At Hivebrite, we are proud to partner with numerous women-focused communities dedicated to combating gender inequality and empowering women and girls.
We recently brought together leaders of two of these communities for a roundtable discussion on building networks that drive change.
Meet the Speakers and Their Communities
LEAD Network is an NGO dedicated to advancing women in the consumer products and retail industry through education, leadership, and business development. The Fourth Floor is an innovative ecosystem reimagining the board room, investment, and supporting female entrepreneurs.
Watch the discussion in full and learn:
- Why women-focused communities matter more than ever and how to build them successfully
- How to understand and meet member expectations
- Community initiatives to empower women and elevate voices
- Tactics to keep members engaged and inspire giving back
- Meaningful metrics to measure impact
One of the discussion highlights was discovering how each community is empowering women through quality engagement initiatives.
Targeted Engagement Strategies
LEAD Network offers programs for both individuals wanting to learn, exchange, and further their careers, as well as for corporate organizations wishing to develop their diversity and inclusion programs.
The community has many chapters based on location and job function (supply chain, logistics, etc.). These chapters offer members a dedicated space within the broader community for more relevant content, discussions, and events based on their needs and affinities. This targeted engagement strategy facilitates a sense of belonging, more meaningful connections among members, and the discovery of collaboration opportunities.
By Members for Members
Lead Network's chapters are exclusively volunteer-run. To demonstrate how much volunteers are valued and encourage members to become volunteers, the team behind the community writes recommendation letters for outstanding volunteers, shares volunteers’ achievements with their manager, which has even led to promotions within their organization, and has a Volunteer of the Year award.
Encouraging Meaningful Action
The community wants its members to go beyond passively consuming content and take action to contribute to its mission. Among the many initiatives the community offers is the Super Powers Now program. This program makes members aware that they can further diversity and inclusion every day by taking actions every day, no matter how small they might think they are. The program includes an actionable step plan that can be applied within a company or a team or individually to help members discover their superpowers, how they can grow, feel empowered, help others, and act to further diversity and inclusion.
Driving Systemic Change
The Fourth Floor is all about democratizing access to money and power to level the playing field for women and drive systemic change.
The founders observed that women entrepreneurs needed advisory board members and directors and that many women were looking to start their for-profit board careers.
The team created The Room to put women looking to initiate or develop their board careers in contact with women looking for an advisory board. All open positions and candidate profiles are listed in a dedicated area of the community platform. Members can click and connect with other members offering opportunities or skills that correspond to what they’re searching for!
After launching The Room and listening to member feedback, the founders realized how important investment opportunities were for their members. The Backroom was created to put women who want to invest in contact with women entrepreneurs looking for funding.
Facilitating Meaningful Relationships
These two initiatives are the underpinnings of The Fourth Floor’s mission. However, the team knew that for these initiatives to work, it needed to create a community around them and foster meaningful relationships amongst members. To facilitate this, the Fourth Floor organizes different events— from accelerators and fellowship programs to happy hours—so members can meet, get to know each other, build trust, and create relationships.
The community also offers a public initiative to assist as many women founders as possible. Aware that a simple introduction can take a business to the next level, the community also created the Spread the Love Sheet. In this spreadsheet, founders can list their dream introductions and where secret gifters can make those dreams come true.
Listen to the complete round table discussion to discover more about these amazing communities and their fantastic work!
Hivebrite is a comprehensive and flexible community engagement platform. It empowers organizations of all sizes and sectors to launch, manage, and grow fully branded private communities. Schedule a demo today!
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