agenda Archives

How do we make sure TheCR Connect is exactly what attendees want? We ask them.

Our annual community conference – TheCR Connect is less than seven weeks away! Believe me when I say things are ramping up at TheCR headquarters and we can’t wait to host an eclectic group of community professionals. When our attendees register we ask them a few questions to help make sure we are creating content that is relevant and exciting for them. Our entire agenda is based on the input we get from our registrants.

This year a few big themes emerged in the responses.

A whopping 41% of attendees indicated that they were interested in exploring how to define community value, and 32% want to learn more about calculating community ROI. In addition to these measurement-focused themes, there was strong interest in cultivating strong advocates and building a powerful community narrative.

I’m excited to share our current agenda – and some of our speaker organizations. From an expert panel on Transforming Community Careers, to interactive sessions on Surviving and Thriving During a Migration and Leveraging Advocacy Programs to Accelerate Change, to deep-dive workshops with tactical outputs like Building a Behavioral Analytics Dashboard and Calculating Community ROI with TheCR’s ROI Model we’ve put our attendees’ interests at the forefront of our planning – and can’t wait to learn alongside them in Boston.

Check out our new Connect 2018 infographic and explore the full agenda here.

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.

The Community Roundtable’s 2018 Research Agenda from The Community Roundtable