About me

Hello, I’m Serena, an online community professional based in London. Over the last 16 years I’ve been building and managing online communities at health charities, supporting other organisations in their work, and leading professional networking communities. Bringing people together means the world to me.

I recently changed focus in my career away from full time community leading to spend more time on Good Community, a consultancy I started in 2021 so I can share the breadth and depth of working full-time in online community management. My work spans everything from community strategy, tactics, safety, and operations.

My aim is to help community teams, non-profits and charities to thrive by sharing my experience and good practice in community management. Below, you’ll find out more about my experience, working with me and how to contact me.

Working with me

I work primarily with charities and non-profits to provide advice on community strategy and community management and have delivered training and coaching to empower and enable community teams to thrive.

I’ve designed and facilitated training and workshops in: the how and why of content moderation, online empathic communication, self-care for community teams, safeguarding community members, and motivation and skills for online community volunteers.

I’ve provided advice and information about: migrating community platforms, developing employee or volunteer roles, hiring and onboarding people, community profession trends and challenges, developing community strategy, and demonstrating buy-in and impact.

I’ve spoken about: burnout and community building, self-care for community managers, how to listen to your community, the advantages and challenges of online community building, and how to manage emotional labour.

If you are interested in working with me, please contact me by emailing serena@goodcommunity.co.uk or connect with me on LinkedIn.

My work at Alzheimer’s Society

For 11 years I worked at Alzheimer’s Society, a non-profit in the UK. I worked on the team who ran Dementia Talking Point, an online peer support community for patients, carers and their families. I led that team for 7 years.

My work helped the community to grow from 20,000 to over 85,000 members. As we scaled, I created new policy and procedure and training resources. I helped to introduce a new volunteer team, increased employee headcount, secured funding, and recruited, trained and led a remote and distributed team.

I also planned and led a complete community redesign and rebuild project, moving the entire online community to a new software platform and taking our members, employees and volunteers on the journey with me!

In the role I led three teams of volunteers and employees in different countries and with different roles, as well as overseeing product management and service development, creating community policy, securing buy-in and funding, leading on moderation, demonstrating impact, delivering strategic impact, and raising the profile of the online community internally and externally.

As part of my role, I received training from the Helplines Partnership and Samaritans in Safeguarding, Emotional Resilience, Empathic Communication and Managing Difficult Contacts.

I have spoken at charity sector and community professional events, on podcasts, and at community management conferences about this work (see below for more details).

Community industry experience

In 2022 I was invited to judge the Non-Profit category of the Community Industry Awards, and in 2020 I was a finalist in the Community Industry Awards in the Executive Lead category.

In 2019 I co-founded CMX London and spent time building the professional networking community until March 2022. I have also been active in the Knowledge and Community Network and the Guild Community Collective.

I have helped to support Modbods, a community of practice for people running peer support online communities at non-profits and charities in the UK and Ireland. As part of this, I’ve facilitated online and offline peer support events, and actively contributed to group discussions.

Speaking and writing

Hear me speak about the work I do and share insights on community building:

• I share insight on the truth about community building and burnout at a video event for Disciple Media, sharing insight on how to understand burnout, recognise its impact of burnout and how to prevent it
• I share insights on the advantages, challenges, and top tips for community building in a video event on fostering community engagement
• A helpful written summary of my keynote talk on managing emotional labour as a community professional, learning how to ethically and self-protectively manage emotional labour when community building gets tough.
• In this episode on Community Signal you can hear me speak about running a community for people with dementia and user-led services.
• Read my advice in Third Sector on how to support frontline online staff and develop procedures to look after their mental health.

Contact me

If you have questions about my work or you have an opportunity that you feel I could help with, contact me at serena@goodcommunity.co.uk or connect with me on LinkedIn.