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!
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.
