Building community is at the heart of Facebook’s mission, and supporting the leaders who foster community is an important part of this. That’s why we continue to invest in and support the community leaders who offer encouragement, bring people together and drive change.
Today, we’re announcing the Community Accelerator, a six-month program for community leaders providing training, mentorship and funding to help them grow their communities.
Selected community leaders will spend three months learning from experts, coaches and a customized curriculum to create a plan to grow their community and meet their goals. They’ll spend the next three months iterating and executing on their plan with funding and continued support from their network and a dedicated team provided through the program. Up to $3 million in total will be awarded to up to 80 program participants.
If you run an impactful, established community, are ready to grow using Facebook’s apps and have the time and energy to invest in this program, we encourage you to apply here! Community leaders from the select program countries, including those without a presence on one of Facebook’s apps, are welcome to apply.
The Community Accelerator is part of our Facebook Community Leadership Program, a global initiative that invests in people building communities and now includes:
- The Community Accelerator which commits millions of dollars to support people creating and leading communities. This is an evolution of our Fellowship program, which supported 115 leaders across the world. Together, those leaders reported that their projects impacted over 1.9 million lives through online community support, the use of helpful resources and other activities made possible by the program. The fellowship program included leaders like Latasha Morrison who is driving healthy dialogue around race relations and Noah Nasiali who provides farmers in Africa with credible and reliable farming information.
- Learning Labs which brings group admins with similar goals together into a collaborative digital classroom for structured learning.
- Power Admins Groups which bring over 40,000 community leaders together to share advice with one another and connect with our team to test new features and share feedback.
- The Community Hub, where anyone can learn how to use our community tools and get more information about our programs. It includes tips and tools for starting, managing and growing a community.
In addition, we know that growing a group more efficiently and managing conversations are important parts of being a community leader. That’s why we built new tools to help them add new members and moderate conversations in their group.
- Membership management: We’ve improved how group admins can manage new member requests, including:
- More format options in membership questions, like single-answer multiple-choice questions and multiple-answer checkbox questions.
- Approving new member requests automatically based on requirements, like someone’s current city, if they filled out all membership questions, have other friends in the group and have been on Facebook for a specific length of time.
- Additional filters, like potential members who have answered all membership questions, more options within the “Join Facebook Date” filter, if they have or do not have a profile picture and the ability to create and save the specific combinations of filters that are used frequently.
- Content moderation: To make it easier for admins to see important posts and find specific content, we’ve added:
- Keyword Alerts to let admins create a custom list of words and phrases and then receive notifications when those terms appear in their group, allowing them to easily spot and respond to content that may need more immediate attention.
- Post topics to help admins and members quickly search for all relevant content around a particular topic within a group.
These programs and tools are helping communities grow and thrive, and we’re inspired by the leaders who bring the world closer together every day.