When and how should I hire someone to help me with my community? With Kristen Pavle, Relational Designer

In this episode, we’re hearing from Overwhelmed on the Delegation Struggle Bus. Our letter today deals with figuring out how to get the right type of help to make sure your community will thrive even when you're not there.

To better help Overwhelmed on the Delegation Struggle Bus, I invited Kristen Pavle as my guest expert. She is a relational designer transforming community-driven businesses into creative, self-sustaining ecosystems. As a community strategist, she has experience founding and creating her own communities, as well as supporting  fresh new communities into a life of growth and thriving.

So, tune in to better understand the different types of community management help available and which one makes the most sense for you and your community. You'll also be the first to know the details on the Ember community's newest program, Ember Fractionals.

In this episode:

(05:21) The communitea: Overwhelmed on the Delegation Struggle Bus’s letter

(07:20) The 3 buckets people who run communities fall into

(08:59) Kristen's experience of taking a step back as a DIY founder/community creator

(12:53) The value of leadership development within your community and asking for help

(17:19) Bri's experience and insights on getting help from virtual assistants for your community

(20:10) The identity and mindset shift behind allowing yourself to ask for help

(24:02) Hiring for your internal community versus your external community

(25:04) Bringing in the strategy piece with a fractional  community manager

(32:00) How you can break into the next level of your community skills

(33:22) A sneak peek into the game-changing Ember Fractionals Program

(38:33) It's never too late to turn your community around

Resources Mentioned:

• Join the Ember Fractionals: https://www.emberconsulting.co/fractional-community-managers

• Hire an Ember Fractional: https://www.emberconsulting.co/hire-a-community-manager

Kristen Pavle

🖥️ Website

📱 LinkedIn

Bri Leever

🖥️ Website

📩 Newsletter

📹 Youtube

📱LinkedIn

And before you go…

💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

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That helps the podcast more than you know and I deeply appreciate it. 🙏

Want your story to be next? Submit an anonymous letter about your community conundrum, fiasco, drama, or other dilemma here.

*Dear Bri is produced by Ideablossoms.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

It does not take a super genius to see very quickly that the hiring system for community managers is completely broken in the community spaces. This episode focuses on three different approaches that you can take to hiring and bringing someone on to help support your community management, specifically in the zero-to-one phase of building and launching your community. And I was so honored to be joined by Kristen Pavli on this episode. Most of you don't know this, but Kristen and I have been working behind the scenes together at Ember for quite some time now. And for the last several months, we have been dreaming and scheming about a new program through Ember called Ember Fractionals. So you're gonna get a big spoiler on this episode about what all is involved in that program, but it essentially addresses this specific question: how do we ask for and find the right support for guiding our fresh new communities into a life of growth and thriving. Welcome to Deer Brie, an advice column for community conundrums, fiascos, and drama. This season of Deer Brie is sponsored by our friends over at Heartbeat. Heartbeat is an all-in-one community platform, and it's the one I chose to host my own community. Your members can finally have events, conversation, content, and even courses in one distraction-free, intimate, customized home. I chose Heartbeat for three reasons. First, Heartbeat is unparalleled in their events management features. Events are a core part of my community architecture, and their features make my life so much easier. Second is segmentation. It's super easy to break my community into smaller, more niche subgroups and create a more customized experience for that group in Heartbeat. And finally, their courses. Being able to host my educational materials and learning journey in a community-first platform makes my community that much more valuable and retention that much stickier. I'm an affiliate with Heartbeat, which means when you sign up through my link in the show notes, I get paid a small amount and no extra charge to you. Thank you for supporting my work in that way. And finally, I usually record this podcast from Hawaii Island. So a special thank you to the Kanakamale people on whose land I currently reside. Our guest today is a relational designer transforming community-driven businesses into creative, self-sustaining ecosystems. She founded an RD lab for social tech innovation where she built and tested techniques for bringing community to the forefront in blockchain and AI. And I have had the privilege of bringing Kristen on to several projects at Ember. And boy, if community work was fun before, partnering with Kristen is like an absolute dream. Kristen, you are what I would call a quiet authority, which I'm always on the lookout for the quiet authorities, because the way that you are approaching community and relational design, it's some of the most thoughtful, holistic methods and approaches that I've come across. And I've been so honored to get to work with you in our partnership. But then to also have you on this podcast is such a delight.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

The feeling is mutual. It's so great to be here. And I feel like so much of the work that I've done in structuring and formalizing my community management has been because of the program that you put out, the Kindling program. So it's just fun to come full circle. Like I joined as a member to learn from you. And I still remember the first email where I reached out just, hey, can I join not as a business owner who's launching her own community, but as someone that does something similar to you? And then yeah, here we are. I don't even remember how long ago that was. It wasn't even a year.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

It was like years, but it wasn't even a year. Yeah. And it's I get that request. It's come across my path a couple of times where people like want to join, but they're not, they're like, I don't have a community, but I'm interested in growing my community building skills. And it was like a happy turn of events that when Ember was growing and expanding, and I was like, I'm underwater, help. You were like one of the very first people I thought of. Well, she already knows my whole process. She's really thoughtful about community. And yeah, it's been such a dream. I hope you'll get a sense of this on this podcast episode, but like also Kristen and my conversations, it's like when we hop onto an hour-long call, the first 30 minutes is us touching base on the deepest levels of our subconscious that we're bringing into the conscious. And then like, oh yeah, okay, let's get to our community tasks.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

I honestly think it's one of the most important parts of community, is how we show up as community people. Knowing yourself is more than half the battle, honestly. So I think it's time well spent.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Me too. I couldn't agree more. Are you ready for the letter I've prepared for you today? I'm ready. Dear Brie, I started a new community recently. And at first, everything was amazing. Members were enthusiastic, conversations were vibrant, and it felt like we were genuinely building something special together. However, as the community grew, I found myself overwhelmed by the administrative side of things. Trying to juggle engagement, moderation, onboarding new members, and content was exhausting. Desperate to regain my balance, I decided to hire a virtual assistant to manage the daily operations. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a mistake. The assistant didn't understand the nuances of our culture, their interactions felt robotic and disconnected, and slowly but surely the energy that made our community unique began to fade away. Engagement plummeted, conversation stalled, and now I find myself facing a community that's lost its spark. I'm struggling to find ways to reignite that initial excitement and bring people back together. I feel guilty for letting things slip and worry I've damaged the trust of our members. How can I authentically revive this community after such a setback? Is there still hope? And more importantly, if I can get it back, when and how should I hire someone to help me with this? I'm not ready to hire someone full-time, but what do people do in this situation? Any advice is appreciated, warmly, overwhelmed on the delegation struggle bus. So relatable on so many levels. Buckle up. Which is part of what we're going to be talking about on this episode. We have something coming at Ember, and we're going to talk about at the end of this episode. And before we dive into that, Kristen, I want to like set the landscape for how people can approach getting support in their community and have you just walk us through these three options. When you are creating a new community, you're in that zero-to-one phase, you don't even have a proven product yet because you're still figuring it out. There's three people who run these communities. There is the DIY, founder, community creator, the person who like identifies as the connector, the educator in the community. The second option is we have a virtual assistant, somebody who is managing the operations of the community, maybe more like an operational community coordinator, but the founder or the main person visible in the community is still very active, very engaged, very much leading the strategy of the community. And then we have the third option is the fractional community manager. This is someone who is managing the community, not in a full-time capacity, in a fractional capacity. And I found the person who hires the fractional community manager is the person who identifies more as the CEO of the company. They are like, they're building the community as the next iteration and evolution of their business. And they're not like, oh, and now I'm going to become the community creator. They're like, now I'm going to hire the team that can meet these needs. So talk us through these three buckets, what you've seen, what have you experienced for yourself? Where have you fallen into this setup? Talk to us about it.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

So I have experience with two of these roles. I haven't worked with a virtual assistant, but I know you have Brie. So I'm really curious to hear your side of things on the virtual assistant. On the other two, so the DIY founder or community creator, and then also the fractional community manager. So I am actively holding both of those roles in different projects right now. Fascinating. It's just so much to jumble, and you're going in different, it really is like different buckets and different hats that you're wearing depending on the role you're playing. So I think I want to start with the DIY founder, community creator, because I actually just yesterday took a step back to just for a sabbatical just for a month, because I was going into a time where I was busier with work. I'm actually taking a course right now, and I haven't stepped back from this community. So I was like, I need a breather. How can I do this? So as a founder, one of the biggest things, and like I'm not a typical founder of a project that has a community because I do both. Like I can found and I do community. So I'm holding like both of those things as part of my identity, really. So the community I'm talking about is called the Sense Making Seniors. And we are a group mostly technologists, but it's a lot of designers, advocates, artists as well, in addition to all of the like super technical people, like developers and engineers. And the vision for that community is that the internet can be a tool for bringing people together for collaboration, for community, for connection. And we see pockets of this, but predominantly the internet is not used for that. So we're very focused in this arena because these are people. I'll be honest, we're all internet nerds, like super nerds. We generate lots of content. We are very used to being online. So the community space is super vibrant, it's very engaged. We produce so much content, it's insane. Like I think we have over 5,000 messages or in a half that we're now like trying to parse. So, yes, it's just it's fascinating, it's fun, there's a lot going on. As one of the founders, I have it's like an attachment thing that you get. And I think all founders have this where it's your baby, it's your project that you brought into the world. And as the community has grown, because of our structure, we're more self-organizing. I don't own the community. I don't even own the like community building thing. I do read it and I have a presence there. Like I think the term you used earlier, like a quiet authority. And I've just noticed over time, I need to step back because I need to invite other voices into the room. I need other perspectives at the table. I don't need to be making all of the decisions. There's plenty of other people here who are interested in trying that on for size and maybe learning. So I would say over the past six months, I've been actively trying to take a step back. And in this specific community, in the senius, trying to articulate what I'm doing in like templates and like guides so that other people can pick up the mantle of facilitating an event. Or I don't know, even just like the nuance of scheduling events and how all of that works and making sense of what's coming through all of the content. So that's been a really interesting project and really difficult to just take a break.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

That's really good. And that brings up a really good point that can happen in any of these buckets of formal community management, which is leadership development and inviting your neighbors into a deeper role of leadership within the community. And some communities are posited for more leadership development. I would say what that leadership looks like in the community can vary greatly. Sometimes leadership development in the community is people coming into a role that's more like a moderator or some of those operational tasks, because that's the spirit of the community. We all take on those tasks together. And then other times leaders can be leading in other ways, like they might be leading in content or in expertise or in bringing other members into the community. So that leadership development can look so different. And I'm so glad you hit on that because that's honestly probably the first place we need to look before we start thinking about how we can do more and more and asking how we can invite our members to step into the spaces where they have natural gifts and talents to share.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

And oftentimes they want to jump in too. And part of the thing, something just came up when you're talking that I feel so strongly. It's such an ironic stance, even for me as someone that is a community builder. The founder role as an archetype, we are taught so many times over and over again about self-reliance and like independence, and like you can do it yourself, like you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, but that's not how community works. It's like the exact inverse, like leaning in more into like interdependence and collaboration and asking other people to partner with us. So it's just funny to me that I notice it in myself with my own community work. Like, how do you invite more people in? And yeah, what does that look like? And what is that approach? And doing it with your members, like, and I'm a member of the Sense Making Senius too. It's a lot of fun. There's a lot of play, there's a lot of talk about how do we best want to do this. And sometimes it's challenging because you need to come up with a structure with a group, which is infinitely more challenging than just with a person or two people, but it's fun. You're playing together.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

This podcast is sponsored by Ember Consulting, where I'm the founder and head community creator. At Ember, we help people who are familiar with running their business on content, coaching, or consulting become community powered. As you hear in this podcast, creating a community is really tough, and managing it can be even harder. So don't do it alone. Whether you're looking to launch a new community or pivot your strategy, our one-on-one consulting helps you skip the learning curve and do it right the first time. And when you're ready to belong to a space just for community creators learning, testing, and growing their communities together, check out the Ember community. Now, back to the episode. I love that. What I picked up on too for your role in this community is you didn't create a community that was like, oh, I think this is one that we can really monetize and grow a ton. And this is the role of the community for you, I can tell when you're talking about it, is like this is a very life-giving, life-producing, energetic space for you. And I think that's so critical when you are the person creating the community. I did a post about this the other day on LinkedIn that said the TLDR was if you don't like being in your own community, I can tell you your members won't either. Perfect way of encapsulating the experience. You should like it. You should love it. You should be excited to be there. And if you don't love it, handing it off to a virtual assistant isn't gonna fix that.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

No, definitely not. Yeah. It's like this mindset of the founder asking for help, I think is the biggest sort of nugget here of what is your mindset and how to think about what kind of help you're asking for, which does lead into the if you want to hire someone, bring someone in. So I don't know if we want to go there or if we want to perfect, perfect segue.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Yep. Cool. Yeah. I can share about what it's been like. So I have dabbled with virtual assistance for the last five years of my business through the many different iterations of what my business has looked like and the type of support that I need. But I've all pretty much always had somebody there to support me with some of the admin and operational tasks or things that are just like on repeat in some capacity. The last six months have been an increased effort on my part to invite and resource my business in a way where I can have more support on the operations side. So I have an amazing content coordinator who has moved into content and community coordination. Her name's Lena. Shout out to Lena. She's amazing. She's like my right hand, makes everything work behind the scenes here at Ember. And I was faced with two options with my own Ember community. I can bring someone in who's what I would call the fractional community manager, or I can train someone who I know is well versed in the operations behind a business. And I can teach them and train them on the operations for the community, but then also moving them into that more of a strategic role. So I decided to go the operational community manager route as more of a progressive journey for my community manager, Lena, where they're starting in more of this coordination role with the hope that as the community grows, they will evolve into that role of more strategic community manager as well. I also did this because I'm running the community that teaches people how to run communities. So I have some resources inside to train people. And I, well, there's a lot of reasons for that decision. I'll just say those were some of them. The pros of doing it this way are one, it's more cost effective because you're not paying for someone who's coming in with that strategy. The challenge is it is a training period and you have to be patient to bring someone onto the team to teach them the culture of your community. If you're looking at your community and you're like a solopreneur or maybe you have a small team, if you've never hired a virtual assistant for your business in general, don't start with handing the virtual assistant your community. Like you need to figure out your own cadence and strengths and like where you need help and where you need to improve in your leadership, leading a virtual assistant and leading a small team. And that is not gonna work if you're doing it for the first time in front of your community. Good call. Yeah. It's already hard for me. Like I have my sweet, amazing team is so patient with me because I have a lot of trust issues and a lot of control issues. And it's taken me five years to even get to the place where I'm like, no, like I've this is a little bit behind the scenes of my own like identity journey. I'm also getting married this year. So there is like a big identity shift happening for me where I'm like, okay, we now believe that we will go farther with other people. Like, that is what we believe that we are signing up for the old African proverb of if you want to go farther, go together. If you want to go faster, go alone. And independent Bree in like her former evolution was like, no, thank you. I would rather go faster and burn myself to the ground trying.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Totally. This is the founder mindset. It's just let's go. Like, I have the vision, I can get us there, I can move mountains to do it. And but at what cost? What cost?

SPEAKER_01 20:55

And there is no shame. And if you're in that season or that space, or it's not even a season for you, you're like, for my work life, I want to go faster by myself. And there is no shame in that valid. Yeah. Totally valid. You will do less than what you could do with people by your side. You just have to know that's the cost. And so I'm shifting in my role and identity personally and professionally into this like more CEO role, but I'm also not totally there yet. Like I'm taking baby steps. I have to be patient with myself. And my team is so wonderfully patient with me because it's unfamiliar and it's a new skill and it's a new muscle. So, all that to say, if you're in the virtual assistant camp and that's that seems enticing to you, and you are on an identity level, like, okay, yeah, I get it. I agree. Yeah, I want to go farther with people. That's also my thing. Great. Let's start taking the baby steps, but also see how you can take those baby steps like outside of. Your community first, because if you jump right into that, into the community being the place where you're partnering with other people, it's just it can get messy pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

No, that makes sense. The biggest theme here, and I didn't see this coming into the conversation initially, is the asking for help. Like it's obvious, like asking for help. I need help with community. I want help with community, and what does that mean? And then what does that do to your identity? And then what are your options from that place? So it's like you mentioned a lot of our calls start with where are you subconsciously? Like, what is happening? Like, what are you wrestling with today internally? And it just in community, there's it's so relational. Everything is relational. So whether or not you're interacting directly with a member, writing an email that goes to potential members, or coordinating with a virtual assistant, or hiring a fractional community manager, you could have hangups in so many different areas about what that means if you're asking for help or what that relationship or trust, or who am I when I'm not doing it myself, or when I don't have that control asking for help and being connected. I think this actually, we haven't talked about this, but you posted something else on LinkedIn about how people are not ready for community. They don't want to put in the effort, and it made a little bit of a splash. And I've seen this with other people posting about this, where the I don't even know what it is, if it's just emotional labor or if it's relational labor of being in relationship. It's not easy. Like joining a community is a completely different stance than subscribing to a newsletter. There's a completely different thing going on. Like you need to show up in your giving of yourself. So that just changes the playing field. So there's just, yeah, we're playing with a lot of intensities here.

SPEAKER_01 23:57

Yeah, yeah, it's a really good point. And it's just like this situation of hiring internally for like your internal community for your external community. It's just like layers and layers of human relationship and coordination and community. And so just think going back to our letter writer, our delegation struggle bus friend. I like so empathize with this because I can easily see how like it sounds like they had this external thriving community and they like their kind of internal business community or their wasn't synced up, wasn't strong, wasn't like flourishing. And so they just patched a person to manage this external community. And when that internal community, when you and your team is not solid, throwing them into an external community that is thriving, it's not gonna like help them thrive more because you and that person have not created the strong foundation and relationship that you need in that business partnership.

SPEAKER_00 25:01

Yeah. And I can totally see for the letter writer, if you do not have that community strategy piece like in your toolkit, if that's not your expertise, no harm, no foul. Like you probably will want to hire someone that does have that expertise so that you're not trying to figure it out with someone else who also doesn't have the strategy piece. So I think that's kind of your point about the virtual assistant. And then on the fractional community manager side, what you are doing is bringing in that expertise to drive strategy and help with some of that operational, the nuts and bolts of logistics of running the community.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Yeah. Yes, that is so good. That's a really good point because I think we're both maybe a little bit ahead of ourselves and that we both have a good foundation for community strategy. And we should be considering that for most of our listeners, you might not consider yourself even like a community builder in your identity yet. And so if you are building a community, where are you strengthening that with strategy? It has to either come from you or someone you are hiring, which brings us to the next bucket, the fractional community manager. So let's say the third situation is I'm the CEO of this brand, organization, company. We built a community. I need someone who can take it from zero to one strategically and operationally. I don't need either of that on my plate. What does that look like? And what has it felt like for you being in a fractional community manager?

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Yeah, I think zero to one and also the letter writer struggling on the delegation bus, they went zero to maybe 0.5. And they're at 0.5 and they feel stuck and they're like, I'm really trying to get to one. Did I mess it up? Did I miss the boat? So, no, you didn't miss the boat. I think this is an interesting question. So I've come in as a fractional community manager in a couple communities now. And the time that I like to come in is either just before or just after launch. So it's in the messy middle where there's a lot going on, there's a lot of moving pieces because the strategist in me loves it. Okay, this is fun. We've got like a little playing field. So the way that it works and has worked for me, I have one community in particular that I want to talk about. It's a fiddle community of all things, online fiddle practice community called Play Everyday. And we've gone through some ebbs and flows. And I think the founder Jason and I, we were friends before we even embarked on this adventure together. So that has been really cool, and it was really fun to get to be part of his business. He has a thriving music education business online. So he's got courses online, wanting to turn his course members, his customers into community members, which again is the shift into this. I'm the teacher, you're the student, I'm putting stuff out on the internet, you're downloading it into hey, what if we all get together in one place and we start spending time together and practicing together? So, what does that look like? For myself, that was the playground. Okay, cool. There's lots that we can play with here. Yeah, and like there, it's really interesting because I'm not the founder, so that's really nice. Like I get to take that hat off completely, and I'm just doing the community strategy and the community operations and the community management, just all of these things. But it's nice because I can rely on Jason as the business expert. Like he knows his business really well. And so how I've seen it work well is that the founder is actually setting like the pace and expectations. And you pointed to this too in your own experience with a virtual assistant. If you're the one hiring, it's really useful on the receiving end as a community manager, fractional, to know what are the expectations, where are you at with the business? How are you thinking about the community? How fast do you want this to grow? So that's one piece. And with Jason, he wanted to be really mindful about I am moving like my livelihood. Like I've been doing this music business for I think it's been like 20 years or something. This is a big change. Like it's just an add-on, but I don't want to confuse people, I don't want to upset people. And then the next piece was being clear what that community is for. So whether it's a new line of business or something that's a totally new business from scratch, and what your vision is and what the purpose is. And Jason, luckily, has been from day one super focused on the purpose of play everyday. It's a fun, playful place where fiddle players can come together and practice playing fiddle. That's it. It's like really straightforward. But how do you do that? And then so this is where the devil's in the details. I love working with creative founders for this reason. If we've got to the container, then it's just okay, what can we do? How can we like set this up? What would this look like? And yeah, I think it's just it's been a ton of fun. The third thing I would add is that finding your like secret sauce of what works in the community, it takes time, and there is a science to it, and like you in particular teach this, and I teach this a bit, but it also is an art practice because of what we've been talking about, it's relational. So each unique community is going to look and feel different, and everything is in relationship to the members and how they're receiving things. So you can't just follow this like playbook off the shelf. There is some dance and like back and forth. And with play every day, it's taken a little bit of time to find exactly what works, but we're finding a pace with it, and people love it. Like we've got members hosting fiddle practice together. There's one member in particular who's hosting waltzes. Come join us, and we'll play waltz songs together, and different people will take turns playing for others, and then we can share the sheet music and talk about the nuances of what's difficult about this aspect of that waltz. It's so niche, but that's the fun part about community. And I don't play fiddle either. That was always funny for me. People just assumed in the community I stopped correcting them. I'm like, you can think I play fiddle, it's fine.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

It's included in her Wikipedia page that she plays fiddle.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

She plays fiddle.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

That's so good. I love everything that you said. And what it reminds me of too is that the virtual assistant role, which is highly operational, it's almost like when you're learning a new skill, you know how at first, like it's very constructed. It's like when you're learning to write in English, you're like, these are the grammar rules. These are this is all the structure for the virtual community manager. These are all like the processes and systems. And then you reach this place in your evolution where the next level is breaking those rules. Is it's the dance, it's recognizing where we need a little bit of improv. It's not the hard skills of right and wrong operational tasks, it's the social dance. And that is difficult to teach, but easy to develop when you are given a playground where you can develop it. And that's what's so fun about community is that then we get to be in like when we gather people in community to learn those skills, you get to grow them while you're a community member. So I think to all the fractional community managers out there, I'd say practice this dance in your membership and participation in other communities. There's no reason you can't be building this skill just through your involvement and participation. And we would hope that in that list of communities that you are involved in, you would consider joining the Ember community because Kristen and I have been working on something behind the scenes now for a couple months, and we're so thrilled to invite people to join the new Ember Fractionals program. So, Kristen, do you want to share a little bit about what is coming in Ember Fractionals?

SPEAKER_00 33:48

So it's largely inspired by Bree and I's work together, and Brie noticing this pattern of a lot of the clients that she's been working with, and sometimes that we collaborate on. After we set people up with their community business for a launch, the next question is what about who runs this thing ongoing? Is this something that I'm taking on myself full-time? Like I don't have full-time. And this is where it became this obvious aha. Well, what if we could help funnel more community managers in a fractional capacity towards some of these businesses? Because often you don't need a full-time community manager, honestly, until it's really like a full-fledged business and there's a lot going on. So, and that's typically not going to happen for I don't know, years, let's say. Maybe you get there in a year. So, yeah, we've been behind the scenes designing and starting to build out a curriculum and a course for fractional community managers. So that's what we've been working on.

SPEAKER_01 35:00

It's been so fun. So there's a couple like angles and people that were serving in this new program and like offshoot of Ember. So one is the clients who need the community managers. And I've done this informally in the past, like connecting my, and that's like I've sourced work, just handed Kristen over to clients. I'm like, this one really is really nice. I highly recommend this service. And it's worked super well. So even in the Ember community, Kristen is one of two people who have joined the program in order to equip them with my methods so that when my clients are ready for a community manager, they know my style, they know my frameworks, and they're ready to take it over. And both of those people I have set up with clients. So that's a really good rate for replacement. It's a small sample size, but a really good rate. And so there's the clients, but then there's also for the fractional community managers. There's a lot of community managers out there. I would say the main space where community managers gather is for free communities where people are looking for like full-time jobs with brands to like lead communities or community teams, which is great. That's like an amazing other like part of the community industry. We operate in the paid community spaces, the questions and challenges that paid communities versus free communities encounter, there's a lot that's the same, but there's like a significant couple categories that are just different. So for us to be able to provide a little bit more insight, a little bit more education, we know what happens with these paid communities, we know the methods, we know how to set them up, we know how to get them from zero to one. So if there was a way for us to pass on that knowledge and also create the ecosystem where these fractional community managers who are now equipped to lead these paid communities, the other angle is most community managers, in my experience, are not they're not there for the zero to one phase. They're more equipped on like how to lead really big communities, skilled communities. And sometimes that's their jam, but then other times they're like they're the kind of scrappy generalists, like me and Kristen. And they love that like early beginning. And so we wanted a program that really embodied like those specific angles, like zero-to-one paid communities, equipping community managers with the tools that they need and the support from me and Kristen, so that when we go to our clients and they're well, they're coming to us asking to hire, we have people who we can feel really confident passing on. So we're so thrilled.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

I'm so excited. Community management, like actually, like, where do you get to just be yourself and talk about the challenges specifically for we're saying this zero-to-one paid community space? It's just so needed. I'm thinking, like, I have something right now that I can go talk to Brie and I can go talk to another community that I have in mind, but I want like a little mastermind right now. Can you help me look in this specific zero-to-one? Here's what I have so far, because it's not a science. Like I'm pulling on all of the materials, and even I'm like, what's not clicking? Like I can feel it, but I'm not sure. And so if I could get that 360 perspective from other people, a trusted network, it would be so great. On demand, even better.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

I love that 360 perspective and that other members provide for you. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, to bring it back full circle with our letter, any final advice for our letter writer overwhelmed on the delegation struggle bus.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

I think my biggest advice, and I guess I was gonna say if you want advice and they're asking for it, so that's good. I'm just so conditioned at this point to not give advice if people don't want it, which I think is fair. So for overwhelmed, yes, because I know I don't like it when I don't want advice and someone's telling me what to do. But in this context, overwhelmed on the delegation struggle bus is asking for advice on is it too late? Have I missed the boat on my community? And I think that's the biggest thing that I want to touch on. I don't think it's too late. I think I've heard stories of people putting the community to sleep for a little while, like we're not doing anything here, and then resurrecting it years later. So I don't think it's too late. I think that it's time to ask for help. So writing a letter to Bree, great first step, and then just figuring out what kind of support you want, and then being really specific about what kind of help you would like. So it's not too late, and there are people to help. So if you're listening, reach out. We can point you in the right direction, or maybe we can help you directly.

SPEAKER_01 39:48

We all need that reminder and call to action to ask for help. Same. Beautiful. If you're interested in Ember Fractionals, either because you're a community manager and you want more support on the zero-to-one phase or the paid community phase, or you are looking for your next hire or your fractional community manager. We'll have links in the show notes on what your next steps are, depending on where we are at in the progress of the program. And Kristen, people can stay in touch with you on LinkedIn. Where's the best place to follow and support your work?

SPEAKER_00 40:25

LinkedIn is probably the best. And then relational.org, Kristen at relational.org. Just reach out via email. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

Thank you for joining me on this episode. Thanks so much for having me, Brie. Thank you so much for sharing some space with me on this episode. Please like and review wherever you find your podcast. To submit your own community conundrum, fiasco, or other drama, go to the link in the show notes. Aloha, and catch you next time.