In the spirit of our soon-to-be staff member @crablab’s post about joining us, I’m excited to announce that I’m moving into a new role at Monzo whereby I’ll be focusing a larger amount of my time on community efforts! In practice, this means that I’ll more formally continue to do a lot of what I’ve already been doing in terms of providing you all with updates, solving some queries, and ensuring this remains a fun, enjoyable place for you all to engage with both us as the company and your fellow users, but also working with the rest of our amazing community team on some new initiatives too.
One thing that we did in the past, that worked really well at the time, was the staff diary where different staff members were posting about what they were presently working on. This worked well when we had less than 50 staff, but now at over 200, the old system failed to scale, and as a result, that thread slowly died a death and only had 7 update replies in the last 5 months I’m currently working on a new system here, which will be more about introducing lots of different Monzo staff members to the community to engage in Q&A threads. I think that will be great, as it’ll help everyone learn about the wider team. As it stands, there are whole areas of the team that aren’t represented well on the forum and as a result you get a huge amount of inside info on what certain teams get up to, but very little about others! Stay tuned for more information on this soon
Additionally, I’d really to gather some informal feedback about what you like/dislike about this forum. Do we do a good enough job at curbing negativity, stuff that crosses the line and makes this place less enjoyable for everyone as a whole? What would you like to see more of?
Congrats maybe as not sure if new role as you were here anyway lol also what about @Naji as I thought he was doing this?
Too many trolls lack of categories i.e. things might not fit for instance the mac one I posted could have gone in security for instance, I did mention it somewhere about what could be added
No. Yeah, I think the place is ok tbh, better than the TCB forum anyway, so much Dyson action going on over there it’s a joke.
Naji is still here and doing lots of community work! He does loads of “offline” community work as well, like organising the open office events, community meetups, themed office events, co-ordinating newsletters and about a million other things that I don’t know how he finds enough hours in the day for! I’m just here to assist him and the rest of the community team as much as I can basically. As with all Monzo teams, we have very high goals and so the more hands on deck the better
Likes: I love how helpful the community is and love the fact that staff such as yourself look at these forums and respond to the comments/questions. Please keep doing this and don’t ever shy away from answering questions and comments.
Dislikes: Equally the community can at times be pretty feisty and make the environment a little less enjoyable. People do not really adhere to the guidelines posted before that people should respond to the content and not necessarily the tone. Also the community at times are not family friendly. I’ve seen and reported myself some swear words that weren’t looked at. It took me going onto the slack channel for it to be brought to someone’s attention.
Suggestions: I would suggest that we get more moderators on the forum in order to enforce those family friendly rules. The community will only continue to grow and its better to ingrain those healthy responses now rather than to let the forums go into chaos and thrive a potentially toxic environment. I also would love for the FAQS section to be overhauled. There’s been some duplicate posts where there need not have been if the information was just posted there for all to see instead of searching through lots of threads.
In my opinion what was once a great community has deteriorated.
Now new users who do not know the ropes tend to get a frosty reception rather than a warm welcome. Instead of being guided on how to use the forum they are more likely to be sneered at and told hey use the search.
At the start a range of opinions was welcome. But now any difference of opinion is stamped on by regular users and leaders forcing the party line.
There have been a number of users on other forums who have commented on the increasing negativity here on the Monzo forum.
People need to know there is not a right way and a wrong way to think on issues but equally valid opinions.
While the app is great. The increasingly know it all and agressive attitude of some in the forum is putting people off and making them try other alternative providers.
I don’t want to put too much credence in what is said on other forums, particularly those of other challenger banks, because there are people with agendas. This forum has been guilty of that somewhat in regards to other companies operating in the same space as us, and whilst we are proud of the fact that we don’t condone this and don’t actively engage in those kind of discussions ourselves as staff, you can obviously see that people who are very invested in us (not just literally but figuratively) might sometimes get into that football team mentality. It doesn’t happen much, thankfully, but on that basis I wouldn’t feel too threatened about what is said about us on other forums.
That said, feel free to DM some screenshots if appropriate
On the other issues, thanks - this is the kind of feedback that is important to us. We can definitely look into being more proactive with locking a thread if it is starting to go off track.
@anon38274058 - that’s great feedback - thanks. I agree that we need to keep things a bit more family friendly and I apologise if I personally missed something that was found offensive. As we plan on offering accounts to those under the age of 18 soon, that’s definitely something that needs improving.
We did just welcome some new forum leaders, so hopefully this will improve the situation!
If anything is seriously amiss - feel free to tag me in a post at any time as this will help alert me to the situation
Sometimes I wish discussions were threaded, it might reduce the repetition in the lengthier topics. Not that I mind writing summaries.
It’s both nice but hidden that new updates are available so quick via here (or the blog) - I don’t know how many people still use RSS readers, but the ATM discussion was a key one buried under the e-mail title “September Journal”.
Congratulations @simonb
I think you have been doing a great job here already so it’s great that you will officaly be taking more resposibilities.
Overall IMO forum is a reflection of our everyday life. Strict controls and admin make things more dull and corporate. I am generally happy the way things are and most of Leaders do a good job.
Some really great feedback in this thread too! Clearly some areas for improvement for us to focus on going forward
We also have another Online Community Manager starting here in January who will be working with myself, Simon and the community leaders to take the community forum experience to another level! Amongst other exciting things
Ok so I will answer properly (or better then I did earlier).
For me like the forums, they are active and there is always something to read and is one of the better ones that I am on. I like how I can dick about and you guys find it funny (Going by PM’s) and I like how the Monzo team get involved and answer things properly without being airy fairy like other banks (TCB).
Q&A is fun and the open evenings are very good (sort the bloody sound).
Things that I think need to be changed are the rules for new members, I think a lot of ‘hostility’ that gets directed at them is because they simply do not know how to search and we just end up seeing the same things over and over again, granted this may be contentious but it is true… this seems to rattle a lot of us long term users who just get bored of it. Yes we were all new users once but some of us know how to search or read first, I do it before I join a new forum and did before I came on here. To combat this maybe no new topics can be created until approved so that they can be merged correctly as I see most of the mods just spend ages doing so anyway, it might also keep the place tidy as it were.
With regards to the mods, I don’t think we need more at the moment if we do make me a mod coz then it would be awesome.
Someone mentioned family friendly and swearing, that doesn’t bother me, I don’t care. We are all over the age of 18 and to have an account you have to be 18+… if people are concerned add a swear filter that can be turned on or off.
Anyway to summarize I like it here and if I offend people never mind it’s only the internet xxx
Make me mod or you will all get rotting fish in the mail
Congrats on the new role! You’re one of the more active staff members on forums and it’ll be lovely to see more posts from you. I noticed staff posts generally get a lot more healthy discussion and positive responses, so I think it makes sense to have more feature posts or just random ones in the foyer- the Huel post was really successful and got a lot of people signing up and talking about it!
The positives: How transparent and friendly the staff are, how people can joke about while still delivering solid info- I learnt a lot about fintech on here though I mostly tune out very technical topics. I’ve been really impressed with the really long explanations put up by staff and I can really tell they make the effort to engage the community. It’s not just “hey here’s a feature!” or “hey sorry to hear this here is a generic answer I give to 500 other people!”. They get shit done. And I love how active it is, though occasionally a long-dead post gets revived and I know not everyone bothers to scroll through hundreds of comments right at the start (the ATM fees thread was immensely painful to read through, like 1000 responses??). But if you ask a question usually you get an answer in minutes. I love it. I’ve got so many recommendations for apps/ sites I now use everyday. Collective knowledge is power ️ I think people do debate about things on here but usually end off along the lines of “I respect that you have a different opinion and we’ll agree to disagree.”
Negatives: Tbh I’m not that bothered with negative remarks since the person is either speaking out of frustration or already has a set opinion about Monzo. Their question gets addressed anyway and a lot of times they’re like “oh thanks for the help” and the issue is resolved, or they go down the line of “this is a deal breaker!!1!!1!” and it either looks ridiculous or brings up a salient point/issue others might face.
If it’s not malicious then it should be taken as feedback for improvement. I love apps and technology but don’t have an in-depth knowledge about it, so I can understand when new customers get frustrated or if they don’t understand the reasoning behind something. I think sometimes people mistake this forum for customer services and drop personal info or very specific questions about a bug we won’t be able to assist with etc. and you need to point them in the direction of the help chat. Thread merging isn’t as quick as before (come back alexs) so sometimes you get about a million threads on “where is Apple Pay?” “where is top up feature?”.
I also didn’t know there were rules against swearing. That’s bizarre to me. I’m pretty happy with the amount of policing we have.
I’ve only started using the forum a few days ago. I’ve been a Monzo current account customer for less than two weeks. My salary is being paid into the account at midnight, for the first time.
The forum community here, seems very… established.
I’ve started a few threads and joined-in on some others. I must admit that I was surprised at some of the input.
A thread I’d started on the possibility of a crowdsourced map of ATM locations within the app, kind of turned into a discussion on the usefulness of carrying cash itself - which wasn’t the point of my initial post, at all.
Another thread I’d started (and was later merged into an existing thread) regarded my employer stalling the changing of my bank details, due to my having no paper correspondence from Monzo. This turned into a conversation about emailing payrolls with the correct level of encryption… At least, I think that’s what the respondents were discussing. It went over my head and was nothing to do with requesting on-demand paper bank statements from Monzo.
I’m not very “techy”, so I found some of the replies extraneous.
It’s not a bad thing! It’s great that there’s a core of chatty existing users here. I just initially found it disorientating. I’m mentally tuning-out all the technical blather now.
I’m currently working on a new system here, which will be more about introducing lots of different Monzo staff members to the community to engage in Q&A threads. I think that will be great, as it’ll help everyone learn about the wider team. As it stands, there are whole areas of the team that aren’t represented well on the forum and as a result you get a huge amount of inside info on what certain teams get up to, but very little about others! Stay tuned for more information on this soon 
I look forward to seeing more exciting updates and I hope you’ll love the new role! 
️ I think people do debate about things on here but usually end off along the lines of “I respect that you have a different opinion and we’ll agree to disagree.”
