The Community Roundtable

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

Celebrating #cmgr on Community Manager Appreciation Day 2023

By

Fact: every day should be community manager appreciation day. I get that not how it works, but truly – the community professionals we know are amazing 365 days a year and deserve all the kudos (along with the salary and perks to match!)

But, since today (Monday, January 23, 2023) IS actually Community Manager Appreciation Day we won’t miss the opportunity to shout out to the incredible community professionals we know. From those of you just starting out in your community career (including our new, awesome community fellow, Erin!) to those of you have that have been working in community even longer than us (we know you’re out there!!) – we appreciate you.

We’ve made it our work to cultivate, support, and provide the resources global community professionals need to empower themselves. Getting a front-row seat to the innovative work they do is a bonus!

Cheers to everyone working in community today – we see you and appreciate the work it takes to build and manage your communities!

Happy CMAD 2018 – Community Management Advancement Day

By

HAPPY CMAD 2018, EVERYONE!

I’m going to be honest – CMAD is one of my favorite days of the year. While CMAD started out as Community Management Appreciation Day, we like to imagine it has evolved into something more – community management advancement day. Because really, what shows more appreciation than saying, “we see you and we want to help you get to where you want to be!”?

We started brainstorming a way to celebrate CMAD 2018 that would both highlight some of the amazing community management leaders we know and provide a tangible asset for community professionals everywhere to enjoy. Thus, CMGT 101 was born. We worked closely with 17 community leaders to get their advice on specific topics, like member retention, effective engagement, community UX and more and compiled this ebook: CMGT 101: 17 Community Leaders Share Their Secrets for Success.

CMAD 2018

We could not have published this ebook without the thoughtful contributions from: 

  1. Lori Harrison-Smith, Steelcase
  2. J.J. Lovett, CA Technologies
  3. Aaliyah Miller, Aetna
  4. Patty McEnaney, Envestnet
  5. Monique van den Berg, Atlassian
  6. Jerry Green, The Community Roundtable
  7. Kirsten Laaspere, Akamai
  8. Jay Graff, JM Family Group
  9. Marjorie Anderson, PMI
  10. Jerry Janda, SAP
  11. Dana Baldwin, Electronic Arts
  12. Dina Vekaria, Pearson
  13. Judi Cardinal, Akamai
  14. Lisa Allison, Analog Devices
  15. Heather Ausmus, Ciena
  16. Chris Catania, ESRI
  17. Stephanie Field, Carbon Black

You can head here and download your own copy of CMGT 101: 17 Community Leaders Share Their Secrets for Success and check out the best practices that this amazing group of community leaders shares.

If you are a community professional please know that we do appreciate you, and all the work that you do every day to advance the world of community management. If you aren’t a community professional – what you are waiting for? Quick – find one and thank them!

A final shout-out to ALL the community leaders in TheCR Network – we only highlight 17 of them here, but there are hundreds more who inspire us daily and it is immensely gratifying to get to work alongside them.

Happy CMAD!

Community management salaries are on the rise

By

 

Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day, everyone! We enjoy CMAD as a chance to recognize the hard work thousands of community professionals do every day. But thank yous don’t pay the bills. That’s why this year for CMAD, we wanted to see how salaries for community professionals were trending.

So we seized on a unique opportunity.

In November, we reached out to a group of community pros for whom we already had a lot of data – the 403 respondents to our Community Careers and Compensation 2015 survey. We asked them for five minutes of their time, to update us on their salary and career path. It was a challenge – people who have moved around change email addresses, others decline to be contacted, and others don’t take part. When all was said and done, though, we had gotten year-over-year updates from more than 110 community professionals. The great news is captured in our new infographic.

Salaries for experienced community managers are rising. Sharply.

Quality community professionals are in high demand, and that means higher salaries. Salaries and bonuses for our survey group jumped an average of almost 10 percent between 2015 and 2016. Some folks boosted their income by changing jobs or roles. Others got raises by proving their value. The bottom line was this – the average community manager compensation in our sample approached $80,000. Community strategists and community directors are regularly earning over $100,000. Those numbers won’t hold true for everyone in every industry, but the broad trend of rising salaries was clear and pretty consistent across use cases and community types.

The average community manager compensation in our sample approached $80,000. Community strategists and community directors are regularly earning over $100,000.

Community pros are a mobile bunch.

One way to boost your salary is to change jobs, and community professionals live that fact. One in four survey respondents changed organizations from 2015 to 2016. Some were merged or acquired into new roles, but most made the leap on their own.

And they’re moving UP.

Community managers, in particular, aren’t just moving around – they’re moving up into management. About 20% of our respondents who defined themselves as community managers in 2015 had risen to a strategist or director role in 2016. And across the board, our sample was reporting to higher levels of their organizations. Forty-five percent of the overall sample said they reported to a Vice President, Senior VP or C-level manager, up from 36 percent in 2015.

Other high-level trends:

There are a few other trends that were in evidence, but not strong enough to be statistically sound. They’re all on my list for the next full Community Careers and Compensation survey!

  • Geography: Our coastal respondents, particularly those on the West Coast, saw the highest salary spikes, which could suggest high demand. We saw positive salary trends in every region, though.
  • Experience/Community Size: There was no evident correlation between salary change and years of experience or community size.
  • Industry: High tech and software community pros got the biggest bump in our sample, but neither the difference or the sample size was enough for us to send people running into the tech sector for a big raise.

Enjoy and share the infographic – and happy Community Manager Appreciation Day! You deserve it.

Community Careers and Compensation update january 2017

Download the infographic. 

Looking for more resources to help you in your community career?

  • How Do I Find a Community Manager Job? – Community management is a profession of relationships – use your network to discover your next role. Most community jobs are not currently found through traditional job listings.
  • 50 Skills of Community Management – The Community Skills Framework represents the five skill families and top 50 skills that are required to build a successful community program.
  • How To Win That Community Manager Job – As organizations begin to increasingly recognize and reward the value of good community management the market for jobs has begun to heat up. While at any given moment there are literally dozens of interesting community jobs open around the country (and truly, the world) the competition for these roles is getting stiffer. How can you set yourself apart?

CMAD 2016 – Unleash Your Inner Community Management Superhero

By

By Shannon Abram, Director of Marketing at The Community Roundtable

It’s no secret that we love community managers. We’ve sort of built our entire business around it! The truth is we not-so-secretly believe that every community professional has the ability to be a community management superhero. From defeating evil trolls to proving the strategic ROI of your community program you might as well be wearing a cape to work.

In honor of all the community professionals we love we put together a little look at some of the top skills that make a community pro, well – a pro. Happy CMAD (Community Manager Appreciation Day!) to all the community superheroes out there!

community management superhero

Looking for ways to boost your skill set? TheCR Network is an amazing training and education resource for community management professionals at every level.

Friday Roundup: 20 Minutes to Shape the Future of Community

By

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

balloonsThe 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

Community Manager Appreciation Day 2015: Three things to do today

By

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Community Manager Appreciation Day is here for 2015. As this CMAD kicks into gear, we certainly have a lot of people to appreciate – with members from more than 100 organizations, we could spend a lot of time appreciating. And we will. But appreciation is just one of the ways you can make CMAD resonate both for you and for the profession.

Here are three things you can do right now:

Appreciate the unexpected: CMAD is about appreciation. It’s in the name. But if you limit yourself to a generic thanks to your community manager, you’re not taking full advantage. Don’t just walk over or send an email to your organization’s community managers – think of communities you are involved with elsewhere. Seek out those CMs and thank them, too. There are thousands of community managers out there, some of them one-person shops whose work gets noticed far less often than it should. Thank them, too.

Advance your skills: Rachel Happe is on a quest to change CMAD to Community Manager Advancement Day, and it is a good day to invest a little in yourself. A tip of the hat to the CMAD organizers, who have been working for months to create a 24-hour hangout of value to community managers, as well as coordinating and curating other events. There are dozens of great opportunities today to learn and improve your skills.

We’re big fans of the 3pm CMAD workshop on “The Power of Programs to Drive Engagement in Your Community,” moderated by TheCR Network’s Community Manager, Hillary Boucher, with Network members Kirsten Laaspere (Fidelity), Patrick Hellen (CloudLock) and Melissa Potvin (CA Technologies) along with Holly Goldin from Atlassian – and me.

But whatever fits into your schedule – dig in.

Advance the field of community management: One way to do that is to take part in the research for The State of Community Management 2015, our 6th annual examination of the growth and maturation of community management as a discipline. We want to gather hundreds of responses to our annual survey of community management practices, which helps drive much of our research during the year.

The survey opens today – and your answers will make it a stronger, more valuable piece of research. It will take 20 minutes so considering adding it to your schedule today, or later this week. You can access the survey here.

I warned you that we would have people to appreciate – and really, our list could be much longer. But we want to thank two groups today in particular – the community professionals whose stories we will tell beginning today with the pre-release of The Community Manager Handbook, and the community professionals who took on the task of championing our CMAD activities in six cities.

So with appreciation we recognize: CM Handbook interviewees Bill Johnston, Jerry Green, Maria Ogneva, Lesley Lykins, Lauren Vargas, Mike Pascucci, Christian Rubio, James LaCorte, Ted Hopton, Charissa Carnall, Matt Brown, Tracy Maurer, J.J. Lovett, Jeff Ross and Alex Blanton. You’ll be able to read their case studies and research that goes along with them when the full Handbook is released on February 4.

For a sneak peek, we have released a “teaser” featuring our own Hillary Boucher, discussing content and programs. Take a look and we’d love to have you sign up for the February 4 webinar sponsored by Higher Logic.

We also recognize our local event champions Laura Brook and Lindsay Starke (Atlanta), Luke Sinclair (New York), Ben Martin and Maddie Grant (D.C.), Heather Ausmus (Milwaukee) and Christopher Parsons and Susan Strom (San Francisco). You are making the fun part of CMAD possible, and we appreciate it

And special thanks to three people who actually are both interviewees and local champions, Eileen Foran (Milwaukee) and Patrick Hellen and Kirsten Laaspere (Boston). Kirsten and Patrick get an added star for being in our CMAD webinar, too.

We refer to the interviewees in the Handbook as “community superheroes”. We interviewed 20 of the best, but if we really wanted to capture all the people using their superpowers for good not evil in the community space, we’d add hundreds, if not thousands, of others.

So if you’re reading this on this CMAD. Take a moment to appreciate one other thing. Yourself.

Community Managers Are the Superheroes of Their Companies (Infographic)

By

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable. 

In honor of #CMAD last week the great folks over at Get Satisfaction put together the infographic below -Community Managers Are the Superheroes of Their Companies.  Besides creating an infographic that is fun to look at they really hit the nail on the head. I often joke (and even state in my twitter bio) that punctuality is my superpower. I have the uncanny ability to be five minutes early for everything (is this because I leave myself an hour to travel 30 minutes? I’ll never tell…) Community managers make my superpower look like nothing. Many have the ability to soothe an angry member with a few kind words. Others can spark excitement and engagement with the flick of a mouse.

Enjoy the infographic and please let us know – what’s your community management superpower?

CMAD Superheros

This infographic originally appeared at Get Satisfaction.

Friday Roundup: January is in the Books

By

cmadBy Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable. 

Another January in the books! The first month of 2014 flew by (personal note: I did get married and honeymoon this month, which probably helped the time move fast for me!) and our first experiment with themed content was a great learning exeperience. I really enjoyed sharing ideas and content around the theme of “Building Community” – next month we’re tackling the idea of “Connect” and I can’t wait to see what the month will bring!

This week there were two pretty big events on our radar #CMAD (Community Management Advancement Day) and the IBM Connect event in Orlando, FL. Both provided a wealth of really great content we want to share so the link list is extra long today.

  1. A fun list of the top 100 Community Managers on Twitter
  2. The first in our new Faces of Community Management profile series
  3. A growing list of community manager books.
  4. Should you give thanks (or a bonus?) to your community manager?
  5. Community Manager: Key to the Future of Business
  6. How to Truly Show Your Online Community Manager Appreciation
  7. Redefining management in the Digital Age
  8. Social Technologies: A Catalyst to the Practice of Knowledge Management
  9. Social Media Salary Guide – Infographic
  10. Social Business Myth Busters from Sandy Carter!
  11. Really great advice on approaching people who are smarter, busier, and more important than you
  12. 24 Community Management Tips from the Experts
  13. Why All Community Managers are Improv Artists
  14. Online Community ROI, Redefined (In Pictures)

Wow that’s a lot of links! We also launched the survey for our 2014 State of Community Management Report this month. If you haven’t taken it yet we’d love your input – we’re looking for community folks from every size company in every stage of the community journey. You can take the survey here. Thank you in advance for your help.

Have a great Superbowl weekend – I’ve got big plans that involve some homemade kettle corn and watching the game (and the commercials!) with friends. I’ll see you in February!

Guest Blog Post: 5 Ways Your Community Can Be More Engaging and Still Keep Your Sanity!

By

Guest blog post by James LaCourte, Online Strategist and Community Manager at Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina. He blogs at The Gaspar and you can find him on LinkedIn.

5 ways your community can be more engaging and still keep your sanity!

Community Manager Appreciation Day is here again but I don’t think most people outside the social media realm even know about it. Community Managers are the unsung heroes working behind the scenes to nurture and grow the community. It’s a tough job that many underestimate the skills and time required.  In a single day you can go from feeling energized to worn down and lonely. But it’s worth it. That’s why whenever two Community Managers get together there’s an instant connection. They know what it takes and the rewards to be gained from such a role.

Here’s 5 ways you can help your community be more engaging and still keep your sanity!

1. Set the tone Define the purpose and set the stage by planting the seeds of discussion.

2. Make visitors feel at home Recruit and welcome new members. Give them a tour or better yet have another member mentor them.

3. Connect people and ideas

The key to any community is in the relationships among participants. Building relationships online takes time. A successful Community Manager can foster relationships by connecting ideas and members to each other.

4. Steering conversation Sometimes conversations need a little help getting started. Other times conversations need to be steered in another direction or cooled down. Do it with confidence and creativity.

5. Shining the light on others

I think one of the most powerful tactics a Community Manager can remember is to find ways to empower and praise community members. Let them shine in the light, allow them to become advocates for the community and in the end the more advocates a community has the easier your job will be.

So from one Community Manager to another I wish you a wonderful day and know that what you do may not be understood by many, but you have a small group of peers who understand and are here to help. That’s the great thing about the Community Roundtable, it’s a support group for all of us crazy people who took on this role, many of us not knowing what we were getting into!

Enjoy your day!

———————————————————–

TheCR Network is a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. The network enables members to connect and form lasting relationships with experts and peers as well as get access to vetted content. TheCR Network is the place to learn from social business practitioners.  Join today

Appreciating Community Managers – Happy CMAD!

By

When Jeremiah Owyang started Community Manager Appreciation Day (#CMAD) we were one of the first to jump on the bandwagon because community managers often work behind the scenes which means that they sometimes don’t get the appreciation they deserve for often very challenging work. In the best of times, community managers can be public heroes but more often then not they are setting boundaries, facilitating emotionally charged situations, having to justify their work to others and dealing with an ever-changing cast of characters and priorities. It is a roller coaster so it is apt to collectively take a day and say thank you – both for what we see and for all those things that community managers do that we don’t really know about but are critical to providing a constructive community environment.

At The Community Roundtable we are continuously honored to serve so many amazing community leaders – and we often get to hear the back story which makes it easy to appreciate and be in awe of the talents and experience of our TheCR Network members. It is a joy to help support them – whether in saying thank you today or by helping them think about things differently, find the right person to talk to or expose them to new techniques. We couldn’t be prouder of what our members accomplish every day. Jeremiah did some fantastic analysis on the power and influence of community managers that is worth sharing with internal stakeholders and communities so that they too can truly appreciate this role.

One thing that we have been discussing with members however is that while appreciation is nice, how can we collectively help advance the role and position of communities within our businesses? Helping to make community managers successful is the ultimate way to show appreciation. In a similar vein, we’ve been spending a lot of our time thinking about how we can most effectively move the discipline of community management forward. In the past few years, we’ve been gratified with the exposure our State of Community Management reports have gotten and feel like that has helped contribute to community management being seen as a professional and critical emerging discipline for businesses. But we have bigger ambitions.

This year, The State of Community Management research is evolving to a quantitative research initiative looking at the following types of metrics:

Community metrics, community performance, community ROI

2013 SOCM Metrics

 

We think that this is groundbreaking research, which will give organizations a much more comprehensive look into how to successfully execute on social business strategies. We also believe that this research will dramatically increase the awareness of and respect for community management roles. This is one of the major ways we demonstrate our appreciation of community managers.

Cheers to all of you who labor in community management – you are our heroes and we want to do what we can to help others see you as theirs.

For more information about the 2013 State of Community Management, see the research prospectus here. If you are interesting in participating, please fill out the form below:

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.