By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.
I’m really not ready for April to be over. Can I get an extension on this month? Ha! I guess I better just keep moving forward. Part of the reason that April flew by was because we launched State of Community Management 2014 this month and celebrated our fifth anniversary. And somewhere in between we facilitated five Roundtable sessions, added four reports to our directory and supported dozens of discussions and introductions within the network. Phew!
I wanted to catch my breath for a moment and share a few highlights from inside the TheCR Network this past month:
- State of Community Management 2014 Supplement (Resource Bundle). You may have noticed the “Lessons from TheCR” section for each competency within the State of Community Management 2014 report. Those were excerpts from full reports that live inside the ever growing TheCR Library within the network. We bundled all the reports mentioned in SOCM this year so members could have easy access to continue their research.
- How to Scale Community Management Efforts (Roundtable Sessions). We had two calls that approached how to scale your community management efforts from different angles. One was facilitated by the very insightful Richard Binhammer who taught members how to use a talent assessment model to identify skill gaps and find community and social talent to supplement and support their strategy. The other call was a member-led discussion on how to hire for your community team. Experienced members swapped hiring approaches, favorite interview questions, and identifiers to help you spot a natural community manager.
- Design Thinking for Complex Community Program Challenges (Roundtable). Complex challenges are those that don’t have a black and white answer. Sound familiar? TheCR member Erin Liman generously shared her expertise on using design thinking to approach the complex issues that many community managers face. Challenges like: “Our executives say they support our community initiative, but their actions tell a different story,” or “We bring our advocates to the table, involve them in decision-making, but they never seem to happy.”
I shared a more extensive overview of what goes on every month if you are curious and you can also check out last month’s sneak peek. Would love to hear what was going on in your world this past month in the comments, too.
Until next month!
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