centers of excellence Archives

How to Create a New Community Launch Process

January 23, 2025 By Emma Nicholas

Do you run a community with sub-communities and have numerous requests for new communities? Do you sometimes feel that your community launch strategy is less strategy and more Oprah?

A community program often leads to requests for more and more sub-communities or groups and it is easy to become overwhelmed by the frequent enquiries to set up a new shiny community for…well, it feels like everyone!

It can be easy to let everyone or no one have one, but adding some governance around new community requests and launches will help you in many ways. It will allow you to defend your decisions, and add a degree of professionalism to your program. It will challenge the person requesting the community to ensure they know why they want a community, who will use their community, and how they will manage their community. And finally, it will set the new communities up for success, by giving them a clear purpose, strategy, and plans for the launch, build and sustain stages..

Here are the steps I recommend for developing your launch process:.

Audit what you already have: If you have sub-communities, it is likely that you already have some resources and something resembling a process to follow. Gather these together in one place and put them in a logical order. If all of these are in your head, this is a great opportunity to get them out of your head and down onto paper (I find that actually writing a flow on paper helps my thought process. Then I add the technology.)
Review your resources: Ask yourself whether what you have is still relevant and accurate. Update it if necessary, and create a consistent look and feel. If you have community or organization brand guidelines, use, those to give a professional look and feel to your new process.
Identify gaps: Follow your process (theoretically, or with a test community) from start to finish and identify whether you have any gaps in your process or resources. Think about how you can make things simple to follow and complete and add those to your resource pack.
Create your Launch Plan: This could take many forms, depending on the tools available to you, but use those that are most popular with your associates, as they are most likely to be used! You could create a Trello board, or similar in Microsoft Planner, or you could use project planning tools like Asana or Monday.com. To add weight to your process, I recommend adding gates, or check-ins, at regular intervals to ensure the initiator is following the process, to answer questions and offer help and encouragement, and to keep the launch on track.
Go Live! Once you are happy with your process, resources, and timelines, go live – there really is no time like the present. I would explain to the first couple of “applicants” that you are trialing a new process and would appreciate their feedback and understanding as you launch.
Review: as with any process, it is important to have an ongoing review process. Check the process works for you and the people using it. Review the whole flow as you complete the process the first couple of times. Once it is working smoothly, you may want to review once a year, to ensure everything is still up to date.
Measure: if you read my previous post “Why ‘Knowing Your Numbers’ is so Important in Community Management”, you will know the importance o measuring success in your community. This new process is no different. Create a benchmark for communities launched before you implemented this process, and those that come after! Use this in your discussions about your communities, use it with your community managers, and use it in your performance reviews!

If you are wondering what kinds of resources might be included in this new community launch process, here are some ideas:

☐ New community request form (you can find some templates here)

☐ Community training (you can find some courses here)

☐ Community strategy – shared purpose/shared value; key behaviors,

☐ Editorial calendar template

☐ Technical setup process – what do you need from the community manager to allow you to build their community on your platform

☐ New member welcome process

☐ Introduction post

☐ Identify super users / subject matter experts (SMEs)

☐ Create initial content and templates for future programming (e.g. form to complete to feature in a member spotlight)

Good luck, and let us know how you get on! We’d love to hear what works for you – have I missed anything?

If you would like to learn more about our advisory services (where we can help you set these types of things up!) or join The Network or The Library, please get in touch.

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:

Claudia Teixeira on Centers of Excellence

August 11, 2022 By Jim Storer

Lessons from The NEW Community Manager Handbook is a limited-run podcast series, featuring the 21 community leaders showcased in the Handbook in conversation with Anne Mbugua.

Episode 9 features Claudia Teixeira, Senior Knowledge and Learning Consultant at the World Bank Group.

Claudia and Anne 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 to Claudia Teixeira on Centers of Excellence

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About Claudia Teixeira

Claudia Teixeira activates the development of strategic Communities of Practice (CoPs) and Collaboration Networks connecting key stakeholders to learn together and coordinate action to generate systems change. She co-developed the Communities Reinvented program at the World Bank (WB), an enterprise community program to support a vast ecosystem of more than 350 CoPs at the WB.

Over the years this team developed the WB signature framework for building CoPs and provided training, coaching, and advising services that helped the development of impactful communities in the WB as well as in other international organizations such as the IMF, diverse UN agencies, and global NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children. Communities Reinvented developed a network of more than 1,500 CoP practitioners at the WB, certified more than 300 Community Managers, and provided tailored support to more than 150 CoP teams.

This work generated multiple recognitions including Outstanding Center of Excellence for Communities of Practice, Outstanding Community Playbook, and Best CoP Recognition & Reward program. The CoP building methodology developed by Communities Reinvented is publicly available through the WBG Building Community a Primer and the WBG Community of Practice Toolkit. Claudia is currently guiding the development of the Social Entrepreneurship Community of Practice in Turkey, a national network connecting key stakeholders from the government, multilateral organizations, academia, and civil society to strengthen the social enterprise sector in the country.

About The World Bank Group

The World Bank Group works in every major area of development. They provide a wide array of financial products and technical assistance, and they help countries share and apply innovative knowledge and solutions to the challenges they face. Since 1947, the World Bank has funded over 12,000 development projects, via traditional loans, interest-free credits, and grants.

They offer support to developing countries through policy advice, research and analysis, and technical assistance. Their analytical work often underpins World Bank financing and helps inform developing countries’ own investments.

About The NEW Community Manager Handbook

The NEW Community Manager Handbook features 21 profiles of community leaders sharing advice and ideas on everything from accessibility, hiring, strategy, gamification, defining the digital workplace, technology, and more. Each profile is paired with research from the State of Community Management reports and includes tactical advice for implementing what you’ve learned.

Learn from community management experts at Easterseals, Glencore, Microsoft, UKG, the World Bank Group, Analog Devices, Inc., AAMC, Zapier, Doctors Without Borders, and more.

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.

Communities are Change Agents

May 29, 2018 By Jim Storer

Resiliency and the ability to change quickly are becoming key competencies for all organizations as new technologies create rapidly changing market conditions. Organizations need to acquire and apply new knowledge faster, and the more traditional learning and professional support mechanisms cannot keep up.

Online communities and engagement ecosystems support rapid learning by capturing tacit knowledge as it develops, transitioning that knowledge into more explicit practices, and flattening access to it. The ability to adapt efficiently and effectively is at the core of organizational success in the digital era. For any organization to be successful, it needs new practices to gain widespread acceptance and enthusiastic adoption. Mechanisms that prompt and inspire organizations to change successfully are change agents. While the potential for online communities to support learning and change has been discussed for many years, it has only been recently that we can start to see the multifaceted impact that communities have across organizations and their markets, as well as on individual behavior. Our 2018 analysis concludes that communities have evolved into powerful agents of change.

COMMUNITY APPROACHES PROLIFERATE

Communities are impacting organizations broadly and deeply, changing functional approaches, stakeholder categories, and workflows. Community programs, which once were only applied to narrow functional goals with single-purpose use cases, are now often large, complex, and multifunctional entities that influence organizations in a wide variety of ways.

Nearly 70% of community teams collaborate with other departments to integrate various workflows into communities. This “hidden” work is in addition to executing the direct day-to-day community engagement and management work community professionals do. Almost 47% of community teams provide consulting assistance to other departments, effectively acting as centers of excellence that build community management skills and capacity across organizations. Only 8% of community programs are explicitly tasked with the center of excellence role and resourced for it.

Community programs contribute across many functions (like marketing, customer support, knowledge management, and learning and development) simultaneously, regardless of where the community program resides in the organization. Community programs that fall within the customer service department, for example, provide benefits not only for marketing (91% of the time) and knowledge management (59% of the time), but also for the learning and development function (35% of the time). This dynamic is true for both internal and external communities and illustrates why communities are such powerful change agents.

Community management responsibilities are now also dispersed throughout the organization, suggesting that community management is fast becoming a key discipline of all management. Community engagement is part of individual performance metrics in departments outside of the community team 43% of the time, and explicit community management responsibilities are allocated to individuals in other departments 53% of the time. The ability for communities to reach deep into and across organizations is expected to grow rapidly, as 50% of community teams expect either additional workflows to be implemented or a greater adoption of current workflows in the next year.

These trends suggest that community teams are shifting from a predominant focus on direct community engagement and management to one of supporting and enabling the discipline across the organization, where the community team acts as internal consultants and subject matter experts. While this is an exciting shift, it requires more resources and additional skill sets to be successful.