The Community Roundtable

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

Save the Date: Customer Community Summit is June 15th

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After a two-year hiatus, we are thrilled to welcome our community audience back to Boston for a one-day, exclusive customer community summit. This all-inclusive experience will take place at Convene Boston on Wednesday, June 15, 2022.

This event is designed for community professionals working with external communities – including customer or partner communities focused on support, product innovation, and marketing/brand awareness.

We’ll combine live product demos featuring new features and functionality from leading customer community platforms, with expert panels and case studies from some of the top customer communities today.

What: The Customer Community Summit is a one-day immersive learning experience for customer community professionals.

Why: Launching, maintaining, migrating, and managing online communities can be overwhelming and, without an experienced team, can lead to expensive and time-consuming mistakes. Learn from solutions providers and online community professionals who have been in your shoes.

Who: Anyone responsible for launching, managing, and evolving online community initiatives. Community managers, project managers, stakeholders, IT professionals, and more are welcome!

We’ve also built in a lot of time for networking with community peers, and connecting with community technology providers to help you get the information you need when selecting a new community platform, or migrating an existing community to a new solution.

The Customer Community Summit will take place at Convene Boston – which means the food will be amazing, and there will be unlimited coffee, drinks, and snacks all day.

We’ll cap the Summit off with a casual cocktail party and head to a series of dinners hosted by our community partners. This is a the perfect event if you’re looking to learn more about the customer community landscape, are currently evaluating a new community platform, or just want to connect with community professionals facing similar challenges.

You can view the agenda and learn more about registration here.

TheCR Connect Boston 2016 Recap

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Participants brainstorm during a working group session.

By Amy Turner, The Community Roundtable

Working in community you can get pretty numb to the amazing collisions that take place between passionate people. We recently got a reminder of what makes community professionals – and members of TheCR Network – so special.

TheCR Connect brought together community veterans and tactical experts from around the country for a two-day workshop full of inspiring speakers, actionable planning sessions, engaged networking and expert case studies. And just a little bit of networking held around actual roundtables, with delicious food and tasty drinks in hand. (Some extra-special bonding was done during the World Series game we watched as a group on night one!)

This year, participation was limited to members of TheCR Network to ensure that deep connections could be made quickly, and so that every participant could contribute and walk away with inspiration to effect real change in their community. No business cards needed at this event – everyone was already connected online in the Network!

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A roomful of community lovers led to great networking.

The Connect workshops, lightning talks and unconference sessions (all led by our amazing members) covered on topics such as Dashboards, Roadmaps, Community Platform Requirements, Gamification, Empathy and Crowdsourcing Innovation.

We even celebrated members of TheCR Network with a series of awards during Connect, to showcase the incredible work they are doing to advance the discipline of community management as well as contributing to Network in valuable ways. Awards covered such topics as “The Cheerleader”, “The Detective” and the “Explorer” and were a fun way to surprise and delight our members.

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Members of TheCR Community Team present member Ted Hopton with an award.

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Community VIP Claire Flanagan receives a special community commendation.

 

While we are sad to have another Connect event in our rear-view mirror, these amazing connections and conversations are already living on inside TheCR Network. Our year-round regular programming, including roundtable calls, working groups and discussions ensures that members are always connecting, always sharing and always learning – even if they aren’t in a room together anymore.

 

TheCR Connect Class of 2016

 

Learn how your community and your career will benefit from membership inside TheCR Network.  jointhecrnetwork_button

TheCR Connect Agenda

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TheCR ConnectBy Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

TheCR Connect is the inaugural workshop in our regional events series. Kicking off in Boston this Fall, TheCR Connect is an event exclusively for community practitioners – those engaged in the development, implementation, management and measurement of community initiatives. You might be a community manager for a 5,000 person internal community, the community specialist at a start-up, or the director of community for a Fortune 500 brand. Learn more.

With just seven weeks left until TheCR Connect Boston I’m excited to share the full agenda*. Without further ado:

8:00am – Breakfast

8:45am – Welcome from TheCR

9:00am – Keynote: Community Inspiration with JJ Lovett, CA Technologies

10:00 – Community Case Study: How to Win Friends & Influence People – the Community Edition Presented by Akamai – Whether you manage an internal or external community we have all experienced some of our biggest challenges negotiating internally. We have to weave our way through a maze of opinions and / or corporate policies to achieve the goals we have established for our community. This session will facilitate a discussion around the following; How to Prevent, How to Avoid, How to Accept, or Run Around It while influencing people and winning friends.

10:30am – Break/Optional Tour of Akamai’s Command Center We couldn’t visit Akamai without getting a look the famous Network Operations Command Center (NOCC).  The NOCC’s proactive stance and unique view ensures a seamless response to network conditions – enabling Akamai to deliver rich media content and applications, regardless of network traffic volume. The NOCC is staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by expert network operations personnel.

11:00am – AMA with Community Experts We’re putting community experts in the hot seat to answer your most challenging questions. Featuring Patrick Hellen, DeepIS, Luke Sinclair, AMEX, and Lauren Vargas, Aetna.

11:45am – Office Hours w/ Community Superheroes We believe every community manager has a superpower. We’ve rounded up a group of these community superheroes including Welcome Wonder Woman, the Executive Engager and more to answer your questions and get your community programs on track.

12:30pm – Lunch & Matched Networking Groups Sometimes it’s hard to find the person you need to meet the most. We’ll take the guess work out of connecting with the participants that can make a difference in your community and career.

1:30pm – Interactive Roundtables Dig in and dive deep on a community challenge that you’re working on. We’ll break into small groups and expert facilitators will share advice and guide you to actionable plans and tools for community success. Roundtable topics may include: Defining Community Value, Sharing Your Community Success and Building Your Community Dream Team.

2:30pm – Break

2:45pm – Community Case Study Stay tuned! Our second community case study will be announced shortly.

3:30pm – Creating a Culture of Yes: Improvisation for Community Management Improvisation is about more than being funny. It involves active listening, confidence, creative thinking, flexibility and working as a team. We are thrilled to host a team from ImprovBoston for a look at how the principles of improv can be successfully applied to community management.

5:00pm – Closing remarks

6:00pm – Happy Hour After a busy day we’ll decamp to nearby Mead Hall for tasty drinks, delicious food and more great conversations.

Want to join us? Members register here, non-members request an invite.

* This Agenda is subject to change at any time.

TheCR Connect is made possible thanks to our partners.

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Sneak Peek: TheCR Connect Agenda

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Today I’m excited to share the first look at the agenda for TheCR Connect – our first live workshop happening this October in our hometown. Without further ado:

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The early bird cost for non-members who register before 7/31 is $550. Any tickets remaining for TheCR Connect (and we do anticipate the event selling out) after 7/31 will cost $600. Don’t miss out on this one-of-a-kind event – non-members request an invite here.

Announcing TheCR Connect – A Workshop for Community Managers

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

TheCR ConnectAfter over six years of connecting community folks online we are taking this show on the road! I am thrilled to announce our latest venture – TheCR Connect! TheCR Connect is technically a workshop for community professionals, but our goal is to have it be much more that that. By bringing together an intimate group of community practitioners we want to facilitate conversations, share knowledge, solve problems, inspire action and provide the tools participants need to go back into their communities and create real, meaningful change. Basically, TheCR Connect is what our online community – both here and in TheCR Network,  would look like if we were all sitting around a big roundtable in a room together, instead of behind our computers and devices.

Our first event takes place on October 1 in our hometown – Boston, MA. You can join an intimate group of people who live and breath community for this day of inspiring speakers, actionable planning sessions, engaged networking and expert case studies – plus some fun surprises.

Participation is limited to just 50 community enthusiasts to ensure that real conversations happen, that every participant can contribute and that everyone walks away with the connections and inspiration to create real change.

If you’re not close enough to Boston to make it in for the event don’t worry – we are targeting a West Coast event in the Winter, and a Mid-West event in the Spring. Stay tuned for a full agenda in the coming weeks.

I hope we’ll see you there, and that you’ll bring your enthusiasm for community building, your passion for connecting with others and your sense of humor! To learn more visit TheCR Connect or request an invite now!

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Did you know TheCR has a facebook group? Join us to chat about current community issues, share advice and connect with other community professionals.

Friday Roundup – Let It Snow? Edition

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By Shannon DiGregorio, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable

snowy boston

The weather people are predicting snow in Boston this weekend, which to me is a mixed blessing. I love the holidays, and growing up in New England a white December makes things a little more jolly. My commute is also from the kitchen to the living room of my house, so nasty traffic isn’t a concern. I do however have a 16 week old puppy who likes to take her sweet time outside – I think a cold snap and a little snow might speed her up – we’ll see!

I really enjoyed seeing so many #thankitforward tweets from so many different people. I’ve included a few below as part of the roundup in addition to my favorite links from this week. Have a wonderful weekend, whether you’re covered in snow or on a sunny southern beach!

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Credit: Snowy Boston Photo by Arthur C. Mills