A Good Start to the Year!

Posted by Keith Severson on February 6th 2015

Hello Community,

One month of the new year has already passed!  I hope everyone is excited about the recent Dr. Who and Wall-E announcement!

The Community Support Team has been hard at work deploying all of the support programs such as the annual RLUG Support Program and RLUG Event Support Program.  Additionally, Kim Thomsen has once again been working very hard to ensure the LEGO LUGBULK Program launches successfully in 2015.  It is really exciting to see the growth of this program and this year we once again have a substantial growth. We are estimating that we will send out over 20 million LEGO elements to 157 RLUGs!  This is our largest program that we operate and we enjoy seeing your pictures come in of how you have been using the bricks!

Also an update on the additional staffing that I mentioned in the last post.

I am happy to announce that Ana Albouy has joined us full time as the “operations specialist” in the Community Support Team.  Ana has been working as a freelance part time for us throughout 2014 and has demonstrated she has what it takes to take the role to the next level.  Her role is working on the systems, processes, and logistical operations of our support programs.  She will be the one who is hands on in the deployment of LEGO sets, elements and other items going out the AFOL community.  However, to be clear, the regional Community Manager, Kim, Kevin and Jan, are still the decision makers on how programs are used and approved. This means that the LUG Ambassadors should continue to submit applications for events and other programs to their regional Community Manager, and then they may see Ana step in at a later stage to ensure the items arrive correctly. This setup is in place to ensure the Community Manager can be in closer contact with the AFOLs while Ana can run an efficient back-end logistics operation.

Finally, regarding the Community Manager position which (we) will be hiring in Shanghai to support the Asia and Pacific region, we are still working on this.  (We) expect a job advertisement to be posted on the http://www.lego.com/en-us/careers site soon. Until that position is filled and fully trained, Jan Beyer remains dedicated to supporting and strengthening the region.

Thank you for your time.