The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

Benchmarking Community Performance

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Benchmarking Community Performance

How do you get the data to support an increased budget? What about getting C-Level to take notice of your community successes? Ricoh found benchmarking community performance was key to their growth.

With the rapid change in workplace technology and tools, Ricoh wanted to ensure a strategic plan that allowed for continued growth & success of their powerful community platform within the organization.

The Ricoh Community team decide to complete a complete benchmark of their Jive community instance, hoping to document the successes and identify paths for growth within the organization.

While they already had a strong community program, they also wanted the numbers to back encourage continued growth and greater adoption and engagement from their executive team.

Learn how a community benchmark helped Ricoh exceed its community goals.

About Ricoh

Ricoh USA is an information management and digital services company. As part of a global leader, they create competitive advantages for over 1.4 million businesses, including 84% of the Fortune 500.

With their legacy of innovative technology that has changed the way we work, and their deep expertise in accessing, capturing, and managing information, Ricoh delivers solutions that are harnessing the power of today’s changing workforce.

Read more Community Case Studies

Interested in more online community management case studies like this one on powering behavior change through community? Learn how top community programs at organizations like Aetna, The Pragmatic Institute, Heifer International, The World Bank Group, and more use community-led programs to increase engagement, boost customer loyalty, improve the employee experience, encourage innovation, and more.

Introducing The Community Score: How mature is your community?

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Communities need different management at different stages

Young communities can be pretty simple to manage. It can be as easy as inviting a few friends and asking questions.

As they grow and mature, however, communities need more mature and sophisticated management. When a community has thousands – or millions – of members, they are really more of a network of communities and that requires advanced strategy, governance, leadership, technology, and metrics.

Because community management evolves with the size and maturity of the community, understanding where you are on your community management journey is challenging and seeing opportunities to improve are even harder.

The Community Score

Over the years, The Community Roundtable has conducted a lot of research and by doing so, we’ve identified the most common markers of successful community management and can determine were on the maturity path those practices sit.

The Community Score assessment will generate the maturity of your community practices along the eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model: Strategy, Leadership, Culture, Community Management, Content & Programming, Policies & Governance, Tools, and Metrics & Measurement.

 

By understanding how mature each of these practices is, we can help you see how to best prioritize your focus going forward. This assessment is also an effective way to communicate your approach and plans to stakeholders.

Start your community score!

Friday Roundup: Introducing The Community Performance Benchmark

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.Community Performance Benchmark

If you haven’t heard the news we rolled out a new service this week – the Community Performance Benchmark. You can read all about this exciting new offering here, or check out Rachel’s thoughts here. In a nutshell the Community Performance Benchmark is a GPS for your community building journey – a valuable assessment of where your community actually stand. We benchmark your management processes and provide you with community recommendations. It’s information that gives you the ability to set priorities, make decisions and manage budgets with confidence. Sign up here to learn more.

Our favorite news & articles from around the web:

Announcement: #ESNchat + TheCR Join Forces! – So – you might be asking “What does this mean for me?” – and the answer is: almost nothing. #ESNchat will continue to run under the current hashtag and twitter handle (@esnchat) at its current time – 2pm ET on Thursdays. Jeff’s last chat as host will be next Thursday, but he’ll continue to be active as the founder and a frequent participant, helping us make sure we’re providing the most relevant and compelling content for you weekly.

Measuring Community Success: More Than Just ROI – Social leaders ready to take the next step in their community journey now have access to a new assessment tool to help them evaluate their community’s strengths and weaknesses, and make better decisions to build more successful online sharing spaces for their employees, customers and partners.

Stop the Technology Madness – Organizational Cultures Are Decades Behind – Recently the term ‘Digital Transformation’ keeps popping up as the latest buzzword bandied about by analysts and vendors and every time I hear it, I twitch just a little bit. We’ve been here before. Remember the dot-com craze? The term Digital Transformation got batted around a bit then too.

Community Management is No Longer a Mystery – Communities have been around since the beginning of time and online communities sprung up very soon after the Internet was developed. Humans have a visceral need to seek out commonality and connect around shared interests – and it is so instinctive that most people cannot articulate how communities come together and thrive. Because of this community management – and prior to that community development – has been seen largely as an art, learned through experience.

How Creative Outlets Make You a Better Community Builder – Every day I discover a new way that art, design, performance, music, and culture work to build a better world. From the League of Creative Interventionists to fantastical creatures prowling the Burning Man sands to the Thrashbird pieces all over my neighborhood in Los Angeles, I see examples of creativity in action every day. Maybe it’s because it’s my job to discover and connect purpose-driven social creatives (holla?),  but I sense there’s something new happening here. Art is bursting out of our cities at the seams.

The Community Performance Benchmark: Five Reasons Why It Matters Now – We talk about (and believe strongly in) articulating goals, developing roadmaps, and plotting your community journey. But just like a trip – knowing your destination isn’t all that valuable if you don’t know where you are today. Benchmarking is a tool to do just that – tell you where you are so you can figure out how to get where you need to go.

Online Community Helps Nerds, Geeks and Gamers Get Fit     – An online community geared to help nerds and video game fanatics get fit and healthy has expanded with the launch of a summer camp for adults.

New community and social media jobs: 

  1. Social Media Community Manager – JeffreyM Consulting – Bellevue, WA
  2. Community Manager with strong editorial skills – Marketers Anonymous – New York, NY
  3. Stylist Community Manager – Fashion Industry Opportunity  – Stella & Dot – San Bruno, CA
  4. MilSuite Community Manager – Data Systems Analysts, Inc. – Fairfax, VA
  5. Sr Community Manager – Orlando, FL – Pearson – Orlando, FL
  6. Content & Community Manager – EF College Break – Cambridge, MA
  7. Community Manager – Meredith Corporation – Culver City, CA
  8. Community Manager – Braintree/Venmo – New York, NY
  9. Associate Community Manager – Ignite Social Media – Cary, NC
  10. eSports Manager – Blizzard Entertainment – Irvine, CA
  11. Community Manager – FirstService Residential – Norristown, PA
  12. Community Manager – K. Hovnanian Companies – Bakersfield, CA
  13. Community Manager – Big Data – Third Eye Consulting Services & Solutions LLC. – Santa Clara, CA 
  14. Social Media Marketing Coordinator – Marshalls – Mississauga, ON
  15. Social Media Specialist – Mercedes-Benz Canada Inc. – Toronto, ON
  16. Social Media Assistant – Sunshine Village Ski & Snowboard Resort – Banff, AB
  17. Customer Success Guru (Remote) – Shopify – Kingston, ON –
  18. Marketing Manager – Ottawa – Uber – Ottawa, ON
  19. Social Community Specialist – Cadillac Fairview 11 reviews – Calgary, AB
  20. PR and Communications Coordinator – Motek Cultural Initiative – Toronto, ON
  21. Social Media Beast – Liquid Nutrition – Montréal, QC

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Looking for resources to help you excel as a community manager? Check out all TheCR Network has to offer! Toolkits, research, expert advice, case studies and more – for every stage of your community journey.

The Community Performance Benchmark: Five Reasons Why It Matters Now

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By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

benchmarkIt’s an exciting day for us here at The Community Roundtable. We’re doing something we don’t often do – we’re rolling out a new service. Today, we introduce the Community Performance Benchmark, which you can think of as “GPS for Your Community Strategy.”

I love this analogy, because it fits so well with a lot of the conversations we already have with community managers and strategists. We talk about (and believe strongly in) articulating goals, developing roadmaps, and plotting your community journey. But just like a trip – knowing your destination isn’t all that valuable if you don’t know where you are today. Benchmarking is a tool to do just that – tell you where you are so you can figure out how to get where you need to go.

Why now? The idea of benchmarking isn’t new – but here are five reasons why the time for the Community Performance Benchmark has come.

1. The discipline of community management has matured

The practice of community management has been around in some form for decades, but until recently the practice has required experiential learning and it’s been treated as more of an art than a science. Now, social science research and our own research and work have helped to document and refine the core practices of community management.

2. We have the critical mass of strategic data to do it

 Working with the members of TheCR Network over the past five years, we’ve been able to structure and refine practices to the point where we have objective markers of good community management. Whether from our annual State of Community Management research, our private roundtable calls with members or our advisory work with leading organizations, we now have foundational data to drive this new service.

3. Community management is the future of management

As networked communications environments spread across all aspects of organizations – from marketing, to collaboration and innovation – community management will become the de facto approach to general management because of its ability to generate more value for both individuals and organizations. Because of this, it is a strategic skill for organizations to develop now.

4. As technology accelerates, organizations can lose sight of the management changes required

Adopting technology without assessing how organizations are managed is a risky investment. Too often, organizations buy the tools and later figure out through trial and error how to best use them or, in the worst case, find the management and process change too challenging and abandon the platform. Often they become lured by the promise of the next new technology, hoping it will address issues, but discover instead that it just compounds them. Benchmarking management processes is a critical link that aligns technology adoption with required management changes.

5. Benchmarking data adds conviction and confidence to planning efforts. Which case would you rather make?

  • “I need more community help. I’m feeling overwhelmed.”
  • “I need more community help. We are managing our communities with about half of the staff of our competitors and we are behind in addressing executive adoption, both of which are leading to low engagement rates. We can improve community engagement by investing in community management staff and an executive coaching program.”

Benchmarking data makes it possible for you to make cases based on independent third-party analysis and comparison to best-in-class communities. More critically, it changes the conversation with stakeholders from “Why should I invest?” to “What do we want and how will we get there?” – a much more constructive and productive discussion – that is more likely to lead to approved budget requests.

We are excited to offer the Community Performance Benchmark service. It is a powerful tool for those we serve – community leaders. It helps them be successful where it matters – in getting the resources they need to create thriving, productive communities.

You can learn more about our Community Performance Benchmark in the Services section of the communityroundtable.com, or by clicking here.