The Community Roundtable

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

Help Community Programs Scale

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The Policies & Governance competency of the Community Maturity Model™  details operational guidelines for successful online community programs. Policies refer to how a community interacts and can be divided into two areas: Terms of service – How a community is managed in legal terms and Guidelines – Articulate what behaviors are expected and why, plainly. Governance is how the community team is structured, operates within an organization, and supports community-related activities across the organization.

Most organizations could support multiple communities with myriad use cases. The most common include:

  • General employee communities for knowledge sharing and collaboration
  • Customer support communities for providing fast, inexpensive, always-on access to answers to product and service questions.
  • Membership communities for groups like students, patients, alumni, or association audiences

In 2021, we saw the emergence of the “Center of Excellence’’ (CoE) approach, where community work is decentralized, but supported with a host of resources. While responses from this year’s data suggest CoEs are falling out of favor, digging deeper shows a different perspective.

Help Community Programs Scale

Comparing the data from respondents who reported “one community” vs. “a network of communities” at their organization, we found a dramatic increase in CoEs once a network exists (i.e., once they’re past the initial use case). Also interesting, 17% of respondents (8% in networked communities) reported only ad hoc/informal governance. Question: Who’s in charge of the communities there? If this is you, please contact us. We want to feature you in a case study.

Interested in Growing Your Community? Become an Enabler!

On a related note, those with a network of communities are more likely to help communities programs scale by providing enabling resources to their organization than those with a single community. When comparing total data on community resources from 2021 to 2022 there isn’t much to report. Comparing responses from individual communities vs. a network of communities tells a different story (see pg. 45 of the 2022 SOCM or the image above).

It’s interesting to note: 30% of community managers representing a single community provide none of the resources mentioned in the survey, which likely results in a less strategic initiative. For those who want to grow beyond a single community, get out there and coach/evangelize.

Want to help community programs scale? Start a center of excellence?

Check out this short interview with Claudia Teixeira, Senior Knowledge and Learning Consultant at the World Bank Group.

Claudia and Anne Mbugua discuss what a center of excellence entails, the path to centers of excellence at the World Bank Group, and advice for implementing a center of excellence at your organization. Listen now.

Get more community ideas and advice in the 13th annual 2022 State of Community Management report:

Help Community Programs Scale

Community Strategy Must Balance Business and Member Needs

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The Community Maturity Model™’s Strategy competency tracks how business and community goals align to achieve results for both the community program and the organization as a whole.

Community strategy balances the business’ need to drive revenue or cost savings with the needs of community members. This ensures that your community program is contributing meaningfully to your organization while providing significant value for members. If you don’t have a community strategy, use our community strategy worksheet to get started.

Our State of Community Management 2022 research shows that community programs with an approved strategy continue to grow. 71% of this year’s total have an approved strategy compared to just 58% pre-pandemic (2020) and 66% last year.

Despite this positive trend, there were still respondents who reported “no approved strategy.” While this has dropped (43% total in 2020 to 29% in 2022), it’s still troubling. A community program with no approved strategy can’t correlate positive outcomes back to business goals. Everything from ROI to long-term member engagement stems from having an approved community strategy.

An approved community strategy is a critical step to develop a fully integrated community program.

Note: Approved and operational community strategies were relatively flat when compared with the prior year (54% in 2022 vs. 56% in 2021), but well ahead of pre-pandemic response (44% in 2020).

If you don’t have a community strategy in place, now is the time to start.

As an organization, we tend to err towards a simple strategy that can adapt and be responsive as the community matures. It can be daunting to get pen to paper and start drafting your strategy but we have two easy ways to get started.

First, complete our (free) Community Score assessment. This will take about 20 minutes. When you complete the Community Score you’ll receive your results via email, detailing where your community strengths and opportunities lie.

community strategy worksheet

Next use the Community Strategy worksheet, found on page 15 of the 2022 State of Community Management report, to start your strategy outline. The worksheet helps you identify organizational and member goals for your community program. Then a short exercise helps you define the types of behavior change that are necessary for your community to meet those goals.

Communities Change How We Work

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The global health crisis brought on by COVID-19 has put the transformation of work into stark relief. It has changed how we work. Those that had already started to use digital technologies to change work found it an easier transition. However, those that had not explored the flexibility of digital work environments have struggled – discovering that ‘lift and shift’ approaches that replicate in-office dynamics directly to the virtual environment don’t actually work very well. Digital workspaces also and heighten and expose cultural problems that have long existed.

The way we work is changing – and it will never go back because the flexibility and fluidity that digital connectivity and collaboration offers is immense; it literally gives many individuals hours of their day back, helps them juggle family and work responsibilities, and increases their productivity when done well.

At The Community Roundtable we’ve been working with online work communities for over a decade and they are demonstrating a new organizational model that fits the digital and knowledge economy. Instead of rigid, control-based governance, communities require structures that rely on shared intrinsic motivators to inspire, support, and reward work. As a result, communities capture more energy, productivity, and leadership while often achieving massive scale. They don’t just allow self-management and individual agency – they require it. Behaviors – not roles – determine leadership, productivity, and personal growth.

Understanding Community Governance

In 2009 we created the Community Maturity Model to help the organizations with which we worked to understand the changes required to move from a highly extrinsically-controlled, hierarchical, and rigid model of organizations to an intrinsically-supported, networked and fluid organizational model.

How to improve community engagement

We’ve spent the last decade publishing annual research, The State of Community Management, and holding roundtable discussions with experts and members of TheCR Network in order to understand how this evolution was happening in practice. We have learned a lot.

Evolving Governance Standards

This week speaking at the Digital Workplace Disruption conference, I was reminded by how far the discussion around the future of work has come; what once was the future of work is more and more the reality of work. Organizations are much more likely to understand that all the investments in technology will do nothing without investment in governance, management, leadership, and culture change. Organizations are also accepting that the COVID crisis will not end the change in working practices so their choice is to adapt or become increasingly inefficient.

It seemed like a good time to revisit how we represented the competencies in the Community Maturity Model visually – because many harken to a more traditional understanding. Strategy is no longer mandated and fixed, but evolving. Leadership is not related to a role but to behaviors. Culture is easier to understand.

The Community Maturity Model is evolving in the following ways:

STRATEGY

In successful communities, strategy co-created and adapted as needed. Alignment comes from a compelling shared purpose that energizes everyone in its pursuit. Commitment comes from the shared value that is generated by the community – which returns more value to every participant than is contributed. Intrinsic incentives are aligned across the ecosystem rather than fractious between creators, distributors, and consumers of value so commitment and loyalty do not require coercion.

LEADERSHIP

Leadership is achieved not through a bestowed role but by behaviors that earn the trust of others. Everyone has access to lead and leadership is earned by having a vision that resonates, relationships that influence, and a big enough network to have impact.

CULTURE

When the focus of work is on transactions and content, culture is ambiguous and difficult to understand. However, when behaviors determine leadership and decisions, culture becomes clear. Culture can be seen in the breadth and depth of different engagement behaviors, which we define broadly in the Community Engagement Framework. Measuring these behaviors and tracking them over time can reveal how culture is changing.

MANAGEMENT

In our traditional understanding of management is that it is a role responsible for managing work tasks and the people performing those tasks. It is focused on assigning, monitoring, and reporting. It is disturbingly patronizing and paternalistic. In communities, there is no structural control that can force and pressure members into doing anything and it, therefore, creates a more democratic and equitable culture. Community management then is not about managing individuals and their actions – it is focused on managing the environment and the governance model. Much of their work focuses on strategy, infrastructure, guidelines, programming, and measurement – all the things that define the vision and the boundary conditions while making it as easy as possible for members to contribute and access value.

CONTENT AND PROGRAMMING

We tend to obsess about content – and it is important but it’s not an end goal on its own, although you wouldn’t know that looking at many of our metrics. The objective of content is to help others learn something – and learning can also be done through conversation. So the goal is less about maximizing the amount of content and ensuring that there are learning pathways for people to explore at their own speed, full of opportunities to find content and connect with relevant peers and experts.

GOVERNANCE

In a extrinsically controlled organization, governances is focused on standardizing roles, tasks, processes, and rewards. It creates structures that tend to feel like constraints and cages and inhibit individuals from bringing their whole selves to work – because the organization does not celebrate the things we do and are that don’t fit in their boxes. Diversity in controlled organizations is a bug, not a feature. In communities, where every individual has self-efficacy and determines how they show up and contribute they are free to be who they want in any context. Differences are prized because it means the community can seize new opportunities that it couldn’t before. Differences challenge others to learn and explore. The goal of governance in communities is to ensure that the elements of a successful community exist and are updated as things change – and to create the boundaries that determine the purpose of the community, all of which are co-created with the community itself.

TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY

In organizations designed for control, tools and technology is a core mechanism to enforce control. It’s job is to increase the productivity of processes and outputs, which it does by standardizing them. The challenge with communications tools and technology is that good communications, relationships, and creativity cannot actually be forced. Tools can help and support but they can’t force someone to be more empathetic than they are. In a community environment, tools and infrastructure can make behaviors easier, through the UX design and integrations. By making some behaviors easy and others hard, tools increase the likelihood of behaviors without extrinsic coercion.

METRICS AND MEASUREMENT

In a production economy driven by extrinsic control, output is the primary artifact of productivity. In a knowledge economy, maximizing the production of knowledge/content is actually detrimental in that it overwhelms people and makes understanding and decision-making more difficult. One need only look at how effective disinformation campaigns are online. Overwhelmed with content, people rely on emotion not facts to focus their attention. With no control over tasks or individuals, the focus of communities is to make behaviors that lead to outputs easy and socially rewarded – so the focus on metrics becomes engagement behaviors vs. outputs. This puts the focus not on generating more content for its own sake but on building the connections, trust, and dialog necessary for a shared understanding and response. It turns out, it is also how to maximize creativity and innovation because it ensures people feel safe to share their ideas and questions.

The Future of Organizational Governance is Community Governance

Years ago, when I used to say that the future of all management was community management I would get confused reactions. Today, when I say that many people enthusiastically agree – because they see how poorly we are prepared to deliver a broad and inclusive economy that tackles the multiple complex crises we are facing. While organizations continue focusing on delivering more and cheaper products, individuals are literally struggling to live. The economy is working well for fewer and fewer people – and it is unsustainable, out of touch, and doing little to address the most pressing needs or biggest opportunities we have in front of us.

There is a different and better way to create economic wealth that is both equitable and sustainable. Communities change how we work.

The Community Maturity Model™

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The Community Roundtable is 10 years old this spring. One of the first things we did when we started was to create the Community Maturity Model as a way to frame our view of how communities approaches develop over time.

The Community Maturity Model™ serves several critical roles. It:

  • Creates shared expectations about how communities develop
  • Creates a taxonomy and consistency in The Community Roundtable’s content and research
  • Standardizes community discussions at a high-level so practices can be translated across use cases
  • Provides a measurement framework that allows benchmarking of effective community program practices
  • Gives community leaders a frame within which to innovate

We have not changed the Community Maturity Model™ in any significant way in those ten years. In the meantime, we’ve completed 10 annual research efforts and reports, hundreds of client engagements, and thousands of conversations with members of TheCR Network.

Things have changed a lot. We’ve learned a lot. It’s time for a change.

In updating the Community Maturity Model™ we were mindful that many organizations and individuals use the model and that The Community Score benchmarks against it. We do not want to upset the entire apple cart nor ruin a good thing. So we kept the fundamental structure the same – four stages and eight competencies.

The primary update, other than the look and feel, is to the descriptors that identify each competency, by stage. In the original model, these were inconsistent and informed by what was happening in the market in 2009. In studying communities and organizations for a decade, we now have a much better sense of what each of those milestones looks and feels like.

So, here it is – the updated Community Maturity framework!

Download a high-res version of the Community Maturity Model here.

Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing more thoughts about these definitions as well as updating existing resources. For now, we would like to thank the members of TheCR Network who helped us refine and think through these – changing many to better align with what they see on the ground.



Love it? Hate it? We would love to hear your feedback and discuss it with you in The Community Roundtable’s Facebook Group.

Using the Community Maturity Model for Internal Consulting at Microsoft

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One of the perks of TheCR Network membership is the opportunity for community managers to collaborate and solve challenges in working groups. Last fall, TheCR Network members formed a Community Maturity Assessment Working Group, with the goal of building a tool to measure the maturity of communities. Members of the group worked on persona exercises to understand member behaviors in different types and maturity stages of communities, and then used this information to outline maturity markers based on the competencies in the Community Maturity Model.

Community Maturity Model

This work helped extend the Community Maturity Model in new ways — both for TheCR and other members. We’ve already shared a couple examples on the blog here:

Most recently, another working group leader, Alex Blanton of Microsoft, shared how he’s using the Community Maturity Model for internal community consulting as part of TheCR Network’s weekly programming. Internal community consulting has been a trending topic in the network – we’ve hosted two other Roundtable calls on the topic – because our members are being asked to extend their skill sets to the rest of their organizations, through training and advisory services. We were excited to have Alex share how he has used the Community Maturity Model as a framework for the advisory work he does with internal engineering communities at Microsoft.

Alex adapted the working group’s assessment tool to align with the needs of the teams with which he consults. One of the services Alex offers is a 90-minute consultation including a maturity self-assessment based on the Community Maturity Model. Alex follows this session with a comparison to industry norms, recommendations and additional resources.

Alex Community Maturity Model Microsfot

Alex demoed his maturity assessment tool on a Roundtable call for TheCR Network.

Some lessons from Alex for starting internal maturity assessment consultations:

–Do consultations on paper. Don’t focus on a “score.” Alex starts his consultations on paper by printing out the Excel-based assessment tool (that automatically generates maturity values), so that clients focus on discussing where they are instead of on trying to achieve a number.

–Use the Community Maturity Model to start a conversation. Alex observes that as clients review the model, they sometimes disagree with colleagues about where their community belongs in certain competencies. Coming to alignment on the maturity level sparks conversation about community activities and progress in a way that helps identify gaps or opportunities.

–Offer a variety of service offerings. Recognizing that not all communities need the same level of support, Alex offers a tiered service model for consulting. For example, he developed an “8-Step Community Jumpstart” for new communities that aren’t yet ready for a full assessment and instead need to prioritize getting started.

If you use the Community Maturity Model in your work, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more about the Community Maturity Model and how other organizations are using it here.

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Looking to take your career in community management to the next level? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals. 

Is Having a Community Strategy Important?

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

This year’s State of Community Management research showed what we’re suspected for along time: ​the foundation of a successful community is a well-defined strategy that integrates social tools and methods with business goals and processes. It follows that a community’s strategy also aligns an organization’s goals with their member’s needs.

​Another prevalent idea that was confirmed by our research is that overall community strategies are maturing. Of course this makes sense – as more companies define and grow their practice of community management the industry becomes increasingly developed. This brings us to our community management fact of the week. We found that 72% of communities have an approved community strategy, signaling that organizations increasingly understand how to justify a community approach. That’s the good news! We also found that of that 72%, only 40% of those strategies are operational and measurable.

Fewer than 50% of communities with an approved strategy have an approved and resourced roadmap, suggesting a significant gap between community ambition and the ability to execute on it. This gap in understanding what is required to fully realize a community strategy is a barrier to community success. Best-in-class communities have a smaller gap between those with an approved strategy and those with a fully resourced roadmap – only about 25% of those with an approved strategy lack a roadmap.

SOCM Fact #4

 

Looking for more insights into community strategy? Download the State of Community Management 2014 report and check out the section on strategy – starting on page 26.

Does your community have an approved strategy? We’d love to hear more  in the comments!

This post is the fourth in a 10-part series highlighting some of the most thought-provoking data from the SOCM 2014 – brought to you via a fun poster – perfect for sharing on Twitter, hanging at your desk, or printing out and waving around your next community strategy meeting. You can see the first three posts here: Fact #01, Fact #02 and Fact #03 or downloadthe whole report today.

 

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Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input improves the quality of their work? It’s true! Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

Announcing The State of Community Management 2014

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SOCM 2014 SponsorsBy Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

The fifth annual State of Community Management report is here!

A lot has changed in the five years we have been publishing this research and the State of Community Management 2014 continues to push the boundary of what we collectively know about community management. As the discipline has matured we have been able to translate much more of it into quantitative data. This year’s report is chock full of data, segmented and delivered in ways that will help you plan and act.

The report includes:

  • Key Findings
  • Findings by Community Maturity Model competency
  • Guidance on using the research, by competency
  • Best practices from TheCR Network, by competency
  • Additional resources

What you’ll see in the data is that community management is standardizing – but still not mature or completely integrated into core business processes. Most community initiatives now have approved community strategies, which is fantastic – and quite a change from the early days of shiny object syndrome. However, all to often those strategies are not mirrored by approved and resourced roadmaps, pointing to one of the biggest challenges in the space today – funding the resources and programs that will translate aspirations to reality.

Also encouraging is that the vast majority of best-in-class (most mature) communities can measure value, indicating an important shift in the market from something that was considered innovative and unproven to something that is understood and measurable.

This research was the result of a community effort that included TheCR Network members who guided our exploration, experts who helped tease out best practices, TheCR team who all contributed in ways large and small and finally our sponsors – DNN, Enterprise Hive, Jive, Lithium, and Sitrion – who made it all possible.

The collaboration across our community allowed us to bring this rich data to you. We hope you find it interesting but more importantly, we hope this data helps you succeed. If it does, we would love to hear about how you used it to plan your roadmap, educate stakeholders or justify your budget.

Happy reading!

 

 

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Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input improves the quality of their work? It’s true! Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

 

 

Michael Pace on the Roles of Email and Social Media

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The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this podcast series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management. Our podcast series continues with episode #13, featuring Michael Pace, Director of Customer Support at Constant Contact. Highlights include:
  • Moving an email-oriented company into social media and community by internalizing the information about social media into the corporate psyche and processes
  • The changing, yet continuing place of email in our communications hierarchy
  • Creating “virtuous cycles” by providing recognition and sharing it with the larger community
  • How social media and community are creating new job roles
  • The “Social Media Council” model of bringing the social media from different departments together- is it necessary to have such a council based on a set of tools?
  • The “a-ha” moment of adopting social media: getting beyond the books and blogs and meeting people to gain knowledge first-hand

 

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Recap of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

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Last week, I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference and, with Ted Hopton, chaired the Community Development and Management track. There were a several notable changes to this event – the first was that the conference was broken up into disciplines and business processes which helped bring more business owners to the conference. The second was that the newer west coast version of this conference is approaching the size of its east coast counterpart, held in June every year in Boston. In my mind, both of these signal an evolution in the market from experimental to operational and it’s a good sign. There were still a lot of new faces and balancing the needs of those attendees with the needs of E2.0 “regulars” is something that needs to be done going forward.

The community development and management track received very positive remarks (although we’ll have to wait a bit to see the tabulated feedback – please fill in an evaluation if you were at the conference). I was happy to be able to introduce Mark Yolton of SAP (slides here) and Bill Johnston of Dell to the E2.0 conference crowd and both spoke to a packed room. Bill Johnston and a panel moderated by Claire Flanagan with Erica Kuhl of Salesforce.com and Megan Murray from Booz Allen Hamilton gave the audience the fundamentals of community and community management while weaving in their own case studies.

The track then focused on specific areas of community management – engagement, collaboration & project management, governance, analytics & measurement, and building support.  One of my favorite moments from the conference was when Joe Crumpler, an IS Manager at Alcoa Aerospace, mentioned that he finally realized at the conference that there was a name for what he did – community management – and that it really represented for him a new way of managing teams. I couldn’t agree more as I think community management is both a role and a discipline or methodology of general management.

Other interesting comments/themes that I heard over the course of the event:

  • Alcoa has reduced the need for status meetings almost entirely by using social environments, which has direct cost and productivity implications. They’ve seen a 30% increase in work time for their team members. Mark Yolton from SAP chimed in and said they had reduced their status meetings to one time per month/5 minutes per project.
  • There is a big cultural change getting people comfortable with sharing ‘in process’ work vs. finalized documents. Individuals often want to perfect something before it is seen and reviewed.
  • There was a lot of discussion around finding the individuals in a network that are most capable of spreading information or spurring action and a growing realization that networks and communities must be looked at as collections of different segments/behaviors to effectively manage them. Erica Kuhl of Salesforce talked about their efforts to create the various personas that make up their community and how they think of creating effective experiences for each of those personas.
  • Many people are mis-using the ‘community’ term and often confusing it with a target audience.  The two are not the same thing.
  • Week ties are often misunderstood because they quickly can become very strong, relevant ties when the context changes.
  • Orchestrating ‘A Ha’ moments for others is less about evangelism and more about persistence and getting people to see value vs. getting excited by a shiny object

Two of the track panel moderators, Claire Flanagan and Robin Harper, created interesting and very effective panel formats, interestingly both used slides to help structure the conversation just a bit.  Claire moderated a track on community managers and their role and did a compare/contract between the different perspectives on the panel.  Robin Harper used very simple slides, some with definitions, to help guide the panel and audience through the conversation. I felt like both formats allowed room for the discussions that make panels interesting, while giving the audience a framework for putting that conversation into context so they had clear take-aways.

Finally, the best part of a conference like this is the people. Gil Yehuda wrote a nice post about the E2.0 crowd that resonated with me and the highlights of my week included dinner with Community Roundtable members, catching up with friends and colleagues, and conversations with a variety of people that are working on different challenges in this space.  If you are working on community management or social collaboration it is worth putting this conference on your radar and I’m looking forward to the next event in June in Boston.

If you are interested in sharing and collaborating with other professionals in charge of enterprise social initiatives, come explore what membership in The Community Roundtable has to offer.

Photo credit: This photo is from Alex Dunne’s excellent Flickr set “Enterprise 2.0 Conference Santa Clara 2010.”

Drupal Commons – Open Source Social Business?

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Late last week we heard about a new offering from Acquia, an open source software company focused on the Drupal social publishing system and a partner of The Community Roundtable.

The product is called Drupal Commons and it’s focused on expanding the use of Drupal in business. This is an interesting development because it may force proprietary community platforms to re-think their pricing models. Drupal Commons is free. Yes, Acquia will offer a host of value-added services, but the total cost of ownership should be dramatically lower than with proprietary solutions.

Drupal already powers robust communities like Intel’s Atom Developer Program, Novell’s Solution Provider Community and Intuit’s Quickbase Community, so it’s not like Drupal Commons is starting from scratch.

We spoke with the folks over at Acquia and what impressed us the most is that they understand that technology is just a piece of equation in building a vibrant, successful community. Our Community Maturity Model makes sense to them. Keeping your eye on all eight competencies (of which one is technology) is essential if you want to be be successful.

So if you’re trying to do more with less and want a proven community platform, you might want to check out Drupal Commons. You can try out an instance on the Acquia site or sign up for a webcast happening later this week to learn more.

Once you’ve had a chance to kick the tires, we’d love to hear what you think in the comments.