community research Archives

What is a Center of Excellence?

Centers of Excellence are groups that are charged with enabling their organizations with a specific practice or expertise and often have other names, whether that is an Enablement Group, Adoption Team, or Internal Consulting. Historically, this has not been the role of community program teams, who were generally tasked with managing one community.

Community Centers of Excellence Enable Distributed Leadership

However, as communities have become more integrated into organizations and as they address more objectives across the employee and customer experience, more people are involved in their management and leadership. The result is growing demand for community management expertise that falls on the community team to deliver. We see this evolution accelerate as communities mature. Only 11% of early communities are explicitly resourced to be centers of excellence – transitioning to a majority of community teams for the most mature community programs. This dynamic is also seen in the growth of groups outside of the community team producing programs in the community. At Stage 4, a majority of communities have cross-functional peers, community leaders, and community members leading programs – all of whom need guidance or training on how to do so effectively.

What kind of enablement services do community teams deliver?

Early on, community teams universally focus on technical support, training, and to a slightly lesser degree, coaching and templates. As community programs mature, they tackle metrics and reporting, consulting, and for some, enterprise governance. Community budgets reflect this transition. In Stage 1, community management resources are only 19% of the total community budget. By Stage 4, 43% of community program budgets go toward talent acquisition and training.

These services correlate with increased reporting responsibilities and increased expectations for engagement for cross-functional peers. More people and groups are involved in both managing aspects of communities, interested in their performance, and measured on their engagement. No longer are community programs isolated and discrete. Instead, they are expanding to align organizational groups in order to address myriad employee and customer experience objectives.

Learn more about centers of excellence and online community programs in the State of Community Management 2021. Download your free copy.

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training, The Community Roundtable

This is it – the final week of survey collection for the State of Community Management 2016. Already, hundreds of community professionals have shared their insights and data – getting their community maturity score and a cup of coffee (or donation in their name) along the way.

Coffee has been around for centuries – but the Community Maturity Score was introduced in 2015 for the first time – the culmination of years of research into how the most effective online communities operate. Every community professional who completed a survey got their scores in each of the 8 competencies of our Community Maturity Model. Awesome, right? We all love getting data about ourselves, whether it’s a Buzzfeed-type quiz (Which Monty Python and the Holy Grail character are you, anyway?) or something more in-depth.

But let me give you three reasons to contribute to more in depth community research.

Your data turns the report into a guide for your community.

A primary goal of The State of Community Management research isn’t just to capture what community professionals are doing, it’s to capture what the best communities do in order to succeed. You want to get there, right? Well, it’s a lot easier to get there if you know both where you are AND where you want to go.

What’s the first thing you need to know when you look at a map? Where you are. Only then can you plot your route.

Data can give you confidence, and give your suggestions greater weight with stakeholders.

Over seven years, The Community Roundtable has become a trusted third-party source for research on community best practices. We hear from dozens of community professionals who use each report for strategic planning and operational guidance. But by taking the survey, you’ll have a better sense of the questions that drive the data.

And, when you present your ideas to stakeholders, you’ll have the data on hand to back up your points, and challenge their perceptions and preconceived notions of community.

One example: Year after year, the State of Community Management survey has busted the 90-9-1 myth – that just one percent of members create the vast majority of the content.

Your data helps you recognize the similarities – and differences – between your community and others.

Let’s face it, community can be a lonely place. When you take the SOCM survey and read the report – suddenly it’s easy to see that the issues you face and the successes you celebrate are being faced and celebrated by hundreds of other community professionals. Every survey we get means we can dig a little deeper into the data and find more comparisons, like:

You run a nonprofit community – how much do you have in common with for-profit organizations?
Your community is small – are there lessons you can learn from larger ones?
How do you compare with other communities using your platform?

We can’t answer these kinds of questions without enough data to make meaningful comparisons.

By sharing your data you’re not only making it more useful to you, you’re making it more powerful for everyone.

We were thrilled with the results of last year’s Community Maturity Scores, but we made some key changes for 2016, too, to make them even better.

So, please, set aside the 20 or so minutes you need to take the survey – and know that what you put into it will only enhance what you can get out of the final report.

And while we’re at it, we’ll even make sure you get a free coffee out of it, by giving you a Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts gift card. Go to https://the.cr/socm2016survey to get started – but do it soon. We are closing the survey period on Friday, March 18th!