Welcome to the team! 
This document will onboard you onto YPC’s internal comms platforms so that you have the skills and tools needed to collaborate. At YPC we build-in-public so everyone knowing where to go for what communications is core to who we are.
If at any time you need support, ask in #questions-and-proposals on Discord or contact communications@youthpowercoalition.org.
Here’s how this works. We’ve got a checklist below of the steps you’ll take to learn all the collaboration platforms.
Your goal is to check everything off in one week.
Ready, go!
Step 0: Set-up Your Accounts
Sign-up for a Hub Account
Add a profile picture to your Hub account
Follow these directions to customize your Discord profileStep 1: Get Official!
Fill out this Join the YPC Team form. IMPORTANT: Youth leaders under 18, have a parent and/or guardian sign the form’s waiver.
Fill out this Identities SurveyStep 2: Join Groups
Groups give you access to team-specific communications.
Click “Request” then submit the form for the Organizers Hub Group
Log in to your google account. Click on “Ask to join the group” and submit the form for the Organizers Google Group
Each circle has its own google group (for example,advocacy@youthpowercoalition.org). Ask your circle’s lead and/or secretary role holder to add you to your circle’s google group. If they don’t know how to do it, they can follow these directions on how to add people to a google groupStep 3: Adjust Notifications
Discord
Choose your Discord channels. If you’d like to read fewer messages in Discord, you can mute and disable notifications for specific channels
Download the Discord app (if you want!). Go to the Discord download page.Hub
Join your circle-specific subcategories. Each circle has a circle-specific subcategory, so you’ll need to add yourself to each one.
- Go to the Support Network category or Actions Network category based on what circles you’re joining
- Click on your circle’s subcategory
- Choose your notifications preferences for the subcategory by clicking on the
bellicon near the top of the page so that it’s something other thanmuted. Screenshot below.
- Repeat the last two steps above for all subcategories you’re interested in.
Adjust your email notification preferences
Download the Hub mobile app (if you want!). Follow the directions for DiscourseHub on Android or Discourse Hub on the Apple App StoreStep 4: Understand YPC Communication Practices
Read Internal Communications Platforms
Read Accessible Communication GuidelinesStep 5: Check-In
Reply to this post with how this onboarding process went or email internal-comms@youthpowercoalition.org. Tell us what we can do to improve these directions and where you might still need support.
And that’s it! Congratulations again on joining our organizing team.
Advanced Policies
Guide to Supporting a New Organizer in Internal Communications
Pre-Onboarding
Add to Collaboration Platforms
Google Groups
- organizers@youthpowercoalition.org
- Any circle specific google groups
They should already be in Slack. They will sign up for the Hub themselves as their pre-work.
Communicate
Welcome again as an official organizer of YPC! This is how you can get on all our internal comms platforms.
Do you think you can complete all the steps this week?
If you have any questions, contact #communications in Discord or communications@youthpowercoalition.org.
Onboarding Meeting Agenda
Why Communications
Check on Pre-onboarding Steps
Ask About Overall Communication Preferences
- What’s your preferred balance between wide communications vs. focused communications?
- How do you need to be communicated with on urgent matters?
- How do you prefer to be communicated with for general communications?
- What are your communications pet peeves?
- What makes communications accessible to you?
Setup Each Platform
What Internal Communication Platforms Do We Use and For What?
Share Accessibility Guidelines
YPC Accessible Communications Guidelines
Closing
- Any additional questions?
- Have feedback for improving collaboration platforms?
- How was this onboarding? Ways to improve?
- Next steps? (Double check that they filled out the Officially Joining the YPC Team form.)
- Check-out
Follow Up
- Update the people tracker
- Set a reminder to yourself to check-in about two weeks from now to see how they’re feeling about the collaboration platforms and respond appropriately
- Add feedback and propose revisions to this onboarding process and documentation
Offboarding
Google Group
- Leave circle specific google groups
- Option to stay in organizers@youthpowercoalition.org google group — we love alums!
Shared Drive
- If you stay in organizers@youthpowercoalition.org google group then access does not change
- If you leave the google group, then you will no longer have access to the shared drive but can still see all documents that were made public or shared specifically with you
Online Hub
- Stay so you can continue participating as a member of the movement
- Choose to leave or stay informed of circle specific sub-categories
- Option to stay in Youth Power Hub team group to continue having access to private categories so you have the information you need to contribute
Discord
- Option to stay in Discord
Universal Guidelines
Closing
Open Questions
- How might we make collaboration platforms onboarding more efficient?
- Asynchronous and self-service?
- Batched onboarding?
- Train the trainers?
- How might we update collaboration platform policies?
- Term limit?
- Feedback mechanisms?
- Reporting?
- Circling back when people change the actual collaboration platforms?
- How might we separate out documentation that’s for people doing the onboarding from documentation that’s for people being onboarded?
- How might collaboration platforms documentation be differentiated for
- Team members
- Working members
- Supporting members (right now they aren’t a part of the team@ or circle@ groups. Should they be? Or should there be something like a team-support@ and circle-support@ group?
- Partner
- Project partners
- Movement partners
- Mission partners
- Initiatives
- Team members