It all began with me deciding to attend one
of Vancouver’s local NetSquared Meet-ups organized by Eli Vander Giessen. It
was an amazingly informative workshop featuring Brady Josephson sharing his
expertise on A Practical Guide to A/B Testing for Non-profits. As I wasn’t familiar
with NetSquared I did some research and soon discovered that it is a network run
by volunteers who are dedicated to helping create local opportunities for
learning, sharing and using technology to make a difference. Before long I
found myself helping Eli as a Co-organizer and community manager back in March 2013
and have continued to be involved to this day!
Here are the reasons why I’ve continued to
be a volunteer with Eli and NetSquared.
1)
Developing your Relationship
Building skills
Being a volunteer community manager has
allowed me to refine one of the most important skills to have in life, how to
build relationships. When you focus on
helping individuals develop strong mutually valuable relationships within the
community, you’ll start seeing increasing regulars, advocates and supporters.
Not only do I make new friends at the NetSquared
Vancouver monthly events and workshops but I’ve also over time been able to
develop a network featuring experts ranging from social media to digital
storytelling, online strategy and etc. A lot of these personal relationships
once developed can stay with you long into the future.
You never know where new connections can
lead you, here is a story that one of our attendees shared with us about the
power of connections:
“"I've been
super busy starting my social website for community sharing but the last few
months is been a pretty amazing journey. From attending a Net Tuesday event I
connected with someone from Car Surfing which started the conversation that had
me end up meeting with companies like Google and Facebook in San Francisco the
same time as the "finding your story" event. I was also just
confirmed to speak at We Day Vancouver on October 18. That one simple Net
Tuesday night has done a lot for me!"
-Daniel Dubois, Director at The
Collaborative Project”
2)
Skill development
An added benefit of being a part of the
NetSquared Network is that I never stop learning new skills because of our monthly
workshops and events. As a volunteer community manager I’ve personally been
able to apply the knowledge gained from the workshops to create some of the NetSquared
digital content. From creating online comics with Chogger, to hosting twitter
conversations on community building and using Storify; being a volunteer
community manager has been a fantastic way to express some of my creativity and
have some fun.
3)
Contributing to your local
community
Lastly, being a part of NetSquared means
that I get an opportunity to give back to the local community. In 2013 we held
42 events and delivered workshops to a record 1316 attendees. We were able to
bring together a lot of partners to help a large community of people in very
unique ways. For example, We partnered with social media experts from HootSuite, Epicentr and The Social Media Network and dress them up as “surgeons” to
provide local invited non-profits to come be diagnosed. The social media
“surgeons” then analyzed or provided consultation to the non-profits to help
them get started or with their questions and current social media challenges.
The benefits of being a community manager
I wasn't
sure what I was getting myself into when I first started but it’s been a great
experience with NetSquared. The benefits of being a volunteer community manager
is that it helps you further extend and build your personal network and
continuously developing new skills. Lastly, you get to do all of that while
giving back to the community at the same time.
By Stevie Vu
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