Two rescue beagles - Ruby and Rosie

My parents owned the village shop when I was growing up. This was at the heart of the village community - I think this is where my love for all things community started!

When I left school, I worked in law firms but it was once I started working in education following the birth of my children, that I really starting finding the value of communities. Following a 10 year career in a secondary (high) school as a Data Manager, I joined an EdTech company and was responsible for the UK Midlands region. Pre-Covid I would host regular networking meetings across my region but I was also one of the admins of a School Data Management Facebook community. I helped to grow this community to around 5000 people and got to know a lot of the members both personally and professional.

When I joined Arbor in 2022, we had an unused customer community (hosted on Zendesk). Customers were not aware of it or the benefits of it. I asked to get involved in a working group to develop a new customer community. After a couple of false starts (mainly due to the platform and authentication), we found Circle and it ticked all of the boxes for us - we could authenticate against our CRM to ensure that competitors were not accessing it and therefore we could use it for beta testing, we were able to host live events and the main one, it was user friendly.

We launched to a small group of Exam Officers following the summer exam season when we thought that this business role might need a bit of TLC. We did this by hosting a live stream by staff who had done that role and also a Product Manager. They covered best practice for results day and top tips to ensure it was a stress-free day (it also meant that Exam Officers knew what they had to do on the day and hopefully deflected tickets into our Support team).

As we moved into the next academic year, we did a full launch by hosting regular topical live streams, mentioning the benefit of the community at every opportunity and having a link to the community within the product itself.

In just over one year, we grew to over 8000 members and have set ourselves a next target of 12,000 members and covering multi-products! I have also just recruited a full time Community Manager - Mharni.

Two of our company values are 'No-one can whistle a symphony' and 'Everyday's a school day'. These both hold true when it comes to community.

Not everyone is as passionate as me about community!

Empowerment, trust and encouragement from line manager.

Circle.

Ensure that members feel supported.

See Arbor's values above - Everyday's a school day - always learning and No-one can whistle a symphony - the power of togetherness.

Embrace Led by Community and other communities for professionals in this area. Community professionals are so generous with their time and knowledge.