The Community Roundtable

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

New Community Careers and Compensation Research

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We are excited to share our latest Community Careers and Compensation report! Based on a global survey of over 600 community professionals, the Community Careers and Compensation 2024 report highlights trends in the community management industry and provides salary data for four different community roles. You can download your free copy here.

The 2024 Community Careers and Compensation report explores salary data, key skills, and job responsibilities for four key community roles:

  • Community Specialists
  • Community Managers
  • Community Strategists
  • Community Executives

It also features community job descriptions, advice for hiring managers and community practitioners, and profiles of four community professionals Helen Chen, Geneva Cooper, Tarek Khodr, and Allison Brotman.

Looking for salary data for a community manager in the Midwest? It’s in there!

How about recommendations for hiring your first community specialist? Also in the report.

Need ideas for how to take your career to the next level in community?

Yup, this will help. Want to understand how to write a job description that will attract top talent from the community industry? Run, don’t walk! Download your free copy of the report.

Community Roles 2020: Three Myths BUSTED

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We have a long history of “busting” online community myths. 90-9-1 rule, we’re looking at you. The latest edition of the Community Careers and Compensation report did some new myth-busting, and in case you haven’t had a chance to read the whole report, we wanted to share a few highlights with you.

This short video busts THREE common myths about online community management roles:

Want to learn more about what community careers look like in 2020? The Community Careers and Compensation 2020 report is now available for individual or enterprise licensing. Learn more.

Community Careers and Compensation

CCC 2015 Fun fact #1: Online communities are everywhere – a (mostly) good thing!

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By Ted McEnroe, Head of Research, The Community Roundtable

Online communities are sort of like chameleons. When they are fully integrated, they can blend into whatever scene they’re in. It’s perhaps the greatest strength of community approaches – they can work in any part of an organization, serve any of a number of purposes, and work with members at any level.

Labord's_chameleon_1And the numbers from the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 report back it up.

Community programs reside in departments from HR to IT to marketing, with 1-in-7 communities serving as their own department. Ideally, that means that community programs are fitting in where it is most appropriate for the organization. In about a quarter of cases, they sit in other areas – departments such as innovation and business advancement that focus on the future of the organization.

In general, we see this as a very good thing, with a couple of caveats. First is a structural one. Because communities are relatively new in many organizations, there may not be clear best practices and lines of communication established for them with the rest of the business. But because they can fit anywhere in an organization, best practices for establishing and connecting community programs with the rest of the organization are not necessarily easy to come by.

Second, there is the risk that communities are vulnerable to changes in leadership. Reporting to a marketing VP who understands community can be a great opportunity. If that VP is replaced by someone without community in their background, the program may be vulnerable and it falls to the community team leadership to make the case upward when there aren’t always a lot of comparable programs to highlight. That’s why community practitioners need to have an eye out always for resources that can be used to educate stakeholders. We hope our research is on your short list.

While communities’ home bases may be scattered throughout organizations, though, there are more signs than ever that communities are seen as integral to company strategies. One piece of evidence is in reporting structures. We asked Directors of Community to whom they reported, and more than 80 percent of them reported to VPs, Senior VPs, or C-level executives. Just under half reported straight to the C-suite. Data like this, and the growing number of communities that have their budgets approved by upper management, demonstrate that in many organizations, communities have the attention of top-level executives, a powerful force for moving communities forward and improving engagement.
CCC_FunFact1_2015

Where should your community department fit in your organization? It depends on your goals – but ensuring the community and its value are understood across the organization is a critical – and unending – need for any community team.

Get more data on the roles, skills and salaries of community professionals by downloading the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 Summary. better yet, take the survey and receive the full report for free – with more details about the roles and skills of community professionals that can make a difference for your community – and your own career.

The 11 Most Valuable Community Management Skills

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Looking broadly, it’s exciting to see that community professionals are an experienced, mobile group that have had the opportunities to move up the community career ladder. Community professionals in the survey have an average of 15 years of experience, with five of them specifically in community. Also striking, though, is that almost ¾ of those surveyed so far have been in their current roles for three years or less.

We’re also getting insights into where community professionals sit in their organizations – where they report and who reports to them. And we are seeing trends in compensation – whether those reporting patterns and responsibilities are translating as you might expect into higher pay and better opportunities.

And this year, we have asked people to rank the skills most valuable for their current jobs from the 50 skills in the Community Skills Framework. Think community folks have a lot on their plate? So far, survey participants have ranked 42 of the 50 skills over 3.0 in importance on a scale of 1 to 5. And 11 community management skills have scored over 4.0. In no particular order, they are:

• Listening and Analyzing
• Promoting Productive Behaviors
• Empathy and Member Support
• Member Advocacy
• Community Strategy Development
• Measurement, Benchmarking and Reporting
• Evaluating Engagement Techniques
• Community Advocacy and Promotion
• Communication Planning
• Writing
• Data Collection and Analysis

Full definitions of these skills are included in the CCC survey.

There are variations, certainly, in skill rankings among roles and use cases, and there are a few 3.9’s I didn’t include here. But even just this set of 11 demonstrates the broad challenges of being a community professional. Not surprisingly, almost all of the 11 also rank highest as the skills in which community professionals most want training.

This data is a good start and provides a great base for the research. But we still want as many people as possible to complete the survey – which can allow us to really get into industries, use cases and more in unprecedented ways. Are media or nonprofit communities different from business and retail? Do they emphasize different skills? What’s the pay gap?

We can’t answer these questions without you. We won’t share your personal data with anyone, and if you’ve got particular concerns, we can work with you. (See the survey and this blog post for more on our data pledge.)

The Community Skills Framework 2015

Want to improve your own skill set? TheCR Academy offers online courses in Internal and External Community Management Fundamental and Community Program Essentials. Learn more at training.communityroundtable.com

Introducing the Updated Community Skills Framework

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By Ted McEnroe, Head of Research, The Community Roundtable

What do you say when you’re asked to describe what you do as a community professional? I’m betting it’s not an easy question to answer – particularly when it comes from Aunt Betty at the Thanksgiving table. What about when you try to explain how overwhelmed you are to your manager – or your HR department?

Without a frame of reference, it is all to easy to struggle with explaining what you can and cannot accomplish given your skills, experience and time limitations.

We’ve also found that community job descriptions can be all over the map – often expecting one person to address a huge range of diverse responsibilities.

Our mission at The Community Roundtable is to listen, synthesize and distill the practice of community management in a way that is easy to understand and communicate. We do this through our models and research. Last year, we published our first iteration of the Community Skills Framework as well as part of the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 – and we learned a lot in the process.

This year, we’ve evolved both the research and the framework and have recently launched the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 survey, which is now open.

The updated Community Skills Framework includes five skill families with ten skills in each family, prioritized based on what we learned from our 2014 research.

A draft of the Community Skills Framework in the Community Careers and Compensation survey

A draft of the Community Skills Framework in the Community Careers and Compensation survey

How Does This Help You?

First, when Aunt Betty asks you what community management is you can say, “It’s a mix of engagement, content, technical, business and strategy responsibilities.” This may or may not mean anything to her but it adds enough detail about your job without being verbose – and in plain language.

Second, and more importantly, it frames the conversation with your stakeholders about the scope of your role, its priorities, what is reasonable for one person to do and where your strengths and weaknesses are… incredibly helpful as you look to navigate your career and where you want to head next.

At The Community Roundtable, we use the Community Skills Framework to:

  • Scope our research and report on what skills are priorities for different community roles (moderation, specialist, manager, strategist and director roles).
  • Identify and report on those skills seen as consistent blind spots – areas where community professionals need the most training and resources.
  • Prioritize programming in TheCR Network, identify where training would be valuable and determine areas to dig deeper on with our research.

If you’re a community professional, we hope the survey sparks ideas and gives you a better understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses.

Take the survey now!

Five reasons you should tell a stranger how much you make as a community professional

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By Ted McEnroe, Head of Research at The Community Roundtable

As you may have heard, The Community Roundtable’s Community Careers and Compensation survey is out now. The survey is one of our key pieces of research each year – a compilation of the skills, roles, responsibilities and yes, salaries of community professionals from moderators and community specialists to community managers, strategists, Directors and Vice Presidents of Community.

It’s data with a lot of value to community professionals and those who hire and manage them. It’s data that many people want to get, but sometimes don’t want to give. We get it. It’s personal stuff – and for that reason, we treat this data very carefully. TheCR research team doesn’t share it with anyone else, even others on The Community Roundtable team.

But just like our other major research platform, The State of Community Management, it’s critically important to furthering the work we do as community professionals and educating others in the power and importance of community.

So here are five reasons you should share your data with us.

Other people are making way more than you. Let’s start with shameless self interest. Your contributions to the data may very well demonstrate that you make a lot less than others who do your job – in other places, in other industries, and other use cases. But without your data, we don’t get the statistical evidence we need to make the comparisons you can use for the next time around.

You make more than others in your position. You have a hard job. So do other community managers. But you don’t want to go into your next salary conversation with data that shows other people with your title make way less than you. You want to be able to show that your direct reports, community use case, and industry matter – and justify your current and future pay. But if we don’t get the data, we can’t segment the data enough to show that. So you will be stuck justifying why your salary is higher than the average across all industries or geographies, when that may be an unfair comparison.

You’ve got mad skillz. One of the lessons of last year’s survey was that people with the same job title often had different skills and responsibilities. This year’s survey asks you what skills are most important for your job – and you’ll be able to compare what you do with what those in your position are doing. You may find you’ve outgrown the title you have, or discover some things that your peers are doing you may want to jump on.

You have untapped potential. Many of the questions in the survey feed your aspirations. We ask the areas in which you most desire training – which will inform not only programming within our own Community of Practice, but can serve as fodder for others, ideas for sharing resources and building informal networks, as well. You’ll also be able to see what skills those who sit on the next rung of the ladder value, to give you a sense of where to grow to better prepare yourself in your career.

You are not a snowflake. You’re special, don’t get me wrong. But just as we have seen there are artifacts and elements that consistently appear in successful communities, there are those skills and backgrounds that correlate with success as a community manager. Maybe, depending on the data, we’ll be able to see skills and backgrounds that correlate with higher salaries. But in order to do that we need to know your skills and your salary.

…And one more, if you’re in charge. If you manage a community team, we have a sixth reason for you. Sharing your information, and getting your team to share theirs as well, feeds your ability to use our skills framework to evaluate your team – and work with HR and others to create job descriptions and compensation for new hires that is rationalized and reasonable, which will help you hire.

Telling someone you don’t know about your work can be uncomfortable, and we don’t ask these questions lightly. If you have issues with sharing personal information, I want to work with you to either make you more comfortable or come up with a plan that makes you comfortable. It’s why we started asking for salary ranges this year instead of exact figures. It’s why we’re happy with you putting down the nearest metro if you don’t want to put down your specific location. We’re OK with not getting your name as long as you give us a valid email. (By the way, we do separate that stuff from your data in the database we work with.)

In the end, we think the value of the data is worth the ask. We hope you do, too. And don’t hesitate to email me with your questions and concerns.

—-> Take the survey now <—-

Learn more about the Community Careers and Compensation research platform (including sponsorship opportunities), and review the 2014 survey report in the Research section of communityroundtable.com

Community Careers and Compensation 2015: The survey is open!

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By Ted McEnroe, Head of Research, The Community Roundtable.

Community Careers and Compensation 2015Cover Take surveyToday, The Community Roundtable is kicking off the survey period for the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 survey.  It’s the second year of our annual effort to rationalize the profession of community management – giving both community professionals and those who manage and hire them a better understanding of the skills, roles and compensation of community professionals.

What does that mean? It means we are pulling together powerful sets of data that you as a community professional can use to help build and assess your team, develop your skills, and use to more effectively negotiate your own career development.

None of it can happen without your help.

The CCC 2015 survey will take you about 15 minutes – and asks you to share background about your community and role, the skills you find most valuable and a bit about your salary and compensation. I’ll tell you about how we protect your information in a moment.

First a bit of context. Last year, this survey was the Community Manager Salary Survey. We received salary and skills information from more than 300 community professionals, and produced:

  • a first-of-its-kind role analysis for Community Managers, Community Strategists and Directors of Community;
  • a Community Management Skills Framework that highlighted the most important skills and responsibilities of community professionals;
  • an eBook on the roles of community professionals that HR and hiring managers can use to create more effective job descriptions.

This year, we are continuing to build on that. We have refined the survey to better understand the size, roles and organizational status of community teams. We have broadened the survey to include more community roles. We have reshaped the Community Management Skills Framework to better highlight the strategic and business skills needed to manage communities effectively. And we have changed the way we ask for compensation – asking for ranges of compensation, rather than exact figures.

Its powerful data for both individual and organizations – that hopefully makes community management roles a bit more sane and rational. We know from feedback how many of you have used last year’s data to start important conversations.

Please:

  • Take the survey: No matter what your role in community, we want to hear from you. Go to https://the.cr/ccc2015survey – give us 15 minutes of your time to tell us about your journey.
  • Share the survey: The better the data we collect, the more valuable the results will be. By sharing the survey link via social media and encouraging colleagues and friends in the community space to take it, you’re helping to make this a more powerful tool for you.
  • Continue the conversation: A survey alone won’t do it. The conversation about the survey and the issues are important. Members of TheCR Network helped create and revise the 2014 and 2015 surveys and the conversations that it triggered provided great insight. If you are not a member of TheCR Network, join our Facebook group.

Now, about salary data and confidentiality.

Even in the era where people are comfortable sharing almost everything, talking about salary is rare. It’s uncomfortable. It’s personal. It’s also incredibly powerful information for the profession. If we want communities to reach their potential, we need to do a better job of structuring the roles, responsibilities and compensation of those who run them. And we can’t do that without knowing what you are tasked with, how you got to where you are, and yes, how much you make for doing it – and ensuring the validity of that data by knowing who you are.

Here’s our pledge:

  • We will never share individual survey data with anyone outside TheCR research team – ever. And that includes with other members of The Community Roundtable staff.
  • We will never publish raw data or individual surveys. Ever.
  • We immediately remove personal information from the raw data we are analyzing, so that the data we work with doesn’t include your personal information.
  • We also only ask for your salary range, rather than your exact compensation, as we balance the need for accurate data with the desire to respect your privacy.

If you have questions about the survey after you take it – ask us. Our business – like communities themselves – is based on trust, and we want to make you feel as comfortable sharing your data with us as possible.

The results will be worth it.