CM Handbook Archives

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.

Best Practices for Community Moderation, or Why Patience is a Virtue

January 11, 2017 By Jim Storer

Policies, guidelines, and governance provide the framework and boundaries for your community, but moderation is where those policies are turned into day-to-day management. Direct moderation is the day-to-day interaction and management that signals to members what gets attention—both good and bad—from the organization. Successful community management requires not just a day-to-day awareness of the activity in your community but also the seamless application of tools and strategies to maximize engagement and minimize disruption.

Moderating doesn’t mean eliminating conflict. In fact, vibrant and productive communities depend on differences of opinion between members to create discussion, generate new ideas and develop innovative solutions. But that vibrancy is dependent on the community’s ability to maintain a respectful tone, and it’s the moderator’s job to thread that needle – fostering discussion and even dissention while maintaining the proper tone. In The Community Manager Handbook we shared best practices for effective community moderation, so when you see a conflict developing:

• Step up your monitoring – spend time understanding the conflict before you get involved

• Give it space – often conflicts will resolve themselves, or the community will help mediate

• Model behavior – it can sometimes be helpful to rephrase opinions of others in a more emotionally neutral tone that allows people to focus on the content of the comment vs. the tone.

• Get personal – in some cases, a personal outreach, especially a phone call, will both help you understand the conflict and perhaps create a space for resolution

• Don’t take it personally – Remember, your role is to create a safe space for people to share, not to arbitrate decisions. Getting personally invested in conflict is a great way to generate distrust and burn out.

Mike Pascucci, Manager of Social Media and Community at Autodesk shared this powerful tip: “Remove emotion from the decision making process as a moderator. Look at every piece of content for what it is.” He also noted that being proactive also creates positive momentum. “Reactive management is by its nature defensive. Proactive gets you seen as a thought leader in the space—and that gives your internal teams comfort, and creates a circle of trust with both internal employees and external communities.”

If you’re tasked with moderating an online community check out The Community Manager Handbook’s section on moderation best practices. You’ll find three good moderation rules of thumb, a sample engagement ladder and more expert advice from our Community Superheroes.

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Want to connect with community professionals around the world? Join our Facebook group!

Community Best Practices: Architecting the Community that Meets Your Needs

January 9, 2017 By Jim Storer

By now, countless organizations have learned the painful lesson: “If you build it, they will come,” only

works in the movies. But there’s a related lesson that is a core tenet of community management. How you build it—the shape of the community you create—drives whether the community meets your goals.

The shape of your community will depend entirely on what success looks like for the goals you have, the complexity of those goals and where potential members are comfortable engaging. Generally speaking, the less complex the outcome (information sharing, discovery, awareness) the larger and more diverse your community can and should be— suggesting that the shape of the network is loose, only lightly connected and may cross channels and platforms.

If on the other hand, you are solving complex technical issues or negotiating business terms you will need a much smaller community that is highly interconnected and includes a high level of trust and confidence, which means it is very likely private and exclusive with no explicit links connecting it to a wider network.

Understanding what kind of community and ecosystem structure best fits your needs will help you define an effective community management approach. The more trust you need to execute on your goals, the better the relationship between participants will need to be.

Are you charged with starting an online community? Check out the Community Manager Handbook for more community best practices, strategy ideas and case studies.

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Want the chance to contribute to research like the Community Manager Handbook? Members of TheCR Network get exclusive professional development opportunities like this and more! Join us and let us help you grow your career as a community manager.

Community Best Practices: Creating an Action Plan

October 19, 2015 By Jim Storer

From values, to members, to tactics. Formulating an action plan for your community is where the rubber begins to meet the

road. Your action plan highlights how you are going to make this community effective on a day-to-day basis. It needs to take into account the organizational environment in which you exist, and your relative strengths and weaknesses as you begin your community journey. Among the things to consider:

Who are your strongest executive sponsors and where are they in the organization?
What is your level of funding and staffing support?
Where is the overall cultural level of support for community initiatives?
How long do you have to demonstrate community impact – how long is your runway?

These answers inform your tactics.

It’s likely that as you create an action plan, you’ll focus most on three of the eight competencies in the Community Maturity Model:

Strategy: Link your community strategy to organizational business goals

– Identify use cases and behavior change needed

– Define shared purpose and shared value

– Take on an active listening strategy

– Articulate budget and resources needed

– Collect and communicate lessons as you go

• Community management: Assign a caretaker to welcome, support and represent members

– Identify a social listener

– Hire a social media or community manager

– Create workflows and escalation plans

– Document and formalize guidelines

– Build a programming plan

• Tools: Target technologies and processes to make your collaboration and communication more efficient

– Define and deploy minimum viable solution and “must haves”

– Vet requirements with stakeholders

– Prepare your basic listening toolset

These processes will inform the size and shape of the community you start with, and how the early stages of the community will operate. It will change over time–that’s the exponential nature of community.

Are you charged with building a community? Check out the Community Manager Handbook for more community best practices, strategy ideas and case studies.

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Best Practices for Selecting a Community Platform

July 22, 2015 By Jim Storer

Q: What’s the difference between buying a new home and selecting a community platform?

A: One is a major expense, fills you with angst and forces you to move all your stuff. The other changes your address.

Joking aside, we tend to approach the selection of a new platform like we would a new home. We research. We draw up lists of features we want. We work to see through the sales pitches and spot anything they are trying to conceal. We consult trusted friends and seek their counsel. But in each case, the most important questions may be the ones we ask ourselves about what we want and need.

Platform questions are common in TheCR Network — and through the Community Manager Handbook we explored best practices for selecting a new community platform with TheCR Network member Maria Ogneva, who lived through the process most recently in her community role at the ridesharing startup Sidecar. Among the tips:

Start with behaviors, not features: Just as you should start your community strategy with the behavior change you want to drive, start your platform selection thinking about behaviors, not bells and whistles.

Think about your technical prowess: A custom community might be able to check all your community boxes, but what happens when there is a problem or you need to make a change? Without the right people, the wrong platform can become a burden.

An eye toward the present, an eye toward the future: Pick a platform that can handle your expected growth, but not at the expense of your present-day needs

The most important thing to remember is that different types of community structures will have very different platform requirements – there is no one size fits all vendor or solution. Think about your community – its size, purpose, technical abilities, support and security needs – and yes, your budget – plus any other special factors that should play a role in your choice. By starting with your needs, you’ll uncover the platform that can best serve them.

After all, in the end it’s not about choosing the best platform. It’s about choosing the best platform for your community.

Are you charged with selecting a community platform? Check out the Community Manager Handbook for more best practices, strategy ideas and a case study with advice from Maria Ogneva.

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All Things in Moderation – Best Practices for Successful Community Moderation

July 16, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Please forgive the pun, I couldn’t help it! In all seriousness, policies, guidelines and governance provide the framework and boundaries for your community, but moderation is where those policies are turned into day-to-day management. Direct moderation is the day-to-day interaction and management that signals to members what gets attention—both good and bad—from the organization. Successful community management requires not just a day-to-day awareness of the activity in your community but also the seamless application of tools and strategies to maximize engagement and minimize disruption.

• Step up your monitoring – spend time understanding the conflict before you get involved

• Give it space – often conflicts will resolve themselves, or the community will help mediate

• Model behavior – it can sometimes be helpful to rephrase opinions of others in a more emotionally neutral tone that allows people to focus on the content of the comment vs. the tone.

• Get personal – in some cases, a personal outreach, especially a phone call, will both help you understand the conflict and perhaps create a space for resolution

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Want to connect with community professionals around the world? Join our Facebook group!

How Can I Use Gamification for Community Engagement?

June 3, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Gamification is a hot topic in TheCR Network, and among community managers at large. In fact, – nearly half of our surveyed communities in the State of Community Management 2014 employed some form of gamification (and more than 60% of best-in-class communities do). As gamification tools become more common, more community managers are looking to tap into gamification as part of their efforts to increase engagement. It’s more than just “turning it on.” Everything from how you structure rewards, badges and levels to general usage patterns can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your effort.

Our Community Manager Handbook provided best practices for anyone thinking about starting a gamification initiative in their community. First things first – before you launch a gamification initiative, think about more than just technology you’ll use. Ask yourself these critical questions to set yourself up for success.

What are your goals?

Be specific with the behaviors you are trying to incentivize in the community. Simply“increasing engagement” is not enough. Make sure your goals are attainable – take into account your community maturity, user profiles and current engagement patterns.

What are your levels?

Setting levels based on the business value you connect to certain actions can provide a rationale for your system. Using community members to help level set can also make sense—after all, if they are playing the game, you may want to give them a stake in the rules.

How does it fit your culture?

Will your levels, goals and point system resonate equally well throughout the community?

How will you tweak—and exit?

Every gamification effort will need tweaks and eventually a reboot or a reset. Make sure you have plenty of time during after launch to evaluable your successes and failures. Soliciting input on how a gamification program worked can even increase engagement and strength bonds with active users.

What about your data?

Gamification efforts can provide a lot of rich data on activity and interactions. What will you measure? How will you look at it? Don’t forget to plan for, collect and present the data that will highlight your program to stakeholders.

Have you had gamification success in your community? Or did your efforts fail to level up? Looking for more gamification ideas? Check out a case study on gamification strategy at UBM in The Community Manager Handbook.

Friday Roundup: Using Superheroes to Increase Community Engagement

May 1, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

If you had a chance to check out our recently released Community Manager Handbook you already know we are very into the idea of community superheroes right now. Batman and Superman have nothing on some of the amazing community professionals we highlight in the CM Handbook! Our own amazing Community team in the TheCR Network decided to take the idea of superheroes one step further, and are rolling out a monthly superhero spotlight – showcasing the superhuman work members are doing on a day-to-day basis. Stay tuned for a more in-depth look at this advocacy program from Ted later this month, and learn how you can recognize your users to increase loyalty and improve engagement.

Our monthly newsletter also flew into inboxes this week – if you missed it you can check it out here – or sign up to receive our newsletter every month.

Things We Are Reading This Week

If you run a community, don’t think like a website on metrics – As we continue to slice and dice the data from more than 200 communities for the State of Community Management 2015, we know that one of the most viewed pieces of the report will be the engagement profiles – the percentage of members who are lurking, contributing, creating and collaborating in the community. It’s a natural thing, especially for new communities, to want to look at engagement and growth metrics early as a way to show to people the success of the community.

Zeynep Tufekci: Why Are Social Causes Easy To Launch But Hard To Win? – These days, all it takes to start a protest is a cell phone, says professor Zeynep Tufekci. But does the ease of social media impede social movements from making big gains?

A Story from Google Shows You Don’t Need Power to Drive Strategy – Brian Fitzpatrick joined Google as a senior software engineer in 2005, shortly after the company’s IPO. Brian specialized in open-source software development and he quickly became a champion within the company for various initiatives focused on end users.

Employee Retention: The Keys to Long, Happy Working Relationships – Employee retention is on every leader’s mind. Building or managing a successful company means crafting and keeping a great team. After doing the hard work to recruit and hire the best employees, it’s important to make sure they stick around to do great work with you for a long time; replacing employees gets expensive fast.

The power of platforms – Properly designed business platforms can help create and capture new economic value and scale the potential for learning across entire ecosystems.

Finding Your Right Collaboration Fit – Who has time to sort through all of the options in today’s collaboration tool landscape? With more than 150 different tools available (or more, depending on how broadly you define collaboration) it will take some time to find those that are good fits for your business.

New Social Media and Community Jobs

Social Networking Customer Advocate – CDI Corporation – Mountain View, CA
Community Manager – Needle – Bluffdale, UT
Community Manager – VaynerMedia LLC – San Francisco, CA
Community Manager – Think Passenger – Community, VA
Community Manager – MRY – San Francisco, CA
Community Manager – The New School – New York, NY
Social Media Team Lead, Client Services – Sephora – San Francisco, CA
Community Manager – Preferred Family Healthcare, Inc. – St. Louis, MO
Community Manager – IPG Mediabrands – New York, NY
Community Manager – FirstService Residential – Scottsdale, AZ
Community Manager – Skyword – Boston, MA
Community Coordinator – Vivint – Lehi, UT
Community Manager – KOG GAMES Inc. – Irvine, CA
Assistant Social Media Editor, Women’s Health – Rodale Inc. – New York, NY
Social Media Marketing Manager – Omni Hotels – Houston, TX
Louisville, KY Brand Ambassador – Marley Beverage Company – Louisville, KY
Staff: Admissions Marketing Specialist – Brenau University – Gainesville, GA
Social Media Coordinator – NetProspex – Waltham, MA
Coordinator of Marketing and Communications – Montclair State University – Montclair, NJ
Digital Communications Specialist – RAR – Richmond, VA
Social Media Representative – DISH Network – Littleton, CO
Public Relations & Social Media Coordinator – CROSSMARK – Chicago, IL
Marketing Manager – Lucky’s Market – Rock Hill, MO

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Looking for community peers to chat with, vent to and learn from? Check out our Facebook group and make some new community friends!

Friday Roundup: 20 Minutes to Shape the Future of Community

January 30, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

balloons The fifth Friday of 2015 is in the books, and this one comes at the end of a jam-packed week at The Community Roundtable, where we celebrated #CMAD, postponed #CMAD, launched our landmark annual survey and released the first piece of a new and fun Community Manager Handbook.

And that was just Monday.

A good part of our focus here at TheCR is shifting this week to gathering data for the 2015 State of Community Management survey. The 20-minute survey delves into a wide range of topics relating to communities and community management, and we have some goals in mind. We want data that helps us see where community maturity connects with desirable business outcomes – you know, the ROI question.

But we also want to gain insights from a broader range of communities. If you know people in the nonprofit space, or if you know media community managers, or have friends who manage communities in more “traditional” industries like manufacturing, encourage them to join the survey. As Rachel Happe put it in her post Now Open: 2015 State of Community Management Survey, “We need you to help us help you.”

So please, take the survey and spread the word. As a reward, at the end of your survey you get a free assessment of where your answers place you on the scales of the Community Maturity Model, which we hope gives you some insights into your own work. Your data will also be a part of the broader research, which will come out this spring, and have an impact on the future of community management.

While we open another SOCM chapter, we’re about to put a new research project out – The Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes. The Handbook will be released next Wednesday, after a webinar hosted by Higher Logic at 2pm ET. Sign up here! The Handbook is a series of 20 case studies of common issues community professionals face in their community life cycles. It’s unlike any other research we have ever released, both in approach and editorial tone.

We want to thank all those who came to our CMAD events in San Francisco, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Washington, DC on Monday. Mother Nature had other plans for us Monday night in Boston and New York, but as the old saying goes, “When life gives you blizzards, make 216 more hours of Community Manager Appreciation.” We postponed our CMAD events in Boston and New York to February 4, and while we couldn’t convince the CMAD organizers to fill 240 hours of hangouts until the 4th, we would love to see you there! Sign up for the CMAD: Post-Snowpacalypse Editions on our Eventbrite.

Oh, and we gave the CMSS poster treatment to some key facts about the role of community manager.

Some Other Interesting Readings This Week:

Why Online Community Managers Don’t Get the Respect They Deserve (And What You Can Do About It): It is important to point out that no one is denying the enormous impact having a community manager in place has on creating healthy and growing online communities. In their annual report on “The State of Community Management,” The Community Roundtable found that having a dedicated community manager clearly led to higher community maturity. So, in an age when community managers are growing in demand, how can you prove your value?

Community Management Realized: (This week), many will celebrate the role of community manager. I have never been a fan of this event. Perhaps this is because I have avoided the limelight. My job is to let others shine, realize their potential, and share their stories. A community manager is never alone in their job. There are times when one may feel the burden of being the sole spokesperson and storyteller of the community, but a community exists through reciprocal relationships and transcends the individual.

If You Build an Online Community, Will They Come?: “If you build it, they will come.” This worked for Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams,” but when it comes to creating an online community to drive better engagement with your customers, it’s not that simple. Building the community is only about one tenths of the work that needs to happen to not only get them there, but what’s more important, to make them stay.

How digital collaboration will evolve in 2015: Information technology typically changes in leaps and bounds, and for collaboration in digital channels, those changes have been rather turbulent over the last decade. While the most significant overall trend during this time has been the strategic up-leveling of corporate engagement using the social business model to foster large-scale, high impact corporate communities, the pendulum of innovation has recently swung back to more intimate and close quarters.

New Community and Social Media Jobs

Community Management Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Research Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Sales/Marketing Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Social Media Community Manager – Commune Hotels and Resorts, San Francisco, CA

Technical Community Manager – The Optical Society, Washington, DC

Community Engagement Manager – itBit, New York, NY

Community Manager – Codeacademy, New York, NY

Community Manager – Nitro, San Francisco, CA

Social Media Community Manager – Walt Disney Co., Celebration, FL

Alphaworks – Community Manager – Betaworks, New York, NY

Community Manager – Data & Society, New York, NY

Community & Content Manager – Spredfast, Austin, TX