Yes, it’s that time of year again – time to take stock of where our community programs are and what’s next.
For The Community Roundtable, this is our biggest and most important initiative every year because our shared value with you is to demonstrate the value of community management. We collaborate with you to deliver research that does just that – creating something that generates more value than any of us could on our own.
This year’s research builds on our State of Community Management 2014 report – pushing what we know about the markers of community management maturity and scoring communities in the eight competencies identified in the Community Maturity Model.
We know this research has helped our members plan and budget – creating community programs that are more strategic and have more resources with which to succeed. It will help you understand things like:
- For communities that can measure ROI, they have an average ROI of x%
- X% of new member welcome processes include automated welcome emails, x% include personal welcome emails from a community manager and X% include video tutorials
- The average and best-in-class engagement profiles include x% lurkers, x% contributors, x% creators and x% collaborators.
- The average community SLA (service level agreement), for those that have them, is x hours.
- How many communities without a full-time community manager can measure their value compared with average and the best-in-class segment.
This research will help you understand how well your community is addressing a variety of management initiatives – and help stakeholders understand where you have gaps and what is required to address them. Critical information as the community management discipline matures.
However, we need YOU to help us help you. Please consider taking our 20 minute survey. While the majority of questions are easy responses about things you have in place or don’t, there are a few pieces of data you may want to gather ahead of time:
- Your engagement profile: Inactive, lurker, contributor, creator and collaborators. (Total should equal 100%)
- Your community budget breakdown: Community management resources; Content and online programming/events; In-person events; consulting, advisory or research; Outsourced moderation and community management; Platform and technology. (Total should equal 100%)
- Your annual ROI percentage, if you calculate it
- Community SLA
- Breakdown of community management time: Engagement; Content and program development; Strategic and planning responsibilities; Technical work; Analytics. Total should equal 100%
New this year, you will receive scores for each competency immediately.
Curious how well you will do? Take the survey here.
