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The Community Roundtable

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

Community Role Profile: Director of Community

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Director of Community

OVERVIEW OF ROLE
​ Directors of community lead community programs and typically lead teams that include community specialists, managers, and strategists. The often have operational backgrounds and are paired with community experts with their focus on securing internal support, integrating across the organization, managing a team, and communicating strategic progress.

​ RESPONSIBILITIES

Directors of community focus on the health of a community program. They are responsible for operations – planning and delivering on the community roadmap. Their priorities tend to be governance, internal advocacy, training, and measurement.

​ A large part of the director of community role is as an internal champion – ensuring that executives and other stakeholders understand the value of the community, are getting the information they need, and that the community is aligned with their priorities. While directors still participate occasionally in tactical responsibilities and a community background is valuable, their main focus is on operational strategy.

​ MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE COMMUNITY
​Successful directors of community exhibit strong leadership, relationship building, and communication skills.

Director of Community

To learn more about the Director of Community Role, and view Director of Community Job Descriptions download our Community Careers and Compensation report – now available for free download.

Community Role Profile: Community Manager

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Photo of Man Holding a Book

OVERVIEW OF ROLE
​ Community managers often oversee more processes than people and are the generalists of the community field. Although some community managers manage moderators or specialists, many work with other teams as the voice of the community. A community manager can be an entry-level role in some companies but on average they are mid-level professionals with over a decade in the workforce and six+ years in community.

​ RESPONSIBILITIES
Community managers are the face and voice of the community. To make the community successful, they work with members to help them find value while ensuring organizational sponsors also receive value.
Community managers balance tactical engagement and programming activities with more strategic responsibilities like planning and reporting. In small organizations, they are likely responsible for everything related to the community, while at larger organizations they may have direct reports, work on a larger team, or have the support of outsourced resources.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE COMMUNITY

​ A community manager’s special gift is empathy – a knack for understanding members and their motivations, their needs and goals, then connecting them with other members, content, and programs that help them achieve their goals.

Community Manager Role

To learn more about the Community Manager Role, and view Community Specialist Job Descriptions download our Community Careers and Compensation report – now available for free download.

Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities

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A lot has changed in the community landscape in the last few years. We’ve seen movement on the vendor side, increased executive support for community programs, and the continued maturation of community roles.

​To further explore some of these changes in community roles and responsibilities, we partnered with Higher Logic to provide in-depth looks at the roles defined in the Community Careers and Compensation report and profile six real-life community professionals in a number of different roles.

The resulting eBook, Community Management: Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities, provides a practical guide for community professionals, hiring managers, and HR teams looking to better understand community roles and responsibilities today.

What skills does a community manager need
Katie Baumer Community Manager
Community Management resources

Through Community Management: Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities you will:

  • Understand distinctions in community management roles. The Community Careers and Compensation research collected data for three common community roles – and the years of experience, salary, and skills required for each.
  • Meet real-life community professionals. Six community professionals share how they found their current community role, and share advice for those interested in pursuing a career in community management.
  • Prepare job descriptions. Use the research data to determine the qualifications necessary for different community roles and the responsibilities and main priorities of each.
  • Explore resources that advance community management skills. Whether you’re looking to build your own skills or are a manager looking to increase your team’s skills, the research highlights the top resources professionals use to network and build their capabilities.

Learn more and download the free eBook now.

Online Community Professionals Emerge as Transformational Leaders

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As organizations evolve, community managers provide leadership and engagement models to suit a new era of work.

January 23, 2020

Boston, MA: The recently released Community Careers and Compensation 2020 report from The Community Roundtable reveals that online community professionals are uniquely situated to lead their organizations into the future of work. According to the research, 63% of community professionals were promoted in their roles in the last year, suggesting they will have an outsized impact on the organization’s success in the coming years.

The Community Careers and Compensation 2020 report explores how online community roles are evolving to meet the needs of an evolving workplace. Based on a survey of 325 global community management professionals, the report provides a research-backed snapshot of trends in community roles, responsibilities, team structures, and compensation, and includes a comprehensive index of community job descriptions.

Individuals that participated in the research represent a diverse set of employee and customer community programs that span industries, organizational size, and use cases. These community programs range in age from pre-launch to a handful that have been operating for over 20 years.

“Over the last decade we’ve seen the career path for online community professionals grow, and we’ve now reached the point where organizations realize how critical the role is to overall organizational success,” said Jim Storer, Principal at The Community Roundtable. “Still, only 19% of organizations with communities have a defined career path and only 17% have an approved and resourced community roadmap. Now that communities are poised to provide immense ROI for their organizations, it’s time for HR departments to focus on how to best recruit and retain seasoned community talent.”

The Community Careers and Compensation 2020 report is designed to help community professionals, and those that hire and manage them, get a better understanding of emerging trends and develop a strategy to ensure community teams are properly resourced to maximize organizational value.

About The Community Roundtable: The Community Roundtable is the leading, global resource for the community management industry. The Community Roundtable helps organizations from Fortune 500s to start-ups and associations recognize, define, and leverage the power of their communities. Through the industry’s only comprehensive community management research, The Community Roundtable provides training, events, and consulting to help companies recognize real ROI from their community programs. TheCR Network – the world’s premier resource for community professionals, connects hundreds of community practitioners worldwide for networking, professional development, and support. Learn more at communityroundtable.com

Do community manager roles change as communities mature?

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By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

Explaining what you do as a Community Manager is never easy – and it turns out, it’s likely to change as your community matures. That’s right – not every community manager does the same thing, and all community manager roles evolve as their community does. (We can see you nodding along at your desk – this is one of those “I knew it!” type facts that confirms a long held belief in the community community.

In the State of Community Management 2016 survey, we asked respondents how they spent their time among the five skill sets of our Community Skills Framework – Engagement, Content, Strategic, Technical and Business.

Learn more about the Community Skills Framework and the 50 skills of community by downloading our Community Careers and Compensation 2015 report.

We found subtle but noteworthy changes when we compared the skills of Stage 1, relatively immature communities, with those that scored in Stage 3 or 4 on our Community Maturity Model. Early-stage community managers spent the majority of their time on engagement and content skills – 57%. The same held true for more mature communities, but the balance shifted. Whereas early-stage community managers spent the greatest percentage of their time developing content – 31%, Stage 2 and 3 communities spent their time on engagement – 35% and 34%, respectively.

SOCM2016_Fact_#7_EvolvingRoles

The data show a second shift that happens as a community matures. Stage 1 managers spent almost as much time on technical issues in their community – 19%, as they did on strategic and business elements combined – 24%. By Stage 2, that begins to shift, and in Stage 3 and 4,  community managers are spending 32% of their time on strategy and business, and 14% on technical skills.

Age ain’t nothing but a number

What about age? It would make sense that someone in a new community would need to spend more time on content as they ramped it up, so you might think that we’d see the same kinds of shifts with age. Turns out, though, just as with people, maturity and age don’t necessarily go together. Splitting the sample by community age showed absolutely no correlation between community age and how community managers spent their time. Stage 1 communities that were more than 10 years old looked just the same as those started in 2013-2015.

As with so many things in community, the evolution of community manager roles is non-linear. It will happen as your community grows and develops – it’s just not a matter of time.

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Announcing our new eBook: Defining Community Management Roles

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Defining Community Management Roles

Click here to download the free eBook.

The Community Roundtable is proud to announce the latest product in our Community Manager Salary Survey platform, a new eBook entitled “Defining Community Management Roles”. The eBook, sponsored by Jive, uses our research to target one of the pain points we most often hear from community professionals – the lack of clear role definitions in community management. This is a problem for human resources professionals and hiring managers – because standards for what defines a community manager role, versus a community strategist or director of community can be difficult to ascertain, and as a result, providing proper compensation, support and professional development opportunities is difficult.

Of course, the problem is a more personal one for community professionals, who seek career paths but are often stymied by the unclear lines between roles, or get overwhelmed and burn out because their job is far more demanding than their defined role (and compensation) reflect. The problem is not a surprise – community management is evolving, and as such roles change – but if we fail to shape it, we stymie its growth as a profession.

The Community Manager Salary Survey and this eBook are among the beginning steps to bring clarity to community management roles. The eBook distills our CMSS research into a practical guide to understand and hire for three community management roles: Community Manager, Community Strategist and Director of Community. We give you more context about each role, the relevant high level data related to each role, a profile of someone who exemplifies the role and a baseline job description for each role.

Download the free eBook now.

We also profile three wonderful members of TheCR Network – Eileen Foran, Maria Ogneva and Christian Rubio, as examples of what these roles mean in practice.

We are preparing for the second year of the CMSS now, and we appreciate the initial feedback we got when we announced the results of our 2014 survey last fall. But we’d love to hear more and open a discussion. What are your biggest challenges, either as a community professional or a manager in charge of community professionals? What didn’t the first year of the CMSS address, and what did it address effectively?

We look forward to hearing from you – and we hope you’ll take a look at the new eBook – and the full Community Manager Salary Survey 2014, if you haven’t had a chance.