The Community Roundtable

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

Ashleigh Brookshaw and Meghan Bates on Change Management

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Conversations with Community Managers - Ashleigh Brookshaw and Meghan Bates

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 #68 features Ashleigh Brookshaw, ASSP and Meghan Bates, Personify.

In this episode of the podcast, Ashleigh and Megan share their perspective on the intersection of change management and community management, how to thrive as a mighty team of one, and how community champion programs can increase engagement and member satisfaction.

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Find 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.

Nurturing Super Users to Cultivate Success

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Many community managers don’t want to overburden their most active members with extra duties that could make them feel used or make them less active in the community. They don’t have the budget or authorization to provide needed training and resources for advocates (or superusers, power users, top contributors, champions, etc.) to be effective in leadership roles. Or they feel like they don’t have the bandwidth themselves to give structure to an advocacy program on top of the rest of their own duties.

But engaging your advocates to take on more leadership responsibilities can be a mutually beneficial relationship for you and your community members.

Community Management Case Study- Nurturing Super Users

Empowering your advocates by giving them real opportunities not only helps you, but it also helps them grow and ultimately provides greater benefits to your organization. It’s an untapped investment that can reap real rewards for both your organization and your key members.

The Mimecaster Central “Legends” Program rewards the most active community champions who continue to offer Legendary assistance to their peers in their support community.

Learn how the Mimecast community team nurtures these super users to cultivate customer success and increase member satisfaction in this case study. Download the Mimecast case study.

#ThankItForward: Recognizing Champions

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

#thankitforwardLast December our team took the month to reflect on who had impacted our lives and work that year and made aconscious effort share our gratitude with those community members, teammates, partners, and mentors. It was a great exercise and we were pleased to see some members even took it back to their own communities!

I posted my #thankitforward in TheCR Network this week, and wanted to share it here with you as well. This is extremely difficult because I have the unique vantage point of seeing how valuable all our members are to the network, but this year I am going to shout out our Champions because they are awesome.

These folks have stuck with me as we rolled our our pilot leadership program. I’ve so enjoyed working with them on programming for the network and the value they’ve added to network and programming is invaluable. I’m so grateful! Thank you, Maddie, Jennifer and Renee!

Who in your network or community made a difference for you this year? 

  • Was there a member who responded with a helpful answer to a question you posted in the forums?
  • Did someone offer to connect offline on a topic you were working on?
  • Someone who makes your day a little brighter when you come into Happy Hour?
  • An expert or facilitator who impressed and inspired you?
  • Did you meet a fellow member at an event and find that connection valuable?
  • Was there a colleague or member who acted as a mentor in some capacity?

Give them a shout out here! Shout out one person or three. Doesn’t matter. Just keep thanking it forward!

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Looking for a way to connect with community peers around the world? Have some year-end budget to spend before December 31st? Join TheCR Network and become part of an expert network of community professionals.