community health Archives

Foundations Of Community Success

January 11, 2022 By Jim Storer

Over the last two years, the place of community in organizations shifted, with community programs becoming a commonly required investment at all types of companies. The COVID-19 pandemic tipped communities from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Suddenly, the value of connecting employees and customers via an equitable and widely accessible digital network was obvious.

Well, obviously to community professionals. It’s not always easy to get organizational leaders on board with the resources and support needed to build comprehensive online community programs.

In this new look at data from the State of Community Management 2021 research, Foundations for Community Success explores:

Checking your community health: How do you decide what defines a healthy community for your use case?
Contributing to organizational success: With community becoming visible across the organization, it’s more important than ever to make sure your community directly contributes to defining organizational outcomes. How can you ensure that your community is aligned with business goals?
Building for long-term success: Community hasn’t ever been a ‘build it and they will come’ proposition. How can you use meaningful content and programs to lay the foundation for long-term engagement and success?

Based on the 2021 State of Community Management research, Foundations of Community Success was produced by The Community Roundtable and made possible with support from Higher Logic.

Download the ebook here.

Renee Vogt, Merck

September 6, 2016 By Jim Storer

Welcome to the latest episode in our community management podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers” featuring Renee Vogt, VTN Capability Owner at Merck.

Join TheCR’s founder and principal, Jim Storer, and director of marketing, Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about a variety of community topics, including:

What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
How can you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

Episode #42 features Renee Vogt, VTN Capability Owner at Merck. Join us as we chat about her team’s community purpose framework, how they help community stewards measure the value and health of each community, and how her background in knowledge management has shaped her community approach.

Check out episode #42 featuring Renee Vogt here:

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Did you know you can subscribe to “Conversations with Community Managers” iTunes? You can!

Raising Good Communities

February 15, 2010 By Rachel Happe

I am not the first, nor will I be the last to equate community management to parenting. Connie Bensen made the analogy and recently Simon Phillips wrote a post You Teach What You Accept that got at a similar behavior modeling aspect of community management. It’s a very apt analogy and it is a good way to think about community management – knowing what kind of community you want to raise is the first step.

I would extend the point beyond just parenting to all relationships. We get the relationships we are prepared to have at any given point. If we ourselves seek out constant reassurances because we need to feed our own egos, we will attract sycophants and the relationship will necessarily be un-equal. If we have an extreme need to control, we will have relationships with people looking for others to take responsibility. If we are insecure about our own self-worth, we will hang on to abusive relationships for far too long. If we do not know what we want, we will allow others to railroad us. This 1-to-1 relationship dynamic has been well trodden by others – just search for any book on confidence, anxiety, or relationships and you can find a lot written on the topic. All these things that hold true for relationships with each other, however, also hold true for communities and their leaders. The ability of the leader to be confident but not controlling, clear but not dictatorial, tolerant yet firm – in essence their ability to maintain a healthy balance between the needs of themselves and their organization and the needs of the community members – will have a huge impact on the health of the community overall.

While this is not at all new territory on the self-help bookshelf, it is a new and uncomfortable area for businesses. Businesses like to think of themselves as logical, efficient, and non-emotive operating entities. Most people understand at some level that they are anything but that. However, there is a collective denial that organizations have emotional personalities that often come with many of the same positive and negative personality quirks that individuals do. The real problem in denying this is that customers, employees, and partners often get it and react accordingly in order for them to maintain their own health. So if you have others entities creating strategies to mitigate their exposure to the negative aspects of your own business that are not being acknowledged internally, that relationship will be limited – and is unlikely to change or improve until the issues are acknowledged, discussed, and addressed in some way. In economic terms it is an opportunity cost and without acknowledging the issues, it isn’t even clear what the opportunity costs are.

Community managers are often the people who see this relationship most holistically – across business functions – from a customer’s or employee’s perspective. In that way, if the community manager has high emotional intelligence, they can help their companies ‘see’ – often for the first time – how they are perceived by the constituent group that they serve. That, of course, is worth little if the organization is unwilling and unmotivated to hear the input and respond to it. That in turn gets to budgets and resources for community initiatives – both for the community management staff but also for functional and line staff that will need resources to investigate, acknowledge, and address the issues being raised. Without the functional and operational resources to respond, community management teams will find themselves as frustrated receptors of understanding – with no real ability to solve the recurring issues brought to them by the community.

Organizations will fall into two primary categories in this area – much like individuals – those who care to do something about it and those who don’t. Companies who don’t have any interest in improving themselves to better their relationships and grow their business are probably better off stepping down from the social express right rnow.