Back in the TechSoup Connect days I published a piece at CMX about a question we all wrestle with: how do you actually measure whether your members feel a real sense of community—beyond the usual “engagement” numbers?

In the post, I shared how I’m using the Sense of Community Index (SCI) to get clearer signals and make smarter decisions.

• What you’ll get: a plain-English intro to the SCI (membership, influence, needs, shared emotional connection) plus the question set I used
• Why it helps: better insights lead to better retention, stronger rituals, and feedback loops your members trust
• What surprised me: our high satisfaction scores didn’t match real retention—and what we changed once we saw the gap
• Quick wins to try: ask about needs directly, add simple rituals that travel across chapters, and always close the loop on feedback

Read the CMX post:
https://www.cmxhub.com/blog/measuring-your-members-sense-of-community

Want to see the Index itself?
https://senseofcommunity.com/soc-index/

Drowning in stories and open-ended feedback? Turn them into strategy. Watch the replay of our TechSoup Connect Canada session with Yashna Jhamb and Akshay Roongta from Ooloi Labs.

• Structure the chaos with simple templates, metadata, and tagging
  
• Pair qualitative “why” with quantitative “what” for stronger decisions
  
• Use AI where it helps (deductive coding, retrieval), keep humans in the loop for nuance
  
• Start small: a weekly 3–5 question story ritual beats a giant tool rollout
  
• See a live demo of Dots for annotating, querying, and reporting on qual data
  

Watch the replay:  https://youtu.be/jCZE2clhjQo

In this seven-minute video I walk you through a fast, low-friction workflow for turning rough Zoom/webinar recordings into publishable videos using Descript, with a final assist from ChatGPT. The core idea: edit the transcript like a Google Doc and let Descript sync the cuts to your audio and video.

• Quick cleanup: trim intros/outros, cut dead air and boilerplate, auto-remove most ums/ahs, and use Studio Sound to fix echoey mics
• Speaker labeling: identify who’s talking, then slice out stumbles by deleting text
• Layouts and repurposing: drop speakers into side-by-side or floating layouts, switch aspect ratios for TikTok/Instagram, and add subtitles
• Camera-shy option: generate a video avatar to read your script
• Pricing noted in the demo: free plan with 1 hour/month of transcription; nonprofit pricing at $5/user/month for 4 hours; Hobbyist at $16/month for 10 hours
• ChatGPT in the workflow: turn rough notes into a readable script for Descript’s teleprompter; draft YouTube descriptions with time codes pulled from the transcript so viewers can jump to key moments

Why I’m bookmarking: this combo makes “good enough” edits fast—perfect for webinars, tutorials, and support clips—without learning pro video tools.