?

While on the professional side that year was a huge success it also came with a price on the personal side: I experienced my first episode of burnout while trying to support 80 community managers with their requests for training. I’m glad it took me just a couple of weeks to recover, and it taught me how to spot for the signs of burnout and how to keep it at bay by protecting myself.?

2017 was a year of negotiations within the ICRC and with several external suppliers. It was also a year when I took my first coaching sessions. In 4 sessions I had a strategic plan to influence 20 key stakeholders. With the help of another senior manager we convinced 19 of them. The last one came a year later and told me that the Communities we launched had saved the fiscal year as one of his teammates went on sick leave at the most demanding moment of the year: the other members in the community worked together to solve each other’s questions within days.?

It was also the year I got certified on the change management methodology Prosci and where I learned it’s added value but also its limitations: it’s quite a top down change management methodology, and that's where the community approach adds a more human way to co-build the change.

2014-2016 were years of tests, trial and learning to deal with frustration. We tried to build communities with Yammer, SharePoint 2013 and other tools. Yammer was banned at the time due to our data protection policies. SharePoint communities offered a terrible user experience. For two consecutive years I proposed a project to launch better online communities and these projects were postponed year after year. I used those years to improve my knowledge of the tools on the marketplace, benchmark solutions and learn from the Lecko reports to help us make a smarter decision in 2017. I also learned how to handle frustration, how to have a plan B, C, D and Z and to gain perspective.

2013-2014 My first and second year at ICRC were filled with action as I contributed to the organization of the 150 years of humanitarian action commemorations, working with all the units within the organization and hosting fundraising events with our partners.?I had the incredible opportunity to work with a manager that had an emotional intelligence that was just impressive, Iris Meierhans. A leader that set an example for me over the years. At the time I told myself: "When I'm 38 years old, I want to be as wise as she is". I'm happy to say that I managed to achieve that goal by that time.

2013 enabled me to work with Somos Mas to build the first extranet of Concord, the European confederation of relief and development NGOs, where I also learned Art of Hosting methodologies to drive valuable engagement and collaboration through strategic workshops.?

2012 was a year of unseen growth for me while I worked at the European Commission, built the Project 668 team, and led the Stage Committee. It was 8 months of non-stop coordination of networking events, career fairs, and building partnerships with embassies and organisations. I realized that my value came from coordination: enabling our colleagues to bring smart people and people with decision making powers in the room and let them discuss and find solutions together. I don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, I only need to ensure that they can hear one another through smart facilitation.

I discovered the immense value of online communities while leading the association of trainees of the European Comission in 2012. We created over 50 sub-communities that mobilized over 700 young professionals in a really short time. Some were focused on getting a team to the Rio+20, others were hosting sessions with the European Commissioners at DEVCO or ECHO on humanitarian or development issues. It was impressive to see all they could manage to build within weeks, how they could help one another, and mobilize people within and beyond the organization thanks to these online networks.

2011 enabled me to work on communications for an NGO in Toulouse. It was a valuable experience organizing a 15-day event around the solidarity economy in the region. It was also my first communications job after my studies. It was an really interesting shift from the previous work experiences I had as an insurance account manager back in Mexico.

10 years go by quite fast. I’m now having a more strategic approach to my work. I've found the areas where I can bring more value, and that usually involves either in the architecture of digital workplace solutions, helping design a community driven change management strategy or hosting conversations with people with diverse backgrounds and expertise in ways that enable each one of them to be heard no matter their rank.

?What have you learned in the past 10 years of your career??Let me know in the comments.