Shilbrook Associates

We are platform agnostic but focus on owned communities for customers, members, partners, and employees. We believe that to make an effective, successful social space, functionality is less important than truly understanding your audience members, their needs and their motivations for choosing to spend time on your platform. If you can link your business processes to their key motivations, you can focus your efforts in areas to achieve lasting success.

Shilbrook offers a wide range of services including:

Audience research Workshops with senior management Interviews and 121s with senior management and department heads Helping the project sponsor develop the business case Identification of project champions Training project champions Drafting and assisting champions to draft policies, processes and plans to support the community Advice on configuration of the platform Recommendations on resourcing the community management Support on launch Mentoring the community management

A key aspect of this is ‘social learning’ – using the platform the client has chosen to work with key project champions (internally, from customer-facing departments, and externally, active members known to be enthusiastic about online engagement), to explore the opportunities and challenges that the platform offers, and to develop the policies, plans and practices that will be needed. These social learning programmes will be tailored to the client, and Shilbrook consultants are continually on hand to prompt, provoke and persuade participants to engage with the topics put up for discussion.