Changes to the Community Team

[Black Six]

Tanja Friberg from the LEGO Community Team shared the following with the LEGO Ambassadors today. It may not mean much to some of you, but I think it's important to share, especially since it comes shortly after LEGO announced disappointing profits and lay-offs. At this point, I don't think the full ramifications for what this means for BZPower and the rest of the community is very clear, so if you have questions, please ask them here. I will do my best to pass them on and get answers from the source. I will also try to share answers to the questions that other Ambassadors ask.

 

Please spread the word about these changes - they're they kind of thing that could have a large impact on how the fan community interacts with The LEGO Group.

 

Dear Ambassadors,

 

As many of you will know from media and information we have shared earlier, the LEGO Group is going through a process of building a smaller and less complex organization. This means that we will also make a few changes in the LCE team. The purpose of these changes will be to focus our efforts on where we create most value for the global AFOL community and for the LEGO Group.

 

In our collaboration with you as Recognized Communities, our focus areas in the coming year will be to further consolidate our support operations by simplifying our work processes. We want to make sure that this simplification also makes it easier for you to apply for and receive support. We will also move all dialogue and collaboration with you as Recognized Communities to LAN and continue to develop the LAN platform. Doing this will significantly reduce the time we spend on dialogue with individual groups on e-mail and phone, but it will ensure that more people are involved in our shared dialogue and collaboration. We will also increase our focus on events that bring larger groups of AFOLs together as we believe this stimulates inspiration and collaboration in the AFOL community.

 

Over the coming months you will experience changes as we focus in on the above priorities. The extensive dialogue that Jan Beyer and Paul Striefler have had with many individual groups as Community Managers in Europe/Pacific/ROW and Americas will gradually shift to LAN. Paul’s position as Community Manager for Americas has been made redundant and Paul moves to a new position in LEGO Brand Retail in December, Paul has done a great job as Community Manager for Americas and will take his Community experience with him in to his new position. Jan will move his focus to collaboration with and support of the above-mentioned events globally and continue to be the link between LEGO House and the AFOL Community, Jan has done an amazing job and we want to utilize Jan’s extensive experience with the Community globally, this transition will take place over the next 4-6 months.

 

All Recognized Communities around the world continue to be of major importance to the LEGO Group and we hope that these changes to how we work will benefit our continued relationship building. As the LAN platform becomes our central hub for dialogue and collaboration, we will continue the successful Brickmate and Support Engager roles, further build Academy and Work Groups and continue to develop the platform by adding new features and functionality. We know that for some of you it will be a learning curve to start engaging more on LAN instead of being able to write/call your Community Manager directly and we will assist you the best we can!

 

Our dedication to working with you is as strong as ever, we have even changed the name of the department to underline that!

 

All the best, the AFOL Engagement team

[ToaTImeLord]

Hum this is a bit concerning.

Black Six do you know how long Lego has been in this self rebuilding time?

Edited November 22, 2017 by Rassilon (TTL)

[Black Six]

Hum this is a bit concerning.

Black Six do you know how long Lego has been in this self rebuilding time?

They announced the lay-offs and reorganization in September, so probably a little bit before that.

[Toa Imrukii]

It says that they're connecting more with the Fans, is it possible that in the future this could bring new themes thought up by say the adult fans? Or that said fans in general could have more input on what LEGO puts out? As the way it looks now, I personally think that is potentially a wise financial move.

[Black Six]

As mentioned before, here are some other replies from the LEGO Community Team with answers to questions from other Ambassadors. If you have any questions you'd like me to pass on, feel free to share them.

There will no longer be a Community Manager dedicated specifically for regions. The reason for moving the dialogue to LAN is to simplify the support structure and have the knowledge and discussion in one place for all to learn from. For Asia, our ambition is to grow the community while the LEGO Group is gradually building up the presence in the region. Jacky and Kim will still be engaging on LAN.

If the question/request does not seem to fit any forums/topics on LAN, please reach out to the LAN Team directly by sending Kim a Private Message via LAN. Ana will be the one to contact regarding support issues. We are havin an email account created that all support related questions should go to, we will send out more information regarding this asap;)

You have a valid point, I understand your concern, the changes we have made to our part of the organization has not been ones of removing focus from the Community and right sizing/down sizing, we have also added more ressources to areas of high value to the recognized communities eg.g ensuring business integration to make sure the LEGO markets around the world will be able to support AFOL activities locally, there are currently more than 600 AFOL events annually and the number is growing;), so we need local LEGO market support:) The AFOL Comunity continues to be a very important priority to The LEGO Group!

We are setting out to build a setup where the local LEGO markets will be the ones attending the smaller events and collaborating with the communities, in many countries that is already happening;) The larger events, such as HUB events and conventions are where we will be able to engage with the most AFOLs at one time, at those larger events there will also be market collaboration and in some cases a Community Manager, a LEGO Designer or similar. It is a way for us to focus our attention and ressources where it has the biggest impact on the Community.

LCE will continue to support the conventions in US (primarily) while the level of support shall inline with the new community engagement model yet to be ready.

 

And Jan will be the contact person for the future RLFC (Recognized LEGO Fan Conventions) moving forward.

We certainly hope that the local support and engagement from D2C (Brand Retails) will increase but that might not be from day one as Tanja said.

 

Regarding to your questions about the support programs, the changes to the Community Team doesn't affect the level of support your group currently access to. It changes the procedure from sending applications to your community manager to an universal window to process these requests. We will communicate more on WHAT and HOW in the coming weeks. Additionally, the other changes you might experience to the support in the future are mainly connected to the new community engagement model.

We do prefer as much of the communication to be via the platform, but I do acknowledge that there are situations where an e-mail is preferred.

For example when having non-LAN people in cc or the pm interface does not provide the needed options compared to an e-mail.

 

I will never refuse an e-mail or not answer it - so when you deem it neccesary to send me an e-mail instead of creating a topic or a pm - then by all means please do.

 

I'll be as present (and perhaps even more) as I've been so far on LAN to answer questions and engage

Ana will be answering in the Support Programs topics and the single e-mail for all support is where you send your requests and detail plan your support.

So in that regards all that changes is that your e-mails go directly to the support e-mail instead of the Community Manager and any questions on support go to Ana instead of the Community Manager.

 

We're already having awesome discussions in here and we do our best to chime in and provide answers - that is NOT going to change at all.

We'll still be around - some more than others. But we are not leaving you behind - you have my word.

We're already having problems in attending to as many events as possible - 4 Community Managers and 1000's of events to go to is not possible.

There's no way we can go to everything or even every country, and we haven't in the 5 years I've been on board this amazing ship.

 

We'll still do our best to have LCE members present at the Hub Events and hopefully we can get to some of the major US Conventions every year.

 

 

We highly appreciate the face to face time and we know it's valuable both to you and to us.

 

But in the daily interaction, you might as well talk to Ana on Support and the LAN Team on standard stuff.

 

When somethings needs that little "extra" attention - then send a pm and we'll work it out somehow.

We're still human and we can still talk and find solutions with you.

Everything can escalate and we still have the opportunity to set up a call or skype conference if needed.

It's a question of prioritizing when to hit the red button and when to do "business as usual"