Image via Wikimedia Commons
By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable
We are approaching the deadline on Friday for the State of Community Management 2015 survey. The response has been great, but we still need as broad a sample as we can get to make our data the best it can be. If you have taken it before, you have seen how your information feeds the final product each year – so please carve out the 20 minutes to complete the survey.
But some of you, we know, are deadline driven. To you, we say TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
Others, especially those who may not have taken the surveys before, have had more basic questions about the survey, the data, and what we do with your responses. Here are answers to five frequently asked questions.
Are my answers public? Your answers are confidential.
Your State of Community Management research answers will never be shared with an outside party except as published in aggregate in our research products, and we do not list the specific organizations that have taken part in our survey without permission.
Why do you need my personal information and email? Your personal information is confidential, too.
We will not use your personal information for any reason except to confirm or clarify survey answers or send you follow up messages specifically about the State of Community Management research.
What’s in it for me? You get an individualized community maturity score, and contribute to research you’ll be able to use to help your community efforts.
We will use your specific community data for one purpose – to give you an estimated maturity score on where your answers rank you on the competencies of TheCR’s Community Maturity Model. That score is seen only by you – it will not be shared publicly at any time.
Do you really need my answers? Yes! Your answers matter.
We know that 20 minutes is not a small ask – but your answers are critically important for the research. The greater our sample size, the more ways we can examine the data, by community size, platform, industry and more, and the better the insights we can give.
This year, we are making a push to get responses from mature communities, from communities that use a number of specific platforms, such as Lithium, Higher Logic, IBM Connect, Sharepoint, Yammer, and Salesforce, and for responses from communities connected to more traditional industries, such as finance, manufacturing, health care and professional services. Media and gaming communities – we want you, too!
When is the final report coming out? Mid-spring.
We need some time to crunch and double-check numbers, to analyze and create the narrative, but you can expect that it will be released in the first half of May. You can also expect we will be ringing cowbells and honking social media horns to make sure you are aware when it comes out.
And keep an eye out for some sneak peeks at what the data is showing us while we work on getting the full report together.
There’s another question that comes up, too.
Can we trust you?
Our reputation is our business. Every product we create, and everything we do in our community, is built on that trust. Not sure I have a pithy single sentence to address that – just six years of hard work and five past State of Community Management reports to demonstrate our determination to protect those who entrust us with their information and produce research that advances the discipline of community management.
Have we convinced you? Excellent. Take the SOCM 2015 survey at https://the.cr/socm15survey
