The Community Roundtable

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

Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day!

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January 27, 2025 is the day (ok, we think every day is the day, but especially today!) to show the community managers in your life some love!

You can check out our CMAD gift guide and past gift guides here or tag them on social media channels with #cmad2025.

We hope you use Community Manager Appreciation Day 2025 to reflect on the incredible work you do every day to help make global online communities safe, productive, and effective.

We’ve always loved the ‘thank it forward’ concept so in honor of Community Manager Appreciation Day we are encouraging everyone to take a moment and shine a spotlight on the work of a community manager you know. This might take the form of a shout-out or kudos in an internal comms channel, it could be a handwritten thank you note, or it could be an endorsement on linkedin.

Community Manager Appreciation Day Events

The good community folks over at Led by Community are aggregating worldwide community events in celebration of CMAD.

Check out the event list below and add your own!

CMAD-EventsBanner

Need ideas on how to thrive as an online community professional? Check out these self-care ideas from 25 community leaders!

Community Management Self Care

Three Reasons Community Managers are (Still) Crucial to Online Communities

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We logged into LinkedIn today, to post our planned Community Manager Appreciation Day 2024 posts, and immediately were sidetracked with more news of amazing community professionals being laid off.

It’s heartbreaking to see so many talented community managers without a community. If you’re reading this there is a really good chance you already know that a community without professional community management is not going to thrive.

In addition to our annual spotlight on amazing community professionals we know, we also want to use today’s Community Manager Appreciation Day celebration to highlight why community managers are so crucial to the success of a online community.

Three Reasons Community Managers are (Still) Crucial to Online Communities

Three Reasons Community Managers are (Still) Crucial to Online Communities

Community Managers Cultivating a Positive and Productive Environment

Community managers play a foundational role in establishing and upholding a positive and productive environment in all kinds of online communities. In both brand/marketing communities and employee (intranet) communities this involves setting clear guidelines, fostering respectful interactions, and mitigating disruptive behavior.

By maintaining a healthy atmosphere, community managers encourage constructive contributions, knowledge sharing, and positive engagement – key ingredients for a thriving online community. You wouldn’t purchase accounting software, and then expect it to take care of itself. When organizations assume their online community can “just run itself” or delegate pieces to different department without the training, skills, or time to manage it they are setting themselves up for failure.

Community Managers Bridge the Gap Between Members and Organizations

Again, this is true for the bridge between employees and their organizations (internal/intranet communities) and brands and their fans/users/followers. Community managers are the crucial link between two very different parties, facilitating two-way communication, collecting member feedback, and translating it into actionable insights for the organization.

This bridge fosters trust and loyalty among members, allowing them to feel heard and valued. Additionally, it provides organizations with valuable data to improve their products, services, and overall strategy. Successful communities empower their members and that work falls to community managers.

Community Managers Create a Sense of Belonging and Shared Identity

Just like every company has a unique tone for their brand, each online community also has a personality. Without active and thoughtful community management is a voiceless void. By fostering a sense of community, community managers help members feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. This motivates them to contribute, stay engaged, and even act as brand advocates, further strengthening the online community.

These are just three very high-level reasons that community managers are crucial to online communities. Every year, our State of Community Management research reconfirms the fact that communities with strategic community management have an outsized impact on their organization.

You can view our annual Community Manager Appreciation Day post here.

Celebrating #cmgr on Community Manager Appreciation Day 2023

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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!

Community management salaries are on the rise

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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?