🎆 Support Circle Relaunch! 🎇

Greetings earthlings 👽

Some of you have been to Support Circle before and know what it is. For those who have no idea what we're talking about, here's a very quick rundown:

What is Support Circle?
Support Circle is a group chat of around 5 people, where everyone takes it in turns to get support while the rest of the group listens. It works similarly to how you might picture an AA meeting.

The room is password-protected and facilitated by a moderator. Everyone arrives at the start and stays for the whole session to make sure everyone in the group is supported equally.

In Support Circle, you can sign up to get support or be a listener for others.

Over the past few months, we've been reviewing the amazing feedback you all left us and also looked at improving our internal processes. As a result of all that, we've ended up with a few key changes we want to tell you about. We've broken these up into headings below.

🔔 A faster, smoother sign-up process
Something we were keenly aware of is that sometimes is took us a while to confirm your place for Support Circle, and communication about it could be inconsistent. As well as being a bit annoying, this also meant we were often unsure who was definitely coming, in some cases meaning we had to close Support Circles last minute when nobody showed. We're changing that.

We've created an automated process to confirm your place within 24 hours. Once you've signed up for a space, you'll receive an automated email telling you how to confirm your spot.

To make Support Circle as accessible as possible, we've moved the sign-up process to email rather than private message. This opens the space up to people who don't currently have boards accounts, and it keeps all communication about Support Circle in one place, meaning we can respond more quickly.

There are also some checks in this process to make sure everyone who gets a place is under 25 and based in the UK, so we can make the most of the limited spaces offered.

👩‍✈️ More moderators
You'll probably know one or two primary moderators for Support Circle. There are times where this hasn't quite been enough, and we want to make sure we have enough mod boots on the ground.

So to make sure we have plenty of capacity to run Support Circle (and potentially more sessions if you want them), we'll be training a handful of new moderators to lead these sessions.

📢 Promoting Support Circle
One of the biggest pieces of feedback we've received is that you folks didn't really know what it was, and obviously we need to change that.

We've created a promotional post all about Support Circle, so you know exactly how it works and what to expect.

You might see moderators talking about Support Circle more to make sure everyone is aware of Support Circle and what it's all about. Feel free to spread the word yourselves, too!

You'll notice there is also a message at the top of the discussion boards about Support Circle, and you might see us advertising it in other ways as well.

What next?
Our hope is that this will lead to less closed Support Circles, more consistent and faster communication when you sign-up, and bigger groups. We'll be keeping an eye on things for now to see how it all goes.

Most importantly... please feel free to try Support Circle! Some of these changes have already shaken things up and we're seeing a lot of new faces. Give it a go - you might like it.