4.2 Expanding your reach

You may only have one team member moderating your challenge, and if your community increases to over 200 active participants, it can be difficult for this person to offer support to everyone. A way around this is to develop a team of buddies, champions and mentors to offer challenge participants support.

Below are some suggestions on how you can spread the community-management role among these supportive groups. Your chosen platform may allow you to set up "user/recipient" groups in the platform-management dashboard, which will help you send targeted emails to different groups (your ask from them will vary according to the role they choose to play).

A challenge buddy is someone who commits to offering guidance and support to a number of participants. Buddies help support the community by encouraging knowledge-sharing and feedback among peers, and helping users become familiar with the platform and challenge.

Start by recruiting 12 “buddies”, each of whom commit to helping 8 members. Buddies may be contributors from previous challenges, team members or volunteers who are interested in the challenge topic, or anyone who has a stake in the challenge being successful. You may need to start recruiting buddies early in order to manage your time, but don’t do it too early – if you do, the chances are they will have forgotten about their role by the time the challenge launches. We recommend you start a month early and send weekly reminders and snippets about the challenge to keep them excited.

If you’re recruiting team members as buddies, it’s a good idea to get them together in a group face-to-face meeting. In this, explain the goals of the challenge and the community culture you're aiming for, and provide a detailed induction on how to use the platform (you may need to set up a draft challenge for this). Help them all to sign up to the platform before or during this meeting, if possible (it’s important that their profiles are a good example to others, so encourage them to add a photo and complete all of the profile questions).

If you’re recruiting volunteers as buddies, the community manager will need to identify who these people are. If you’ve run a challenge before, you’ll be able to recruit from your super-user list. Most platforms will let you pull a report of users into an Excel spreadsheet – look for those with the highest number of comments and followers from your previous challenge, and target them first. You may need to reach out to 60 people to get the 12 buddies you need.

If you have no existing community or network to reach out to, you can recruit buddies from the sector that’ll be most impacted by your challenge. This will require a lot more preparation, so you may prefer to recruit peer mentors (see below) instead. If you choose to recruit buddies from the sector in question, reach out to other groups with their own large networks: for example, group leaders on platforms such as Meetup, community managers at spaces like Impact Hub and project leads from specialised groups, such as Project Dirt.

Here are some guidelines in setting up your buddy system:

You’ll need to reach out to more than 12 potential buddies because we can assume some people will not have the time to join. If possible, connect via phone or video chat, or in a face-to-face meeting, in order to get to know them. Email should be a last resort in this instance.

Try to build a profile of each of these 12 buddies so that you can see if there are any similarities in terms of motivation. Ask them about their experience, their interest in the challenge topic and their comfort levels when using online tools. You could also send out a general request to all participants to ask if they would like to become buddies (eg, “Hey all, we need buddies!”).

Now you’ve had a call or meeting with your 12 selected buddies, you should arrange a meeting or a group call (if they’re not in the same city) offering some training on their role, the platform and community culture.

Doodle polls are a good way to find a suitable date (you may need to offer two sessions). When scheduling this, it’s a good idea to arrange a follow-up call for when the challenge has gone live (perhaps a week in). For online calls, Zoom has a free option and doesn't require participants to have an account; you can also use Skype and Hangouts, but make sure all participants have a sign-in and that you’ve added them as contacts before the scheduled call.

When all your buddies have committed and had some training, it’s time to check in on them to offer your continuing support. You could create a tip sheet for your buddies before the challenge starts, including information on challenge objectives, community culture, and example activities. Be sure to keep this consistent – if you keep changing your ask, the group will get confused and, as a result, become demotivated.

Next, supply each buddy with a list of 8 people to connect with. You may not have enough people in the first week, but should have by the second week. When emailing participants to let them know about their buddy, be sure to attach a link to the buddy’s user-profile; and if they’ve submitted an idea, add a link to this, too. Try to connect buddies with members who have similar interests and have selected “submit an idea” or “join a team” in their profile. Start by assigning buddies with the idea-submitters of the “seed ideas” to maintain momentum.

It’s helpful to arrange a call two weeks into the challenge (or earlier, if you find that buddies need help), to check in with your buddies. The call doesn't need to be more than 30 mins – it’s just to check if anyone needs help or is facing any challenges. You’ll usually find that buddies’ activity rises just before the call, in preparation for it.

At the end of the challenge, it can be helpful for buddies to receive a summary of their input. Share the results from your feedback survey, highlighting the number of ideas that were helped by the challenge and positive comments from members.

Champions are a little different from buddies, in that they have a lighter support role that’s linked to their interests. They act as representatives of a specific agenda – they might be a youth champion, an environmental champion or a social-justice champion – and commit to asking idea-submitters questions with a specific agenda and raising awareness of the issue (eg, public health).

This means they don’t commit to supporting a specific number of participants or ideas, but only offer feedback or support on ideas that relate to their interests. You can also recruit champions on topics that will improve the quality of a project: for example, an “impact champion”, whose sole role is to share advice and comments on how to measure and increase impact.

A champion acts as a sort of mentor for idea-submitters or the community, by:

• sharing links and resources on their chosen focus area;

• offering tailored feedback and advice to idea-submitters;

• and inviting people from their networks or sector to join the challenge.

The role can be helpful when it comes to offering more diverse feedback and helping participants focus on the impact of their idea through a different lens. You may only need champions if your challenge’s focus is wide: for example, if you’re looking for ideas across a number of different themes to improve your city, champions would be a good idea.

To recruit champions, you could ask for recommendations from your team, partners and community. Start recruiting champions early, so they have time to promote the challenge in their respective communications channels. You can call this role anything you want – we've just used the word “champion” as an example.

Know your key participants – in our experience, roughly 85% of activity comes from just 15% of participants. And the ten most active participants are the most important ones. It pays to be in touch with them on a regular basis, to listen to their suggestions and needs, and to help them to make progress on their projects. This will usually turn them into loyal role models.

If you don't have time to create a more formal buddy system, a small group of super-users can help you to develop the community further by kick-starting conversations. If you’ve run a challenge before, you can pull the group together before you launch your next challenge, as you’ll be able to identify super-users from the previous challenge.

You can recruit team members, volunteers or participants as super-users, in the same way you can buddies. Here are some quick tips:

• Personally speak with at least 20–50 potential super-users to help them feel closer to the challenge (with a six-week run-up, this means speaking to 3–8 people a week until your challenge launches). If you don't have an existing community to approach, you can find people as suggested for the buddy system above.

• Give the people you’ve reached out to a guide on example activity.

• Create a “group” of super-users in your users page. For Crowdicity, you can do this under “crowd-management” and can send the group personalised emails/messages more frequently than on other platforms.

• Try to check in with the group by phone on a fortnightly basis.

• Assign super-users a “badge” so they get recognition on the online platform and are easy to search for – you can call this role something specific, such as “star-member”. The role can also be added to LinkedIn, so will really incentivise students.

The main difference between this group and the two above is that it doesn't recruit to push a certain agenda, theme or focus; instead, these people are driven by the potential to create impact.

Before you launch the challenge, recruit around four business mentors who can help you develop participants’ ideas online. Business mentors will:

• log on to the platform for an hour every week and comment on four ideas;

• offer a live Q&A session;

• lead an online-coaching session via Skype;

• write a blog for participants;

• and host an “ask me anything” session via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook (depending on which platform is most popular for your target audience) – it’s a good idea to capture this via Storify and add it as a blog on your platform to harvest the learning.

A business mentor offers support and guidance on a number of skills the idea-submitters may benefit from: for example, marketing, financial advice, business planning, and so on.

You can use experts in a number of ways: they can help set the scene for the topic, contribute on the platform, host live “inspiration” sessions to attract innovators and be a judge for the final selection.

We found that experts offer more when they’re involved in the online process, rather than just appearing as final panellists for “pitch days”. But it’s important to strike a balance here because “experts” can actually dampen an innovation process – they can be a little closed to just “seeing how the idea develops”, having tried and tested so many different options themselves. With this in mind, always try to recruit collaborative experts.