Center of Excellence Archives

Interested in Growing Your Community? Become an Enabler!

January 30, 2023 By Jim Storer

Community managers are often connectors by default – it takes a certain type of person to excel at the role. People with high EQ tend to thrive.

Our research has shown that community leaders with a network of communities are more likely to provide enabling resources to their organization than those with a single community. Comparing the data from respondents who reported “one community” vs. “a network of communities” at their organization, we found a dramatic increase in CoEs once a network exists (i.e., once they’re past the initial use case).

Also interesting, 17% of respondents (8% in a network of communities) reported only ad hoc/informal governance. (Question: Who’s in charge of the communities there? If this is you, please contact us. We want to feature you in a case study.)

State of Community Management 2022 - What Resources to community teams provide? — ©2022 The Community Roundtable – *The State of Community Management 2022*

It’s interesting to note that 30% of community managers who represent a single community provide none of the resources mentioned in the survey, which likely results in a less strategic initiative. For those who want to grow beyond a single community, get out there and coach/evangelize!

Some common use cases to extend the reach and the benefit in your organization include:

General employee communities for knowledge sharing and collaboration
Customer support communities for providing fast, inexpensive, always-on access to answers to product and service questions.
Membership communities for groups like students, patients, alumni, or association audiences

Tips on Getting Started

Start a monthly “community jam” for those who want to learn more about community and how it might help them with a specific business use case.
Coach executives on how they can best support your work — try to get them to an “aha moment” on how community approaches could help another area of the business.
Document what has or hasn’t worked in your community, and begin compiling templates, and (ultimately) a community playbook for your organization.

It may feel overwhelming when you consider it, but by taking an iterative approach you’ll get where you want to be faster.

Help Community Programs Scale

December 12, 2022 By Jim Storer

The Policies & Governance competency of the Community Maturity Model™ details operational guidelines for successful online community programs. Policies refer to how a community interacts and can be divided into two areas: Terms of service – How a community is managed in legal terms and Guidelines – Articulate what behaviors are expected and why, plainly. Governance is how the community team is structured, operates within an organization, and supports community-related activities across the organization.

Most organizations could support multiple communities with myriad use cases. The most common include:

General employee communities for knowledge sharing and collaboration
Customer support communities for providing fast, inexpensive, always-on access to answers to product and service questions.
Membership communities for groups like students, patients, alumni, or association audiences

In 2021, we saw the emergence of the “Center of Excellence’’ (CoE) approach, where community work is decentralized, but supported with a host of resources. While responses from this year’s data suggest CoEs are falling out of favor, digging deeper shows a different perspective.

Comparing the data from respondents who reported “one community” vs. “a network of communities” at their organization, we found a dramatic increase in CoEs once a network exists (i.e., once they’re past the initial use case). Also interesting, 17% of respondents (8% in networked communities) reported only ad hoc/informal governance. Question: Who’s in charge of the communities there? If this is you, please contact us. We want to feature you in a case study.

Interested in Growing Your Community? Become an Enabler!

On a related note, those with a network of communities are more likely to help communities programs scale by providing enabling resources to their organization than those with a single community. When comparing total data on community resources from 2021 to 2022 there isn’t much to report. Comparing responses from individual communities vs. a network of communities tells a different story (see pg. 45 of the 2022 SOCM or the image above).

It’s interesting to note: 30% of community managers representing a single community provide none of the resources mentioned in the survey, which likely results in a less strategic initiative. For those who want to grow beyond a single community, get out there and coach/evangelize.

Want to help community programs scale? Start a center of excellence?

Check out this short interview with Claudia Teixeira, Senior Knowledge and Learning Consultant at the World Bank Group.

Claudia and Anne Mbugua discuss what a center of excellence entails, the path to centers of excellence at the World Bank Group, and advice for implementing a center of excellence at your organization. Listen now.

Get more community ideas and advice in the 13th annual 2022 State of Community Management report:

Community Conversations – Episode #78: Stephanie Weiner

January 31, 2022 By Jim Storer

Community Conversations is a long-running podcast highlighting community success stories from a wide variety of online community management professionals.

Episode #78 of Community Conversations features Stephanie Weiner Director, Digital Strategy & Engagement at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

We chat about converting digital skeptics, using a playbook to scale community initiatives, and replacing email with community programs to create evergreen knowledge bases online.

Listen now:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Community Centers of Excellence Enable Distributed Leadership

July 26, 2021 By Jim Storer

What is a Center of Excellence?

Centers of Excellence are groups that are charged with enabling their organizations with a specific practice or expertise and often have other names, whether that is an Enablement Group, Adoption Team, or Internal Consulting. Historically, this has not been the role of community program teams, who were generally tasked with managing one community.

Community Centers of Excellence Enable Distributed Leadership

However, as communities have become more integrated into organizations and as they address more objectives across the employee and customer experience, more people are involved in their management and leadership. The result is growing demand for community management expertise that falls on the community team to deliver. We see this evolution accelerate as communities mature. Only 11% of early communities are explicitly resourced to be centers of excellence – transitioning to a majority of community teams for the most mature community programs. This dynamic is also seen in the growth of groups outside of the community team producing programs in the community. At Stage 4, a majority of communities have cross-functional peers, community leaders, and community members leading programs – all of whom need guidance or training on how to do so effectively.

What kind of enablement services do community teams deliver?

Early on, community teams universally focus on technical support, training, and to a slightly lesser degree, coaching and templates. As community programs mature, they tackle metrics and reporting, consulting, and for some, enterprise governance. Community budgets reflect this transition. In Stage 1, community management resources are only 19% of the total community budget. By Stage 4, 43% of community program budgets go toward talent acquisition and training.

These services correlate with increased reporting responsibilities and increased expectations for engagement for cross-functional peers. More people and groups are involved in both managing aspects of communities, interested in their performance, and measured on their engagement. No longer are community programs isolated and discrete. Instead, they are expanding to align organizational groups in order to address myriad employee and customer experience objectives.

Learn more about centers of excellence and online community programs in the State of Community Management 2021. Download your free copy.

The Hidden Work of Community Teams

June 25, 2018 By Rachel Happe

Community management work is evolving along with roles – and evolving rapidly. As all communications become networked, community engagement and management is a discipline that everyone needs to cultivate to be successful.

I’ve long said that community management is the future of all management – and community leadership is the future of all leadership.

That’s happening and people are turning to community professionals for support; help with strategy, coaching, training, and more. All of those requests are straining the already stretched resources of community teams and making them de facto Centers of Excellence without formal acknowledgment of that role. Even more critically they do not have the resources or skill sets they need to provide that support effectively while still shouldering much of the responsibility for day-to-day engagement. 47% of community teams are consulting on project work, 43% are responding to training requests, and 32% are accommodating coaching needs while only 8% of community teams report that they are Centers of Excellence.

Add to that, 52% of community programs include engagement as a professional development goal for employees outside of the community team and 43% of programs include community management responsibilities for employees outside of the community team. That requires a lot of coordination and reporting, never mind training and coaching. And yet, the average community team still only includes 4.4 full-time staff members.

This shift from primarily focusing on building engagement and community value to helping others build and facilitate communities is a tough transition. The skills required to do one are not necessarily the skills required to do the other. As teams do more indirect support they need better business, strategy, and technical skills – all of which are secondary skill sets when the primary responsibility is direct engagement and value creation.

Do you provide indirect support for others as they develop their community management skills? If so, is it acknowledged and resourced by your stakeholders? If not, do you report its frequency and time requirements to stakeholders so they can more accurately see the breadth of work you are doing?

Want more insights? Download The State of Community Management 2018 report now!