Research has always set The Community Roundtable apart.
We’ve always believed that to get the attention and support of stakeholders for the strategic role of community management, we needed to invest in research. Our research is also a key shared value with our members, clients, and our broader community. Collaborating together, we have taken a niche discipline that was seen as an implicit art in 2009 to a structured, repeatable set of approaches that can be taught, followed, quantified, and communicated easily.
What this means for us, is that our research agenda needs to pivot. We no longer need to understand and document how to build a successful community program – we know that. Instead, the challenges we face are more about navigating current organizational environments, out-dated thinking, and market shifts.
It is now critical to translate what we know about community management and its effectiveness at addressing strategic opportunities to a broader audience. Executives have been slow to see and invest in community management skills. Because it is one of the key enablers to digital transformation, this lack of investment is keeping many organizations from fulfilling its potential.
TheCR’s 2018 Research Priorities
While our conversations with TheCR Network members have always informed and contributed to our research and, in turn, that has always informed the topics we discuss in TheCR Network and the content we publish, we have not made those themes explicit. This year is the first year we are publishing a research agenda.
This agenda is structured around four themes we are championing in 2018 and include:
- Communities Get Down to Business
- Communities As Change Agents
- Community Roles Evolve
- Strategic Measurement of Communities
These topics will be explored through programming in TheCR Network, virtual training workshops, research, and advisory work.
Interested in these discussions? Join our Facebook group for free or sign-up for our monthly newsletter to follow along.
