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Introducing TheCR Champions: Jennifer Honig

December 22, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager The Community Roundtable.

Earlier this summer I told you about the Champion Program we’ve been working on and I introduced you to our first Champion, Maddie Grant, who has done an awesome job of adding programming to the network with an association/non-profit lens. I’d now like to introduce you to another Champion. Meet Jennifer Honig, executive director at Techstra Solutions.

Jennifer Honig

Jennifer, tell us a little bit about your background.

I began my post-MBA career as a management consultant focused on reengineering/change management. This led me to Young & Rubicam where I ran the Key Corporate Account Group (multiple lines of business/geographies).  At Y&R, we faced the challenge of connecting our global network to service clients. We leveraged technology to create a global intranet; one of the first in the industry. We were excited to share best practices especially around creative work. I was captivated by what was happening in technology and went to work for several tech start-ups. I led Marketing and Public Relations, building global brands and positioning executives as industry leaders. 

Fast forward to the advent of social communities and internal/external social media. “Social” brings engagement to an entirely new level – it builds brands (corporate and personal), communities, and networks that disrupt the status quo and change the game.  Technology is the tool and I am the conduit, enabling companies to harness its power.

Tell us about your current work. 

I started Techstra Solutions to help companies address the opportunities that social collaboration brings to their organizations. Our offerings continue to expand as social networks and communities add business value to drive innovation, improve productivity, and company transformation.

Many executives feel challenged by how to utilize social networks(internal/external) in a leadership capacity. However, they acknowledge the need to do so. In my discussions with community managers and corporate leaders, I realized that executive engagement is a challenge for many and an essential element that must be addressed for initiatives to thrive. This is why I was excited to become a Champion in TheCR Network on the topic of executive leadership.

What working group you will be facilitating here at TheCR?

The Social Executive

What are your goals or what is your vision for the group?

Executive engagement is the “Holy Grail” of community initiatives; highly sought and rarely achieved. If achieved, it is with just a few executives, not en masse.

Coaching an executive is challenging and time consuming, taxing limited resources. My goal is to bring together this group to help “Crack the Code”  of executive engagement. Together we can create best practices and a knowledge base that will pave the way for others.

What is your proudest moment as a community builder?

An executive that I work with 1:1 moved beyond posting/engaging with the national team that he leads and started to engage globally. Creating a personal communication strategy for executives works! When you help someone realize the benefits of utilizing these systems to accomplish their business goals, they get it. It just takes time, continuous reinforcement, and for some, a leap of  faith.

And for good measure, tell us about a ‘community on the side’ that you are passionate about. Something you are passionate about outside of work. 

I am excited that winter is coming! I am an avid skier and my daughters (Samantha and Grayson) are racers on the ski team at 7 Springs. I am taking an active role in building a community around the ski team and its member families. It is great to be able to apply what I know to an organization that is so important to our family.

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Want to collaborate with community champions like Jennifer Honig? Join TheCR Network!

Introducing TheCR Champions: Maddie Grant

October 22, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

(This is the second post in our series highlighting TheCR Champion program. Read part one here.)

This month we announced a new leadership program — TheCR Champions – for TheCR Network. Today I want to introduce you to one of our new Champions!

Maddie Grant is a long time friend of TheCR and has facilitated Roundtable calls as a guest TheCR Expert a number of times over the past few years. We are thrilled to have her facilitating a working group and helping us to deepen our engagement, content and programming. Lucky us!

Maddie Grant

Want to learn more about Maddie, her expertise, and the working group she is facilitating? Read on!

Maddie, tell us a little bit about your background.

I’m a social/digital strategist and serial entrepreneur, based in Washington DC. I consult to mostly associations and nonprofits and my main company, SocialFish, is a large social media blog (about 35 writers) for that industry.  I currently run an Essentials of Community Management crash course.  I also consult through ICF Interactive, and two of my clients are big community management projects, both of which are basically relaunches after failed starts. (Reasons why they failed the first time? Lack of internal support and infrastructure, of course! I bet everyone here could have guessed that one!).

I also have a brand new consulting firm (you heard it here first!) called Culture That Works LLC with my partner (in life) Jamie Notter, who is also my co-author on our book Humanize: How People Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World. We’re currently writing our next book, on millennial thinking, and the company is for the culture consulting work we do together. This relates directly to community building, because a lot of what we write about and consult on is internal and external collaboration, as well as culture change related to technology change.

So, it seems the common thread for all of this is online communities! Yay!

What working group will you be facilitating and what are your goals for the group?

I have been invited to TheCR (thanks Rachel and Hillary!) to facilitate the associations and nonprofits working group. My goals for the association and nonprofit group is first to help connect people to each other; I’ve been described as a “bridger” IRL (so to speak) and connecting the dots between people and between communities is something I do pretty naturally.  Second, my goal is to help bring in expertise related to nonprofits, which will hopefully be relevant to anyone in the CR.  Nonprofits and associations have important community-driven missions –to do with pushing our industries forward and/or changing the world for the better– that are directly tied to our ability to build community online. So connections and learning, those are my two big goals.

Do you have a community that you are especially passionate about?

A community on the side that I am crazy passionate about is this – I run social strategy for Artomatic, a huge nonprofit arts festival in DC. We attract about 75,000 people and 2500 artists and performers to each event, and the whole thing is volunteer run – so part of my job is corralling the hundreds of volunteers, both short term and long term.

Thank you Maddie! We are excited to collaborate with you.

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Want to take advantage of exclusive TheCR Champion programming inside TheCR Network? Join today.

Introducing TheCR Champion Program

October 9, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager The Community Roundtable.

Turns out Fall 2014 is a pretty big season here at TheCR. (In case you missed it we announced a new service last week and announced our new partnership with #ESNchat the week before!) Today, I’m excited to share some news from inside TheCR Network.

ChampionsAfter months of work, we are launching a leadership program for TheCR Network called TheCR Champions. This program serves to:

  • Deepen conversations among special interest groups who share a common use case or characteristic 
  • Enhance our content and programming by having community leaders, who have deep expertise in their domain, lead conversations
  • Connect you more closely with similar peers and industry experts

We’ve sought out Champions who are experts in the space and who can add depth to the conversation in their respective domains, introduce members to the others within their personal networks, and facilitate a special interest group within TheCR Network.

We have launched three special interest groups to start:

  • Associations & NFP/Non-Profits: exploring issues related to associations and non-profit organizations in the social and community space
  • The Social Executive: to explore and curate best practices for gaining executive support and coaching executives to get started and succeed in their communities
  • Business Model Innovation: to explore the critical role of community elements in the development of new business models at enterprises large and small

We have groups on social support and governance launching soon, with groups on ESN/collaboration and social media in the works.

What does this mean for our members? They’ve seen (and will continue to see) more content and programming (available to the entire network but tailored to specific groups) with a variety of quality facilitators and guest experts that address special interests. 

For me, it’s the culmination of months of work below the visible surface of the community – the iceberg effect of community management – and over the next few weeks, I’ll be introducing our first TheCR Champions on the blog. We are honored to work with them and excited to have them invest their time and expertise inside the network, and we want to give you an idea of the special work they are doing.

Thanks for reading along. I love sharing the cool stuff that happens inside the Network, and I’d love to chat with you if you think membership might be a good fit for you and your community journey. Drop me a line!
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Want to take advantage of programs like TheCR Champions? Join the Network today!

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