I run a support community for owners of diabetic cats, since 2018. We’re on Facebook (3 separate groups: a main one with close to 8k members, one for vets with 2.5k members, and another smaller one for “beginners” that get overwhelmed with the main group).
I’m getting to work preparing our future on Discourse. Decisions is made, Discourse installed, I have some migration/onboarding ideas, but before that, I’m having a long hard think at how to organise things here on Discourse.
Amongst various technical annoyances, a major issue for us with Facebook is that it’s “everything in one pot” (hence the creation of a beginners group at some point), and that the algorithm often works against us (for example, posts about deceased pets get huge engagement, and are often the first thing people see when joining the group).
The community is highly moderated and very engaged, with about 20-30 posts per day. I played around with a Discourse trial account this summer to make sure the platform would work for us, and came up with the following draft structure.
I’d really be interested in getting “outsider” feedback/challenge on my ideas for structuring categories and the community. I know of the trap of over-segmenting things, and I think my choices are justified but… who knows. It’s also useful for me to “share this out loud”. One major doubt I have is regarding using sub-categories, or leaving everything at the first level.
Here goes. (Don’t pay attention to the labelling too much, as the community is francophone and I’ve loosely translated category names – it’s really the structure I’m thinking about.)
Welcome
- new members: a landing space where we can orient people, identify emergencies, welcome people and guide them through the next steps
- discover the community: this is about helping people understand what the community is and is not, how we function, house rules, how to navigate it, and also, everything pertaining to discourse
Getting started
- general questions on feline diabetes (is my cat going to die? do I have to give insulin? – this is the kind of stuff we would cover in the facebook “beginners” group)
- getting the gear: people often need to order a glucose monitor, syringes, we have an “emergency kit” we recommend, so this will be for all the questions about the stuff people need; all the “second-hand” and “giving” equipment posts would come in here too. – wondering if it makes sense to further structure this by type of gear (each one has quite a lot of complexity: syringes; glucose monitors; continuous glucose monitors… maybe this category should go up a level?)
- tracking spreadsheet: this is the main tool we use to track health and blood glucose over time, and a requirement for our members. it’s the most “technical” thing we ask of them and there is a lot of hand-holding here to get started, we often prepare the spreadsheet for them, there are questions “how do I add another year, help I broke my spreadsheet”…
- cats: this is a new idea – on facebook, as there are no “signatures” or proper user profiles, we have expanded the spreadsheet to act as a medical file and ID for each cat. Here, the idea would be a category with a structured template in which each member has a post with a presentation of their cat, photo, bio, relevant info, link to the spreadsheet of course
Managing Feline Diabetes: this would be the main category, with all the questions people ask regarding their specific situation, support, etc. Diabetic cats fall ill and often have other illnesses that interfere with managing diabetes, people worry about being able to go on holiday, are stressed out, want to change insulins (or not), navigate the relationship with their veterinarian (and sometimes their loved ones). I don’t know if this should be further structured into sub-categories or not (examples: insulin change; managing stress/life; comorbidities…)
Medical Training and “nursing”: this category would be broken off from the rest because it is a really important one which tends to be “forgotten”. When you have to give your cat injections, apply glucose sensors to it, manage an anorexic cat etc, not every cat is cooperative and not every owner is competent in feline behavior. So this is all about “how to work with the cat” and might, in time, also include more behaviour-related issues (stress influences diabetes regulation, many cats live in environments which are not optimal and many owners are unaware of this).
Dosing advice: this is a huge part of our work. We have tried and tested dosing protocols and we help people learn to apply them, navigate tricky decisions. To post in this category, there would be a requirement that people have got a tracking spreadsheet and have a file for their cat in the “cats” category. (This is a major pain we have right now, people arriving with minimal information and wanting advice on “how much inject”; we spend a lot of energy explaining to people that we don’t have any cristal balls!)
Grief support: end of life care and decisions, dealing with death, supporting grieving members, remembering regretted pets… this allows us to have a place to properly take care of this important topic without it being “in the face” of people who have just arrived or don’t want to go there yet.
Veterinarians: this will be a forum invisible to all but vets and selected moderators/community members, pretty much duplicating the way the veterinarian facebook group functions. It’s not very busy, but important.
Off-topic: a social space where people can connect, talk about their cats in a non-diabetic way, other animals, whatever…
Helping out: for community members who are active helpers; we do a lot of “coaching” of people who help out (and supporting too, it’s not always easy); right now it’s done in a Messenger group, but clearly once on Discourse I think having a category for that will be good.
Admin team: private, admins and moderators, for everything regarding the management of the community.
Some topics I’m not too sure how to integrate in this structure, or open questions:
- Food: there are a huge amount of (often misguided) questions regarding food. People think food can fix everything. They want to change food immediately (not a good idea, generally). They think this or that food is bad, or good, or better (generally based on lots of misinformation, which we are good at educating people about). I’m tempted to make it a category of its own, like Medical training, because it will allow us to manage it better, rather than leave it somewhere in between “Managing FD” and “Getting the gear”
- “High dose” cats/conditions: some conditions like acromegaly require some cats to be given very high doses of insulin. There is also specific management of some of these conditions. Many people are not comfortable advising around high doses. I’m torn about this one: on the one hand, people with high dose cats will feel less alone if we give them their space, on the other hand, it reinforces the idea that “high doses” need to be treated very differently from normal doses (it’s not fundamentally different, but most people can’t make that leap). The issue here is that “active helpers” tend to shy away from these situations and members are often left hanging. Keeping them with the “normal” topics implicitly communicates they are not that different.
- Emergencies: we have those, some are life-threatening, they often require special management and there are specific, senior members who are good at dealing with them. Having a separate category could help alert the right people, but on the other hand, will members either abuse the category or feel shy about using it? Maybe there is a better way with Discourse functionalities to “flag” a topic as an emergency?
- Tech support: currently we have a Messenger group for tech support regarding facebook, using Google Docs (that’s where our documentation is… another issue), the spreadsheet. Anything “computer/phone-related”. With the structure presented here, there might be tech support issues that fall in the cracks between the “speadsheet” and “discover the community” categories. Maybe this should be organised differently?
- Other illnesses: diabetic cats often have comorbidities. We’re not there to replace veterinarians, but inevitably we get questions (and do have real expertise), particularly on issues that are common with diabetes. We’re often navigating the fine line between on- and off-topic. Maybe having a category for “medical stuff that’s not diabetes” would help us deal with these questions better. They do have their place, particularly when it’s about the diabetic cat, but it does tend to drift towards “general medical advice”.
- Senvelgo, oral treatment: we’ve now had an oral treatment for a couple of years that can be an alternative to insulin in certain cases. I think it makes sense to break it off into a separate category. However (same as with high doses), there are benefits to keeping these topics mixed in with the general ones. People using the oral treatment are often afraid of having to do injections, and being able to see how “easy” it actually is because they are posting in the same category as people using insulin can help dedramatise. Also, the “insulin” people can be good advocates, but they’ll never go and hang out in a “Senvelgo” category. So, I’m really not sure what to do with this one.
Right, I think that’s more than enough for this post. I have issues regarding how to migrate our (extensive) documentation, and what to make public/private, but I’ll put those in other topics to keep this one focused on the category structure.
I’m wondering if I should take advantage of tags for certain things (I’m not 100% clear if anybody can create tags – are they “real” tags – or if they are predefined - aka “categories”).
Any thoughts or comments on my proposed structure are most welcome, and shared experiences regarding similar questions you may have grappled with in setting up your own communities. What did you do that worked, didn’t work? What are your observations?
Thanks so much!
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