Our new moderation tool

This week...

• Numbers update

• Research findings

• Our new moderation tool

• Mind ‘How to’ guide

Our vision 

For people that care about their community 

Who want to join forces to get things done  

Co-operate is a national community centre for co-operation  

That connects people in and across communities with one another to make things happen 

Unlike a physical community centre restricted by geography and funding, or a community digital platform distracted by monetisation  

Our product is created with communities, for communities, and is owned by communities 

Read more on our updated About page. 

This week in numbers

Co-operate North Star Metric: 

200 active community organisers organically return within 30 days by end of 2020. 

To help achieve this goal, we are currently focusing on organiser retention, on boarding organisers and increasing the number of group pages added. 

Groups: 

Number of groups added this week: 30 

Total number of groups added: 2620 

The below map highlights the locations of all groups added to co-operate (March vs Now). 

In March we were active in 8 communities across Trafford and Leeds. We now have a light national presence across the UK with areas of opportunity across Scotland and the South East. In some cases, the groups out way stores, e.g. Isle of Wight with two stores and 12 groups.  

Research findings

We’ve now completed our recent research with both organisers and participants. We got lots of insight and lots of quick wins. 

Some larger themes also came out of the research that we will investigate in more depth. Two of those themes we noticed throughout the research were interconnectivity and privacy. 

Interconnectivity 

·         Organisers want to connect with other groups, learn from them and share ideas. 

·         Organisers would like to share resources with one another.  

·         Organisers want to be able to connect with their participants, and for this to be two way feedback. 

·         Organisers want to be able to communicate ‘professionally’ with co-organisers. 

Privacy 

·         One women’s group was closed to protect the people within it.  

·         One organiser kept his group closed to maintain a grasp on numbers.  

·         Three organisers were unsure about sharing their details as an organiser. 

We’ll be looking at these design challenges and thinking about: 

·         How might we connect groups with groups, participants with organisers, and those that want to share resources? 

·         How might we design different scenarios to address the user cases for privacy?

We’ll come together as a design team to creatively tackle them. We’ll keep you posted on the outcomes of these. 

For anyone interested in the full outcomes of the research, it was presented at this week’s show and tell and can be found in this deck. 

Our new moderation tool

As we move away from Contentful and into our own database, we need a new way to manage and moderate the content created by our users. The below screenshots are the designs for our new moderation tool, giving us the ability to approve or edit submitted groups and activities.

Why moderation matters

Without moderation content could be:

·         mildly harder to read because of weird capitalisation or poor grammar 

·         inconsistent with the rest of the page/site (reducing trust) 

·         very hard to read, especially for people with cognitive conditions 

·         exclusive due to acronyms and jargon 

·         inaccessible to screen readers 

·         politically incorrect or potentially offensive 

·         inappropriate 

·         racist, homophobic, sexist or any other 'ist' or 'ic'

We’ll moderate submitted groups and activities to make sure they are suitable for Co-operate, but we also want to make sure that they’re accessible to all.

Mind ‘How to’ guide

We’re working with the fundraising team from Mind, and our Community team, to create a ‘How to set up a community quiz’ guide to coincide with Co-op colleague fundraising week and World Mental Health Day. 

Using How to host a music experience as a template, we’re pair writing the guide with Jonathan, a mental health advocate and expert quiz master from Mind. 

The objective of this guide is to inspire more people to set up their own activities in the community and add them to Co-operate. And to encourage more participation in activities that improve mental wellbeing. 

Thanks for reading this week! 

The Co-operate team 

Posted by Robyn Golding on 28 August, 2020