Can you improve the performance of Online Facilitators?

One of my tasks is to help online facilitators have the correct skills and ways of working to help them create active and vibrant groups on the Knowledge Hub.  I admit I’m not always successful.  Many groups fall silent.

But the facilitators who do engage with me and other facilitators across the platform are much more likely to succeed.

But how do you identify the people with something to share and something to learn.  This is where Performance Improvement Benchmarking (sometimes known as the River Diagram or Maturity Matrix) comes in.

Performance Improvement Benchmarking is a tool that allows you to create a matrix around any topic to identify areas of strong and weak practice.  Once the matrix is complete and benchmarking has begun it will enable you to visualise the knowledge gaps and connect sharers with learners.

Originally developed by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell as part of Learning to Fly.  It has been used by many organisation covering different topics.

I have used it internally around Knowledge Management and have recently participated in The Knowledge and Innovation Networks Knowledge Management Benchmark.

So how do you use it with facilitators?  Well when I need a bit of inspiration one of the first blogs I go to is Richard Millington’s Feverbee.

Richard wrote a great blog about the Community Management Framework

So I took 7 out of the 8 themes Richard suggested are key to community management/online facilitation and started to develop a maturity matrix for online facilitators.

This is the first version which was tested in-house.  And I will be going wider to the rest of the Facilitators Community that I look after to help us plan the future activities and events for the group.

Below is the Performance Improvement Benchmark and images from the first benchmark that took place.