The Community Roundtable

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

Three Tips for Building Your Community Team

By

In our State of Community Management research, we found that 47% of community roles are defined by HR teams, who might not always understand what your community team needs to succeed. A clear understanding of community roles and responsibilities is critical when building your community team.

Help them help you by providing a detailed look at what common community skills are, where your current team (even if that’s just you) excels, and what gaps need to be filled for future success.

You can use our Community Skills Framework to provide your HR team with a look at industry-standard terms and skills.

Three Tips for Building Your Community Team from Lisa Tallman

Lisa Tallman builds community at Easterseals for 26 national affiliates. Starting as a team of one, she approached team building from a strategic angle.

“I always have a business case for my community programs that I update annually. And one thing I always include is headcount. ‘Here’s what my current team is doing. Here’s how much time and effort it’s taking them to do that, and here’s what’s not getting done because we don’t have the resources.’ By showing my executives what we need to fulfill the strategic plan, I can tie community goals back into organizational goals.”

Building Your Community Team

Here are three tips from Lisa on building a community team:

Hire the right mindset.

Many skills can be learned, but a relationship and opportunity-seeking orientation is difficult to develop. Consider the personalities and working styles on your current team, and make diversifying beyond your skillset a priority.

Think about the future, not just the present.

Use Lisa’s tactic of considering the long-term strategic goals for your community program when hiring. This will help your team scale as programs grow, and provide growth opportunities in line with your team structure.

Community management is hot right now.

Community teams are growing faster than the availability of experienced professionals. As you consider potential hires, remember there’s no one community unicorn out there for you. Hire with the expectation that training can close gaps.

Hear more advice from Lisa on building a community team on her episode of Lessons from the NEW Community Manager Handbook or download your copy of the NEW Community Manager Handbook today.

5 Critical Hiring Characteristics for Community Management Roles

By

Critical Hiring Characteristics

Looking at community job descriptions, it’s clear there are some characteristics that are prized by hiring managers.

While empathy, communication skills, and collaboration have always been a component of a community professional’s responsibilities, the growing recognition of the need for negotiation and strategic skills is newer. As community roles become more common, and as they continue to diversify into more specific areas (like community operations, technical community management, etc.) there will continue to be a core set of characteristics that are critical for successful community management.

We’ve found these five characteristics to be key when evaluating community talent. This is obviously not a complete list – thinking about your unique needs as a community program and an organization will always be important when thinking about the right fit for your community team.

5 Critical Hiring Characteristics for Community Management Roles

1 – Empathy.​  Many community management job descriptions share a key requirement: empathy. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another is quickly becoming a critical part of effective community management. Emotional intelligence is a key attribute.

2- Strong communication and negotiating skills. Community professionals interact with a wide range of people and have to gracefully navigate differences of opinion and perspective. That requires sophisticated communication and negotiation skills – no wonder these skills are becoming more common on job descriptions.

 3 – Ability to collaborate across the business. Community professionals are being asked to partner with teams across organizations. This requires leading discussions and training on community topics, as well as implementing projects that generate shared value. The ability to listen, translate concepts across different groups, and collaborate is essential.

4 – Strategic planning. In an environment where you rarely can tell people what to do, staying aligned around a strategic vision is key to a successful community program. This strategic vision informs planning, governance, and tactical programming in ways all community professionals need to understand.

5 – Ability to thrive remotely. We admit, this one is new and we aren’t seeing it on too many job descriptions yet, but just wait. As the world becomes more comfortable with employees working remotely the ability to thrive both working remotely, and also connecting people who are working remotely will become a sought-after skill.

If you want a primer on 50 common community management skills our Community Skills Framework™ includes five skill families with ten skills in each family, prioritized based on what we learned from our extensive community management research. You can use the Community Skills Framework™ as you craft your community job descriptions to ensure you are using industry-standard terms and including the skills critical to your particular community needs.
Learn more about the Community Skills Framework™ here.

If you want to browse community management job descriptions and get more advice on smart hiring for online community management roles you can download our community job index here.

Critical Hiring Characteristics for Online Community Roles

By

Looking at community job descriptions (download our CCC 2020 report for 30+ online community management job descriptions), it’s clear there are some characteristics that are prized by hiring managers. While empathy, communication skills, and collaboration have always been a component of a community professional’s responsibilities, the growing recognition of the need for negotiation and strategic skills is newer.

Empathy

​ Many community management job descriptions share a key requirement: empathy. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another is quickly becoming a critical part of effective community management. Emotional intelligence is a key attribute.

​ Strong communication and negotiating skills

​ Community professionals interact with a wide range of people and have to gracefully navigate differences of opinion and perspective. That requires sophisticated communication and negotiation skills – no wonder these skills are becoming more common on job descriptions.

​ Ability to collaborate across the business

​ Community professionals are being asked to partner with teams across organizations. This requires leading discussions and training on community topics, as well as implementing projects that generate shared value. The ability to listen, translate concepts across different groups, and collaborate is essential.

​ Strategic planning

​ In an environment where you rarely can tell people what to do, staying aligned around a strategic vision is key to a successful community program. This strategic vision informs planning, governance, and tactical programming in ways all community professionals need to understand.

Learn more and browse 30+ community management job descriptions in our Community Careers and Compensation report – now available for free download.

Community Role Profile: Community Strategist

By

Community Strategist

OVERVIEW OF ROLE

​ The community strategist role is an expert role dedicated to what the title implies – community strategy. Typically, strategists are individuals with community management experience who have particularly strong strategic skills; analysis, community architecture, business models, and the ability to understand the interdependencies between different parts of a community ecosystem.

​ RESPONSIBILITIES
​ Community strategists are most likely to work in professional service firms or as part of a centralized community program office that provides internal community consulting to business units and other groups within large organizations. They are more likely to be individual contributors, and they act as subject matter experts within their ecosystem supporting and auditing a portfolio of communities.

​ MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE COMMUNITY ​

Community Strategist

Strategists have a special knack for understanding community performance and the levers that impact it. Successful strategists work with community managers to ensure their strategies and approaches will yield successful shared value and keep the communities productive.

Community Strategist

To learn more about the Community Strategist Role, and view Community Strategist Job Descriptions download our Community Careers and Compensation report – now available for free download.

Community Role Profile: Director of Community

By

Director of Community

OVERVIEW OF ROLE
​ Directors of community lead community programs and typically lead teams that include community specialists, managers, and strategists. The often have operational backgrounds and are paired with community experts with their focus on securing internal support, integrating across the organization, managing a team, and communicating strategic progress.

​ RESPONSIBILITIES

Directors of community focus on the health of a community program. They are responsible for operations – planning and delivering on the community roadmap. Their priorities tend to be governance, internal advocacy, training, and measurement.

​ A large part of the director of community role is as an internal champion – ensuring that executives and other stakeholders understand the value of the community, are getting the information they need, and that the community is aligned with their priorities. While directors still participate occasionally in tactical responsibilities and a community background is valuable, their main focus is on operational strategy.

​ MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE COMMUNITY
​Successful directors of community exhibit strong leadership, relationship building, and communication skills.

Director of Community

To learn more about the Director of Community Role, and view Director of Community Job Descriptions download our Community Careers and Compensation report – now available for free download.

Community Leadership is the Future of all Leadership

By

Maskot / Getty Images

Communities provide a governance structure that helps organizations adopt a more distributed model of leadership and accountability. This empowers individuals to collaborate, create, and engage their peers in adaptive ways while staying aligned with a broader mission.

As community structures replace traditional models of work, leadership needs to adapt as well to look more like community leadership.

Over the last ten years of research and practice, it has become clear that the unique strategies employed by community professionals to build trust, engage members, foster relationships, and measure success are not just valuable in the community space. They are the skills needed to for networked organizations and business models to thrive.

The skills, techniques, and operational models being used in communities today are what many organizations will look like in the future. The skills to manage and lead these organizations require a very different mindset that is being incubated in today’s communities, one that prioritizes opportunity over risk, innovation over predictability, and trust over control.

Many executives conflate online social networks with online communities and because of this miss the opportunity, continuing to view engagement as potentially polarizing and risky. Yet well-managed communities offer safe learning environments that contribute positively to an organization’s brand and culture, with no associated risk. This then is the opportunity for all organizations who hope to thrive in the digital era – and current community leaders are showing us the way.

Learn more in our Community Careers and Compensation report – now available for free download.

Community Career Pathways

By

The community field is expanding in exciting ways, with an increasing diversity of roles and career routes available. Where once there was ambiguity and limitations on professional growth, there are now too many possibilities to map out. The map below is just a sample of the avenues that could be taken by a community professional.

If you aspire to senior leadership, community is an excellent way to build your leadership capabilities. If you are interested in moving from moderation to more of a strategic position, there are steps you can take to stand out from the crowd. Whether you are just starting your community career or have a few years of community experience under your belt, there are a variety of options and taking the time to understand them will help you decide the best path so you can be strategic in your career planning.

Recommendations for Community Professionals

1. Assess your skills and experience – Identify strengths, weakness, and gaps using the Community Skills Framework


2. Proactively fill gaps – Select one skill to improve and seek project work and support for training. Ensure skills, accomplishments, or certificates are added to your resume


3. Treat the hiring process as a collaboration – You likely know more about communities than a hiring manager. Use interviews as an opportunity to reframe needs and expectations.

Learn more in our Community Careers and Compensation report – now available for free download.

Elizabeth Kohler on Engaging Online Learners

By

Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professionals. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI, and more. 

Episode #72 features Elizabeth Kohler, Social Learning & Collaboration Architect at Cleveland Clinic.

In this episode of the podcast, Elizabeth shares how to get learners comfortable with using an online learning platform, strategies for pulling engagement in a social learning community into the classroom, and the benefits of using a cloud-based platform for learning and social sharing.

Elizabeth shares best practices including defining your learning cultures, starting with a definition of success, and getting executive buy-in and support.

This episode of Conversations with Community Managers is sponsored by Jive Software.

Listen Now:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

About Elizabeth:

Elizabeth has an extensive background in the design and development of online collaboration communities, adult learning programs (eLearning, classroom and blended courses), and video/graphic production. A majority of her career experience has been in the healthcare industry, and she is skilled in picking up new information quickly, whatever the topic. She finds motivation in challenges, change, and diversity. She is continually recognized for her creativity, problem-solving, and positive attitude. She is an outgoing, optimistic person with a passion for lifelong learning, adventure, and personal development.

Listen to more episodes of Conversations with Community Managers.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Why You Need an Enterprise Community Manager…. STAT

By

In the last month, thanks to the worldwide Caronavirus pandemic, organizations across the globe have been thrust suddenly into organizational-wide digital transformation. They are discovering what many experts have been saying for years – that the tools are the easy part.

Most organizations today have the technology that enables new ways of working – but they haven’t used it to work in new ways.

Our 2019 State of Community Management research shows that internal communities are powerful agents of culture change, quality improvement, and innovation. For employees, communities help them network with peers, find new ideas, and get faster answers – all improving productivity. Together this has compounding value for organizations as each individual changes their own behavior to work more effectively.

More fundamental than that, however, is that communities can empower employees in a whole host of ways. In empowering people, leadership becomes distributed – moving opportunity sensing and decisions out to the edges making organizations more adaptive, resilient, and innovative. That is something that will give those organizations that have strong community programs an advantage now, as the entire organization needs to change and adapt to quickly changing circumstances.

Those organizations that have actively pursued changing the way they engage, manage and lead their workforce have invested in community management. These teams are responsible for:

  • Creating an environment that encourages and rewards new work behaviors, through ecosystem and infrastructure design, training, coaching, and creating community programming structures for different work processes.
  • Helping managers across organizations become community managers as communications become more networked and transparent.
  • Measuring and tracking progress so that executives understand the value of working in new ways – and how that value is generated.
  • Working with both IT and business groups to integrate, adapt, and use the available tools in the most effective ways.
  • Showing and modeling how to work differently.
  • Creating a center of excellence that includes a community of community owners who are showing people across the organization how to learn, engage, and lead in a new way – with less control and more collaboration.
Community Manager Skills

Enterprise community management – that which is focused on engaging employees vs customers – is a complex role and to do well, requires a team of professionals. These community teams share an orientation for networked communications and tend to specialize in one or more of the five skill families that we’ve defined in the Community Skills Framework: Engagement, Content, Technical, Business (program management), or Strategy.

I have long said that the future of all management is community management and enterprise community teams are the ones working to scale and extend this competency across their organization. Managing communities requires a very different orientation than traditional management – it is a lot more about inspiring, facilitating, coaching, and leading than it is about project and task management. Instead of putting a box around work tasks and roles, it’s about building a trellis off of which people can grow in directions that energize them while doing so within the boundaries of work that needs to be done. It is about helping employees self-manage and self-direct in ways that create more value for everyone.

The Community Roundtable has many great resources for those of you who are looking to add these capabilities, including:

community careers and compensation report

Lastly, I recommend following these three internal community leaders, who have been working in this space for over a decade and generously share their expertise and perspective on social media channels. On Twitter at CheeChin Liew, Keeley Sorokti, and Jeff Ross.

Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities

By

A lot has changed in the community landscape in the last few years. We’ve seen movement on the vendor side, increased executive support for community programs, and the continued maturation of community roles.

​To further explore some of these changes in community roles and responsibilities, we partnered with Higher Logic to provide in-depth looks at the roles defined in the Community Careers and Compensation report and profile six real-life community professionals in a number of different roles.

The resulting eBook, Community Management: Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities, provides a practical guide for community professionals, hiring managers, and HR teams looking to better understand community roles and responsibilities today.

What skills does a community manager need
Katie Baumer Community Manager
Community Management resources

Through Community Management: Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities you will:

  • Understand distinctions in community management roles. The Community Careers and Compensation research collected data for three common community roles – and the years of experience, salary, and skills required for each.
  • Meet real-life community professionals. Six community professionals share how they found their current community role, and share advice for those interested in pursuing a career in community management.
  • Prepare job descriptions. Use the research data to determine the qualifications necessary for different community roles and the responsibilities and main priorities of each.
  • Explore resources that advance community management skills. Whether you’re looking to build your own skills or are a manager looking to increase your team’s skills, the research highlights the top resources professionals use to network and build their capabilities.

Learn more and download the free eBook now.