Engagement, co-design and community moderation on the Elefriends community at Mind

I’ve just finished 9 months working on the mental health peer support community Elefriends. The role was a maternity cover post and focused on community engagement as well as moderation training and support.

So what did I get up to?

Six co-design workshops with community members

I organised and co-facilitated six co-design workshops with community members and local Minds. All the workshops had an online consultation component.

• Two workshops to co-create community content and ‘themes’ functionality for Sport England funded project Get Set To Go.
• Two workshops to co-create community content and functionality for Big Lottery funded peer support project Side by Side
• Two workshops to co-design a mobile app for the community. The Apple version is in the app store now.

I worked with agencies PAN and Yoomee to create and test content and functionality initially developed in the co-design workshops.

This included three animations to encourage community members to get more active. You can see the first one here.

App testing

• I co-ordinated three sessions of user testing for the Elefriends app. Two of these took place face to face and one online.

Community moderation

• I regularly moderated the Elefriends community. This involved reading posts, providing support for members in crisis, hiding unsafe content and supporting members to post appropriately. It also involved responding to messages and reports from community members.

Training and feedback for internal and external moderators

• I wrote bi-weekly updates for external moderators.
• I provided feedback on moderation decisions and supported moderators during and after their shifts.
• I ran three moderator support sessions providing additional support and training.
• I updated existing moderator guidelines and researched and developed additional guidelines around exercise and eating for community moderators.

Writing content for the community

• I wrote wellbeing and resilience focused content which was published within the community at least twice a week.

Online peer support workshops

• I ran two workshops about online peer support for local Mind networking events.

 

It was an absolutely brilliant nine months and I’m really pleased that I will be continuing to work with Mind from November. I’ll be researching and writing some of their on and offline mental health information as part of their Information Team.