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Forum Commitments: Two Questions Every Member Should Answer

I recently received the following question from a forum moderator:

Our forum is looking to create a “statement of commitment” to clarify the level of commitment we expect of ourselves and one another.  We’ve had some challenges of late with members not prioritizing the group over outside commitments, and it has raised the issue that we may have misaligned expectations for the sacrifice we are each willing to make to be present. I volunteered to draft up a commitment statement and was wondering if you have anything you can suggest.

A starting point for this conversation is to develop (or review if you already have) a constitution or forum mission statement.  Here’s a sample from our resource library.

A simple approach if you want or need to start from scratch is to ask each member to answer the following two questions and for the group to discuss commonalities and differences to agree to a unified statement:

1. Three years from now if I got everything I want from this forum, what will I have gotten?
2. What am I willing to do (commit to) in order to make sure I got the above?

How healthy is your forum? How would you rate it?

I am often asked: How is my forum doing compared to other forums?  There is no simple answer to this question, and apple-to-apple comparisons are difficult.  However, you can examine your forum by asking these questions:

• Membership:  Do we have the number of members we want, balancing the desire for optimal size, peer quality, and diversity of perspective?
• Attendance: Are most, if not all, members showing up on time to every meeting?
• Scheduling: Do we get our meetings on the calendar at least three months in advance?  Are members willing to make forum a priority commitment so that scheduling does not become a huge time and emotional drain on the group?
• Leadership: Is our moderator responsive, engaged, and committed to the group’s success?  Have we selected an assistant moderator, both to help now and to succeed the moderator when his/her term ends?
• Presentations: Are members willing, even eager, to explore their toughest issues and highest aspirations in forum?
• Retreats: Does our forum schedule an annual retreat to go deeper, reinforce best practices, add to its toolkit, and recommit to the shared forum journey?

Ask yourself these questions, and you can then qualitatively assess your own forum on a 1-5 scale: 1 (in real trouble), 2 (weak, needs support), 3 (doing pretty well), 4 (strong and high functioning), or 5 (very strong, transformational).

You still won’t know how you compare to other forums, but you will have a basis to take action inside the forum and get the help you need from outside.  As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me with any questions.

Bob Halperin

Refreshing your monthly updates

I was recently told by a forum moderator: “Our update quality is varied from member to member, with more of them becoming travelogues, rather than getting into the heart of the emotional impact and significance.”  The moderator asked how to reframe and refresh their updates.  Following are a few ideas:

• Set the tone that forum updates are about the issues and challenges you can’t share anywhere else (what we sometimes call the top 5% and bottom 5% of your life). The acronym that summarizes this is MITy WISE:
  • Most Important Things
  • Why it’s important
  • Impact personally
  • Significance for you personally
  • Emotions you are feeling
• Especially appropriate for the beginning of a new year: Try annual, instead of monthly updates. See this earlier blog post for more details.
• Flip the format of updates: Ask that members start with the emotion they are feeling, then why the emotional feeling is significant and important, and only then share the facts.
• Do another round after completing your standard updates. See this blog post for the prompts to use.
• Try a different update format such as those available in the Alumni Forum Services Resource Library.

Dealing with an urgent issue – you don’t need to wait until your next scheduled meeting

When a forum member has an urgent issue to present and the group’s next meeting is not scheduled for sometime, consider arranging an emergency meeting.

Some guidelines:

• Since the purpose of the meeting is only to have a single presentation, it will be shorter, somewhere between 30-90 minutes long.
• It may be held either in person or via conference call.
• Because the meeting is scheduled on short notice, and in order to work for the presenter, attendance is optional, and missing the meeting does not count as an official absence.
• You can still follow the standard presentation format in this special meeting (e.g., coaching if time allows, communication starter, presentation, Q&A, experience sharing)

In the four years my forum has been in existence, we have had two emergency meetings of this type.  Both were arranged as conference calls on Saturday morning at 8:00 am because that was the time when we could get the most members.

Bob Halperin