Rachel Happe, Principal & Co-Founder, The Community Roundtable
Back when we started The Community Roundtable in 2009, community management was a bit of a mystery and while there were opportunities for community managers to gather and share, there was not much documented about what community managers did all day. We found that many community managers were overwhelmed, in large part because a lot of the work of community management was hidden from view – which lead us to write about The Iceberg Effect of Community Management.
We’ve come a long way since then but are still struggling to define reasonable job descriptions, align compensation and determine how to assess the performance of community professionals. Those conversations with members and partners led us to invest in an annual role and salary research platform, which we renamed this year to reflect its scope: Community Careers and Compensation.
Along with the research, we developed the Community Skills Framework (CSF), which we updated to reflect what we’ve learned and the feedback we received from members of TheCR Network.
The Community Skills Framework represents the five skill families and top 50 skills that are required to build a successful community program.
How can you use this framework?
- Assess yourself – where are your strengths and weaknesses?
- Identify skill gaps you want to address
- Start critical conversations with stakeholders about the reasonable scope of your role – and what other resources are required
- Communicate the expertise required to build a successful community program
- Assess team strengths, weaknesses and gaps
- Build a team professional development plan
- Write a job description
Like all of our research, we hope this helps you have important conversations about what is required, reasonable and expected with regard to community management.
At The Community Roundtable we work hard to share as much as possible with our wider network, not just our customers. In return, we ask that you participate in the research so that we can better understand the scope of how community management is practiced.
The 2015 Community Careers and Compensation survey is now open. Please take 10 minutes to tell us about your role: https://the.cr/ccc2015survey
