Community Careers Archives

Podcast: SOCM 2019 Highlight – Community Leadership is Unevenly Distributed

October 24, 2019 By Jim Storer

Join TheCR’s Rachel Happe, Principal and Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable, as she chats with Marjorie Anderson, CSPO, Manager, Digital Communities at the Project Management Institute, about the State of Community Management 2019 report.

In Episode #62, Rachel and Marjorie discuss key finding #3 from the 2019 research: Communities Propel Engagement

Rachel and Marjorie discuss how community management can feel like playing “1001 and one ways to say no, without having to say no”, how community professionals can advocate for themselves in the workplace, and ways to avoid burn-out.

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How do you direct your own career path when one is not defined?

October 11, 2019 By Binta Dixon

One of the interesting career-based findings from the SOCM 2019, was that only 25% of community roles are approved by HR. This is a crucial number because it means that three-quarters of CM’s do not have clearly defined roles or paths to promotion to go along with them.

When we look at the profile of emerging leaders, we see a wide range of functional backgrounds, skills, and industries. Community leaders are ready to move to a new stage. Are you one of them?

To utilize the SOCM while negotiating a title change, you can reference the section on communities with advanced strategies. Outlining how your role fits into a detailed community strategy, including ROI projections, provides a tool for execs to understand the importance of management to the success of the community.

So you get the new title, but what about compensation and influence?

Even in companies that are supportive of community, CM’s are frustrated with a lack of resources.

Obtaining resources requires organizational influence. Finding opportunities for training and collaboration is helpful in establishing new connections. Using your current network to gain access to new executives and stakeholders is one tactic to get in the door. These interactions help increase the visibility of the community and foster relationships that can propel your career forward.

If you are being asked to help design your new role, this is an excellent opportunity to build a strong foundation of tasks and responsibilities that give you access to other department leads, creates opportunities for collaboration, and facilitates training for executives.

Maybe you are exploring other options and want to design a list of what to look for in a company. Consider things like the organizational governance structure, titles, and roles within community, responsibilities of community staff, and current organizational strategy.

Does the company support a community mindset? Are you willing to help create one?

Knowing what kind of role is right for you, and then defining the duties that support it is empowering and necessary in a market that is diversifying and growing rapidly.

Members of TheCR Network are discussion role transitions, career paths, and compensation every day. Join these vital discussions to contribute your perspective on industry standards and trends.

Although we’ve published several career development resources in the past, such as the Community Careers and Compensation Report 2015, TheCR is also working to develop more careers and compensation information and we would love your feedback. If you have questions around your career path, trends in community careers or anything career-related, drop them in the Community Careers and Development group.

Community Hiring Is Not Keeping Up

October 24, 2017 By Rachel Happe

Community management skills are increasingly required for all management roles. That has not resulted in a corresponding increase in community hiring.

Communities Are Now Strategic

Executives finally see communities as intriguing options for solving their organization’s hairiest issues – from streamlining the customer and employee experience to increasing market relevancy, spurring innovation, and transforming culture for a digital era.

Community approaches are now applied to more use cases across organizations, resulting in a strategic urgency to make community management a core skill of all organizational leaders and managers.

However, executives are putting their community efforts at risk because they are resistant about hiring senior community program owners and strategists.

Still Too Many Lone Community Managers, Often Reporting to Executives

In 2017, 59% of community programs report to a VP or higher and 47% of communities are reporting up to the C-suite. However, only 38% of community management professionals are Director-level or higher.

While it is exciting that communities are now seen as a mechanism to transform organizations for the digital age, it’s causing a lot of stress and anxiety for community professionals themselves. 27% of community programs still don’t even have one full-time community manager and another 43% have only one full-time community manager. This is not the kind of staffing profile that is going to transform an organization’s culture and leadership approach.

This gap between strategic ambition and community hiring is causing some predictable outcomes. Many community managers are under a lot of pressure both to satisfy the strategic interest of their executives and execute the tactical responsibilities required for successful communities. Those individuals are scrambling to grow their strategic skills without the air cover of more experienced program managers and it’s a lot to take on while still executing on tactical engagement goals.

Organizations are not moving more quickly on senior community hires because they currently don’t have the capability in-house, are not confident in their ability to hire the right person, and know that there is a strategic risk in making the wrong choice. Another reason is that because it’s now seen as a skill set needed for all leaders, it’s unclear whether hiring a handful of individuals is even the right approach.

Measuring Community Value Helps Make the Case for Hiring

The good news is that because more community programs are demonstrating that they can prove value, community budgets are growing.

In the short term, much of that budget is going to contractors and consultants that can help shape community programs and train internal resources in community management skills.

In the long term, I believe that will open up community hiring for more roles. Those hires will more often be responsible not for individual communities, but as staff for internal centers of excellence that help coach, train, and support staff across the organization. We are seeing this more in client work, where we are helping to build and support centers of excellence in community management.

Taking your next steps in a community career

November 23, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Ted McEnroe, Head of Research, The Community Roundtable

In D.C., there is something known as “the Washington Read.” When a new book comes out, you flip straight to the index and see if you were mentioned (for good or bad). The closest equivalent in TheCR world is in the Community Careers and Compensation report, where people flip to the salary chart and say, “How do I stack up?” Then they look at the upper tiers and add, “…And how do I get there???”

There’s no magic bullet – but the good news is there is evidence that you can get there.

The average community professional in the CCC 2015 survey has a dozen or more years of work experience and more than five years of community management work – but just a bit over two years in their current job. For Community Strategists and Directors of Community, the experience numbers grow, but the time in current role doesn’t change much. What’s that mean? That most community professionals are on their second or third role – and improving their salaries as they gain experience.

How are they finding these jobs? Generally, not through external ads. Turns out only about 13 percent of Directors of Community got their jobs from an external ad. Two-thirds said they either defined their own director role or were approached by the hiring manager directly. So make those connections, work those networks, and be entrepreneurial about your opportunities.

It’s worth it – and turns out it’s possible, too.

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Want to get started enriching your community career? Check out the training options for community professionals in TheCR Academy!

Sweating the details: TheCR community research process

October 26, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Head of Research, The Community Roundtable

What goes into the community research that The Community Roundtable does in the field of community management? Data, collaboration and experience.

It’s an exciting day for me. Today I shipped out the first draft of the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 reports (yes, there are two versions) to the graphic designer to get the layout done. That will be followed by more edits, more layout tweaks and more edits after that, leading up to the final report release in the middle of next month.

I’ve written before about the cooperative effort that goes into creating the questions for each of our core research offerings. But for those of you who took the time to complete the survey, it may seem like things get awfully quiet between the survey period and the release. And you’re right. It gets quiet – like library or research lab quiet.

Once the data is in and the survey period closes, we have a lot of data to go through. For the CCC, as an example, we end up with about 65,000 individual data points to review, and formulas to write off those bits of information. For the State of Community Management, the number is even higher. Data is entered, formulas are written, and then we do through the painful process of cleaning. That means the members of the research team begin going through line by line looking for red herrings, typos, misinterpreted replies, and data in improper formats. These range from respondents who may feel that all 20,000 members of their external community should be counted as volunteers, to cultural differences, like using 1,5 versus 1.5 for headcount in a community team.

Jillian Bejtlich from our team is our spreadsheet wiz, and we go through the data, the myriad ways we can parse it to test hypotheses, find patterns and answer questions. Rachel Happe, of course, joins the fray as we go through, and depending on the project, other members of the team take a look as well. We evaluate, look for those “Aha!” moments, and over a period of days and weeks, discussions and debates, settle on tentative key findings for the report.

The data supporting those key findings – and every finding has supporting data – are checked and rechecked, and the findings and their supporting evidence are presented to the team for approval. I love and hate this part, because already a lot of work has gone into it, and the challenging and wordsmithing are both valuable and a discussion of how ugly my baby is.

Key findings in place, we bring in additional data (if there is any), clean and recheck the data to make sure nothing new and weird has developed, and we begin to build the major graphics for the report. Each report has a handful of graphics we know will be central to the document – in the SOCM, it’s engagement profiles and variations on the Community Maturity Model. In the CCC, it’s the salary table and the Community Skills Framework. The design for these graphics begins even before we have data in place, and continues as data comes in, to make sure that the end graphics tell an effective story.

From there, we build out the boilerplate data sections – those we know we are going to have in each SOCM or CCC. It’s the same process. Examine, analyze, compare, lay out, write copy, and it gets repeated for each element. While we go through this, we are continuing to build two lists – one of data points that deserve further exploration and one of data points that can be used in other projects – since after all, not every piece of data and every observation can fit in a single report. We also make sure the information we gather is making it into other aspects of our work – questions we can answer on TheCR blog in the upcoming months, webinars and calls we can plan, and elements we can add to our online training and other assets. We also use this information in less formal ways – when you ask us a question on Facebook or Twitter, we are drawing from our experience and knowledge of the data – not just hypothesizing based on anecdote. Members of TheCR Network, too, are able to take advantage of our insights and those of their peers as they dig into the thorny issues of community.

From there, we fall into a more traditional editorial process. Write. Edit. Rewrite. Approve graphics. Rewrite. Edit. And so on. In the end, we end up with reports full of data and analysis that can answer your questions and help you plan your community or career strategy. And a whole lot more.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s a joy to do. And none of it would be possible without the input of hundreds of community management professionals like you – who take the time, share their data and help us create a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Communities are complex organisms, and there are no magic formulas – many of us have learned that through experience. There’s also no one piece of research that will answer every question. But bit by bit, together we’ve created a body of work that can guide communities new and old, large and small, on the road to success.

Oh – and keep an eye out for the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 summary report next month. I can’t wait for you to meet our newest baby.

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