career resources Archives

Community Management Skills That Matter: Technical

April 23, 2018 By Jim Storer

Technical Community Management Skills: Designing and building effective communities

Technical skills are unique in that they are most easily outsourced and often score lower than their true importance because not everyone on a team needs each specific skill. But as noted in our Community Careers and Compensation Report Key Findings,
developing a technical specialty is a great way to increase your value within a community team — and add to your paycheck. Not everyone needs technical skills in data analysis, API development or UX and design, but team members that have them provide great value. Community teams and those who lead them do need to understand where their technical strengths lie and what individual skills can do to strengthen the community if they are to reap the maximum benefits from them.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Data. Data. Data. ROI and engagement statistics are critical, and your community’s existence is heavily based on demonstrating behavior change and measuring community value, so it’s not surprising that the ability to collect and analyze data is seen as both a valued skill and a training need at all levels. Because community teams often need just a limited number of “experts” in other technical skills, community professionals may want to pursue the opportunities that most excite them, while keeping in mind community needs and desires.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Technical skills are unusual in that strategists and directors value the skills themselves less than their ability to manage the people who have strong technical skills on their team. At all levels, being tech savvy will help you move up the ladder — and investing in specific knowledge can help you develop into a community technologist role, a horizontal career path that has great value, particularly as a consultant. Software and application programming, for example, was the lowest scoring skill of all we surveyed — but being able to code software and APIs can be a hugely valuable to certain organizations or the vendors who serve them.

Want to level up more of your community management skills? Click a skill set to learn more:

Community Skills in Internal vs. External Communities

April 18, 2018 By Jim Storer

In The State of Community Management, our comparison of internal and external communities described them as “similar, but different.” That holds true for internal and external community professionals as well. Our research finds that, when you focus on active members, the engagement profile of internal and external communities isn’t that different — they have similar percentages of lurkers/listeners, contributors, creators, and collaborators. And when you look at the skills internal and external community professionals value, they rank the skill families in the same order: strategic, engagement, content, business and technical.

But look below the surface, and things start to change.

While promoting good behaviors, facilitating connections and selling the benefits of community are seen as highly-valued in internal communities, data and member support skills play a much more powerful role in external communities. And looking at the most-valued skills role by role, more marked differences emerge. For example, skills like executive coaching, consulting, and training development and delivery score much higher for internal community managers and strategists than external ones.

Conversely, skills such as response and escalation, and moderation played higher in external community managers’ skill sets. In the end, though, these different approaches are judged very similarly.

Top 10 highest-valued skills by Community Type:

Internal Community

Community Strategy Development
Community Advocacy And Promotion
Promoting Productive Behaviors
Facilitating Connections
Selling, Influencing And Evangelizing
Measurement, Benchmarking And Reporting
Communication Planning
Listening And Analyzing
Member Advocacy
Consulting

External Communities

Community Strategy Development
Listening And Analyzing
Community Advocacy And Promotion
Measurement, Benchmarking, And Reporting
Data Collection And Analysis
Evaluating Engagement Techniques
Empathy And Member Support
Communication And Planning
Writing
Member Advocacy

The general themes of performance evaluation may be the same in each use case — but achieving success on these measures requires different strategies, skills and approaches from internal and external community professionals, and the specific data the define “success” varies.

Explore the Community Skills Framework:

Community Management Skills That Matter: Content

April 13, 2018 By Jim Storer

Content: Ensuring the community is generating value

Community Managers place the highest relative value on content skills, although all three key roles give writing and communication high marks. Community managers’ content skills are focused on the development and production of community content and programs. At higher levels, those skills are less utilized, while being able to develop narratives and take a higher-level approach to how content fits
the overall story of the community becomes more relevant.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Top training needs underscore the subtle but important difference between how managers, strategists, and directors of community view their work through the lens of content. Managers find communication planning, such as the management of content calendars, their most critical skill set for development. Strategists and directors say they most need training in developing the community narrative, which gives members and those in the organization an understanding of the community’s role and value through data and storytelling. More tactical skills like multimedia storytelling, graphic design, and SEO optimization had appeal across roles. They may be incredibly valuable for some team members but are not needed by everyone in a community team.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Our research shows that if you can’t communicate, your future in community (and your present) is in serious jeopardy. But moving up from a manager role can take one of two routes. Developing a specialty in a specific skill, such as multimedia or SEO can make you a valuable (and hard to replace) team member and can be a selling point for someone seeking or moving into a strategist or community content expert role. Growing into a director role can mean not just understanding how to tell stories, but how to weave those stories together into a compelling narrative that demonstrates the value of and need to invest in a community program.

Want to learn more about critical skills for community managers?

Check out our Community Skills Framework and download our Community Careers and Compensation report.

Community Management Skills That Matter: Engagement

April 3, 2018 By Jim Storer

Engagement: The day-to-day lifeblood of communities

Engagement skills are likely what comes to mind when one pictures the life of “typical” community manager, and these daily skills are indeed what helps communities form and grow. Engagement skills are a core community management skills family for all community roles — without engagement fundamentals, it is impossible to understand or influence communities.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Behavior change and gamification are buzzwords in community, and they resonate as the top training need across all community roles. Boiled down, these skills allow community professionals to leverage key motivators to engage, influence and change behavior in their community. A related topic — promoting productive behaviors — was second choice.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Want to become a community strategist or a Director of Community? Your skills managing the day-to-day moderation, content, programming, and connections that create engaged communities won’t go to waste. As you move up, though, you may spend less time inside the community, and more time building relationships between the community and the organization as a whole — engaging stakeholders who can ensure the community succeeds along with community members.

Want to level up more of your community management skills? Click a skill set to learn more:

Community Management Skills That Matter: Strategy

March 28, 2018 By Jim Storer

Strategy: Proving the value of community

Strategic skills are the most valued skillset across all community roles, and community strategy development is the most valued of the 50 skills in the Community Skills Framework. For community professionals, this demonstrates the constant need to assess input and activity through a strategic lens — without doing so, community professionals can quickly get consumed by reacting to tactical issues that keep them making significant progress.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Across all roles, improving how communities measure, benchmark and report their success on key goals is seen as a number one training need. That’s more than just mechanics — a key piece of training must address identifying the right metrics to really get at behavior changes.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Not surprisingly, community strategists place a high priority on strategy. If you want to head in that direction, an understanding of strategy, roadmap development and consulting approaches are required. Want to make your mark as a Director of Community? Learning how to effectively coach executives will not just improve your job success — it correlates highly with community engagement.

Want to learn more about critical skills for community managers?

Check out our Community Skills Framework and download our Community Careers and Compensation report.

Building A Skill-Based Community Manager Job Ad

March 22, 2018 By Jim Storer

A quick search on LinkedIn finds more than 1,000 jobs with “Community Manager” in the title at any given moment. Subtract the ones about property management, and add in “Online Community”, “Community Specialist” and a dozen other terms and you are left with several hundred job descriptions — not two of which have the exact same requirements or expectations. As we have noted on many occasions, many current community management job descriptions are not well balanced and tend to be misaligned in one or more of the following ways:

Hiring organizations want more experience than they can get for the compensation they are offering.
They expect more specific expertise than is reasonable for the general years of experience required.
They ask for more advanced skills than are required for the role’s responsibilities.
They have too many responsibilities listed for one individual to reasonably be able to handle.
The traits they are seeking are misaligned with the work environment (i.e. agile in a big bureaucracy).

Enter The Community Skills Framework

Using the Community Skills Framework to craft job descriptions based on the skills you value, and aligning those skills with the appropriate roles and compensation can do a great deal for talent acquisitionand retention. A simple exercise can help. On the Framework, check off the skills you value and need for your team. Those skills can form the basis of a job ad.

Then ask yourself some questions:

What level of individual (i.e. — a moderator, manager, strategist, etc.) are these skills most applicable for? Set the right title.
Is there a reasonable expectation that I can attract the skills I want, with the experience I need, at the compensation I can offer?
Am I seeking a unicorn? (A person with such unique qualifications — such as a business model expert who can code APIs — that I’ll never find them, and would be better served with a narrower focus or two hires.)

The best job ads take into account not only the skills you value, but the experience you need and the traits you desire in your next hire. By making sure your expectations are realistic and your compensation competitive, you can find talented community professionals — and keep them.

Community Career Profiles: The Director of Community Role

March 21, 2018 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Directors of community are responsible for community programs – strategy, governance, team management and budgets. Not every community has a director – instead, a functional executive often takes on these responsibilities. The director of community role is more common in mature communities, in large organizations and in organizations where the community program is central to the business model.

Directors of Community in the Organization

Directors of Community command respect in organizations, both in terms of the number of people they oversee in the organization and the place they occupy in it. 4 out of 5 of those who identify themselves as Directors of Community have direct reports, and most of those have 3 or more of them. When we think about communities being truly integrated into the business, Directors of Community sit in a place to make that happen — our research shows that 83% report to vice-presidents or higher in the organization, including 43% who report to the C-suite.

Access to top managers and connection to the business side of things comes at a small cost for Directors of Community, who are expected to be in the office, rather than work remotely. Just 1-in-5 Directors of Community in our sample works remotely most of the time, and a majority are generally found in the office on a daily basis.

Skills and Training Needs

Directors of Community don’t forget their roots — highly valuing engagement and strategic skills just as strategists and community managers do, but it’s not surprising their biggest training needs revolve around understanding, gathering data and telling the story of the community in a business context. Skills that feed into understanding the value of the community to the organization and to members are also seen as critical.

Want to be a Director of Community?

Your best opportunities may be within your current organization. About half of Directors of Community in our research say they were promoted into their community management role, and nearly two-thirds say they either defined their own position or were approached directly by the hiring manager. Just 13% of Directors of Community say an external job posting led them to their current role.

Are you a Director of Community at your organization? We’d love to hear how your responsibilities and priorities stack up against our survey participants. What is your top community focus for the coming year?

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Want to learn more about the director of community role?

Download our Community Careers and Compensation report for free.

What is a community manager?

March 14, 2018 By Jim Storer

Community Manager is by far the most often cited and discussed role in the community space for a couple of reasons. First, in the past online communities were used primarily for tactical reasons, which often did not warrant more senior roles. Secondly, communities were often run by ‘lone wolf’ community professionals who did not directly manage a team, but were responsible for everything from strategy to moderation. Community manager seems to have been the best catchall title to give to someone without direct reports, but who had a breadth of responsibility.

The community space has come a long way, but the Community Manager role has a wide variation in responsibilities, compensation and reporting levels. Community managers are often expected to do a bit of everything, and while the role is evolving it still requires generalists who handle a diverse set of responsibilities.

Community Managers in the Organization

Our research has shown that community managers work predominantly for corporations vs. agencies or as independents — suggesting that organizations are seeing the value in investing in community management for the long haul. Community managers often work with communities scattered around the globe, giving them the opportunity to work remotely — a benefit that accrues to both internal and external community managers.

Community managers typically report to someone at the director level, with only about a third reporting to a vice president or higher. Despite the manager title, most community managers don’t manage anyone. Our research shows that only about a third have direct reports, either employees or volunteers.

Skills and Training Needs

Community managers’ top five most valued skills get to the heart of the tactical day-to-day monitoring and management of communities. Their most desired areas for training suggest an interest in digging deeper to drive engagement and understand what specific elements lead to community success. These training needs also suggest an opportunity for community professionals to develop into community specialists such as Community Architects, Community Analysts and Community Strategists.

Performance Evaluation

While community metrics are part of the evaluation of a community manager’s performance, the voice of the community is rarely part of the process. Just 5% of community managers say a review from the community is part of their performance evaluation — versus 91% who say they receive a manager assessment and 72% who submit a self-assessment.

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Interested in more about the community manager role?

Download the Community Careers and Compensation report for free.

Community Hiring Is Not Keeping Up

October 24, 2017 By Rachel Happe

Community management skills are increasingly required for all management roles. That has not resulted in a corresponding increase in community hiring.

Communities Are Now Strategic

Executives finally see communities as intriguing options for solving their organization’s hairiest issues – from streamlining the customer and employee experience to increasing market relevancy, spurring innovation, and transforming culture for a digital era.

Community approaches are now applied to more use cases across organizations, resulting in a strategic urgency to make community management a core skill of all organizational leaders and managers.

However, executives are putting their community efforts at risk because they are resistant about hiring senior community program owners and strategists.

Still Too Many Lone Community Managers, Often Reporting to Executives

In 2017, 59% of community programs report to a VP or higher and 47% of communities are reporting up to the C-suite. However, only 38% of community management professionals are Director-level or higher.

While it is exciting that communities are now seen as a mechanism to transform organizations for the digital age, it’s causing a lot of stress and anxiety for community professionals themselves. 27% of community programs still don’t even have one full-time community manager and another 43% have only one full-time community manager. This is not the kind of staffing profile that is going to transform an organization’s culture and leadership approach.

This gap between strategic ambition and community hiring is causing some predictable outcomes. Many community managers are under a lot of pressure both to satisfy the strategic interest of their executives and execute the tactical responsibilities required for successful communities. Those individuals are scrambling to grow their strategic skills without the air cover of more experienced program managers and it’s a lot to take on while still executing on tactical engagement goals.

Organizations are not moving more quickly on senior community hires because they currently don’t have the capability in-house, are not confident in their ability to hire the right person, and know that there is a strategic risk in making the wrong choice. Another reason is that because it’s now seen as a skill set needed for all leaders, it’s unclear whether hiring a handful of individuals is even the right approach.

Measuring Community Value Helps Make the Case for Hiring

The good news is that because more community programs are demonstrating that they can prove value, community budgets are growing.

In the short term, much of that budget is going to contractors and consultants that can help shape community programs and train internal resources in community management skills.

In the long term, I believe that will open up community hiring for more roles. Those hires will more often be responsible not for individual communities, but as staff for internal centers of excellence that help coach, train, and support staff across the organization. We are seeing this more in client work, where we are helping to build and support centers of excellence in community management.

Six skills to make you a successful Director of Community

April 18, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

You may run an online community – but to own an online community program, you need to add some skills to your toolset.

“Great player. Couldn’t cut it as a coach.”

“She was such a great reporter – but I hate her as an editor.”

“Man, I can’t believe his startup crashed and burned like that. He was so good…”

Which one is the Director of Community?

In every business – there’s the stereotype. You’re great at what you do – so you get promoted. You get a new office. You get a pay bump. And often, you fail miserably. That’s because the skills that make you good at what you do are often not at all the same skills to make you good at managing people who do what you do.

That’s the case in community management, too. The Community Careers and Compensation research highlights that Directors of Community and Community Managers share a role in community – but the specifics take them in very different directions. Community managers focus on what goes on in the community – content, engagement and community strategy. As a director, though, you don’t own the community – you own a community program, and need to prioritize building, promoting and connecting community to the business, and need to manage the community as a cost center.

The manager sits at the edge of the community and looks into it. The director sits on the edge and looks out from it. So if you’re a community manager with an eye toward growing your career, what do you need to think about?

Here are six skills that move you to the front of the line as a Director of Community.

Managing people – Not a shocker here, but directing community should (unless you are building to your first hires) involve managing a team of community professionals. What makes a good team? What skills do you need? What skills do you have on board? How will you support your team’s continued growth? Having a system to know what you have, hire what you need and grow what you can is critical.

Building a business case – Thinking about your community strategy is critical, and as a director-level hire, you need to think about how the community works in the business context. Defining the value of community – and the shared value upon which you can connect members and the organization, is important. From there, you need to understand the community benefit in business terms. What’s the ROI? How can you demonstrate that community gets into making your organization a more effective business?

Converting your executives – Executive engagement is a powerful force in community success, but too often, we set unrealistic expectations for converting executives from skeptics to believers. (How many of your members at any level go from disinterested to community leaders, anyway?) Being able to strategically explain the value of community to your executives and other stakeholders can get them on board. Using a system like The Social Executive framework can help you pique their interest, show them the opportunity and get them to see the value.

Enabling training – You’re not just a teacher and evangelist, you’re head of curriculum for a community training program. Developing training that gets new members into and engaged with the community can be a daunting challenge, and in most communities, training is too big to handle alone. Creating a learning mindset and preparing advocates and trainers to help put your system into action is a critical and valuable business skill.

Empowering advocates – As a Director of Community, you’re likely in an organization with the opportunity to build a robust advocacy program for your most important members. What do you do to build that program, and get your most active and important community members to scale your community management efforts while giving them real value for their contributions?

Capturing how it works – Getting stakeholders engaged in community strategy? That may be the easy part. The challenge after that point is developing your roadmap and benchmarking your programs, so you can compare where your community is now to where you want it to be – and then figure out how to move it forward.

Of course, as a community manager, you have a leg up. Your job has been dealing with people – but you have a new set of “customers” in a Director role. Being able to translate what you do as a manager can help get you hired – and being able to turn that into practice can make you a success.

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TheCR is pleased to offer a guided course in Community Program Essentials to help you take the skills you have built within communities and apply them to making community a stronger part of your organization. The 8-week course starts April 26, and gives you a cohort of peers and weekly office hours in addition to self-paced video lessons and worksheets you can use to put the course ideas into practice. It’s an opportunity for Community Managers looking for their next role, and for Directors of Community to hone their skills. Click here to learn more!