Need a sign that communities are in the spotlight? Look at where communities fit into organizations. In the State of Community Management 2017, we asked more than 300 community professionals where their communities fit in the structures of their organization. Communities today can be housed in almost any department in an organization, but consistently, they are being […]

What is community strategy? A successful community strategy integrates social tools and methods with business goals and processes. A good community strategy also aligns an organization’s goals with member needs setting you up to succeed in both keep engagement high and provide ROI. We recommend using the Community Maturity Model to help in building a community strategy. Below are […]

When thinking about engagement many community managers dismiss the idea of formal training program for their members. For some it’s just too much work – if you have thousands of members already set in their ways, where do you even start? Hillary Boucher recently led a Roundtable Call with members of TheCR Network that touched on this very […]

The theme of this year’s community workshop – TheCR Connect, is “Telling Your Community Story” and we believe that means many things. Some obvious: building a narrative, using metrics to paint a picture, and some not so obvious: defending investments, cultivating stakeholders. Every community professional is tasked with telling the story of their community – […]

Lesson 1 for the day: Do not put a plastic cutting board in the oven. Lesson 2: Do not grab with bare hands to take it out. My recent life lessons brought me to the ER waiting room to watch triage nurses in their element. As each patient arrived, they took their vitals, assessed their symptoms […]

Here’s an interesting piece of data from the SOCM 2017: for the first time, communities say they are spending more on people than on technology. That’s right – by a narrow margin, organizations with dedicated community budgets said they spent slightly more on community management salaries and resources than they did on their platforms. The […]

Executive engagement has long been considered a critical element of community growth. But getting executives to be truly involved in communities has been a tremendous challenge for community managers. So what’s keeping executives from jumping in, even when they think community is a critical opportunity? We asked the respondents to this year’s State of Community […]