Community Skills Framework Archives

3 Quick Community Wins for February

February 2, 2022 By Jim Storer

Check these three easy community management to-dos off your list and set yourself up for community success.

We are delighted that in recent years February has become a time to practice love in all its forms. If you’re into all that Cupid stuff? Awesome! But the rise of Galentine’s Day, along with increased calls for self-care is what really warms our hearts. Our quick wins for February focus on online community love.

1- Put your oxygen mask on first.

If you aren’t taking care of yourself, can you really do your best job taking care of other people in your online community? No. So, February is a great time to reflect on the parts of your online community management role that help you thrive. Thinking about your role and your future isn’t selfish; knowing yourself and where you excel and where you want to grow is only good for your community.

If you aren’t familiar with our Community Skills Framework, it’s a great way to assess your strengths and identify areas for growth and areas for outsourcing. You aren’t going to be great at every single community thing and that’s ok (more than okay – normal!) Identifying the places you should ask for help, hone your skills, and better use resources will make you happier at work and more productive. This short video walks you through all 50 skills in community management and helps you prioritize your time.

2- Show Your Superusers Some Love

Every online community – internal (employee community) and external (custom community) – has a handful of dedicated members who contribute more than the rest. Whether you have a formal superuser, advocacy, or membership leadership program, or informally track and interact with these members, now is a great time to show them some love.

5 Ways to Show Super Users Love in Your Online Community:

1- Swag. Everyone loves free stuff, and it doesn’t have to be an expensive investment. A hand-written note and some stickers go a long way with your superusers.

2- Shout-Outs. Highlight these members in the online community with a quick mention. Feeling seen and appreciated by online community managers makes super users feel valued.

3- Online Badges. If your online community uses badges, create a special badge to identify your superusers. This will also highlight your superusers as a resource to new members who may not understand how to engage when they join your online community.

4- Personally thank active contributors. It seems simple, but it helps increase member satisfaction.

5- Give them a sneak peek at an upcoming program, feature, or initiative. You’ll get valuable feedback and your superusers will love feeling like they got a behind-the-scenes look at something before everyone else does.

How to Start a Super User Program

If you don’t already have a superuser program in place you might consider putting that on your 2022 to-do list. Our State of Community Management research shows that when a member of an Average External Community shifts from a passive recipient of information to an active participant, their activity increases by more than 10x. Their ROI – the return they get for the time they invest – increases by over 200%. This makes investing in advocacy and member leadership programs a no-brainer.

This case study from Mimecast highlights how their community team nurtures their superusers, resulting in the growth of customer participation over 3x in two years.

3- Encourage Your Community to Say Thanks

Everyone is tired. Everyone is burnt out. Everyone is over being on Zoom. Ok, maybe not everyone, but definitely a lot of people. This last quick win is as much for your sanity as for the good of your community. Find a way this month to bring out the good people are feeling.

Maybe it’s a shout-out thread where members can recognize people or ideas that have inspired them recently. Maybe you start a gif-off channel in slack where people can share thank yous accompanied by delightful memes. Maybe you start an appreciation discussion where you tag three people who have made your work life easier/better/more fun/less crazy and ask them to tag three people, and so on.

A wise man (ok, it was Ferris Bueller) once said “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Use February as an excuse to slow down and show some love.

If you have other ways you like to show appreciation in your community we would LOVE to hear them! Please share in the comments below, in our free Facebook Group with over 1500 members, or tag us on twitter @thecr.

PS – We love you. After 14+ years in the community business, we know that we are only as successful as our community. You’re killing it out there, and we’re proud of you. Stay strong!

Community Management Skills That Matter: Technical

April 23, 2018 By Jim Storer

Technical Community Management Skills: Designing and building effective communities

Technical skills are unique in that they are most easily outsourced and often score lower than their true importance because not everyone on a team needs each specific skill. But as noted in our Community Careers and Compensation Report Key Findings,
developing a technical specialty is a great way to increase your value within a community team — and add to your paycheck. Not everyone needs technical skills in data analysis, API development or UX and design, but team members that have them provide great value. Community teams and those who lead them do need to understand where their technical strengths lie and what individual skills can do to strengthen the community if they are to reap the maximum benefits from them.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Data. Data. Data. ROI and engagement statistics are critical, and your community’s existence is heavily based on demonstrating behavior change and measuring community value, so it’s not surprising that the ability to collect and analyze data is seen as both a valued skill and a training need at all levels. Because community teams often need just a limited number of “experts” in other technical skills, community professionals may want to pursue the opportunities that most excite them, while keeping in mind community needs and desires.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Technical skills are unusual in that strategists and directors value the skills themselves less than their ability to manage the people who have strong technical skills on their team. At all levels, being tech savvy will help you move up the ladder — and investing in specific knowledge can help you develop into a community technologist role, a horizontal career path that has great value, particularly as a consultant. Software and application programming, for example, was the lowest scoring skill of all we surveyed — but being able to code software and APIs can be a hugely valuable to certain organizations or the vendors who serve them.

Want to level up more of your community management skills? Click a skill set to learn more:

CMGRs are Entry-Level? Not Anymore.

February 8, 2016 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable.

With the SOCM 2016 survey fully launched we have just one CCC fun fact left for you – and it’s probably something you’ve known for a while. CCC Fun Fact #8: Community management isn’t “entry-level” – the average community manager has more than 12 years of work experience including nearly five in community roles alone.

I bet you’re reading this, shaking your head. Of course great community management takes experience, but so often we see community jobs advertised as “entry-level” for laughably little money. The 2014 Community Manager Salary Survey demonstrated clearly that community managers are hardly entry-level employees in their skills or their experience, and this year’s CCC research confirms that. The average community manager has more than a decade of work experience, with much of that in community management. Most of the community managers in this year’s survey aren’t in their first job — but they may be in a new one. Half of the respondents have held their current job for less than 2 years.

If you’re looking to level up your community career the Community Skills Framework is a great place to start. You can identify your strengths and find growth opportunities that will help you advance your career – and maybe even get a raise!

Download the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 summary report now, or take the survey and get free access to the full report!

If you love research like the CCC we’d love your help with our current research initiative – The State of Community Management. Take the survey now and you’ll get free access to the full report in May!

CMAD 2016 – Unleash Your Inner Community Management Superhero

January 25, 2016 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Director of Marketing at The Community Roundtable

It’s no secret that we love community managers. We’ve sort of built our entire business around it! The truth is we not-so-secretly believe that every community professional has the ability to be a community management superhero. From defeating evil trolls to proving the strategic ROI of your community program you might as well be wearing a cape to work.

In honor of all the community professionals we love we put together a little look at some of the top skills that make a community pro, well – a pro. Happy CMAD (Community Manager Appreciation Day!) to all the community superheroes out there!

Looking for ways to boost your skill set? TheCR Network is an amazing training and education resource for community management professionals at every level.

50 Essential Skills in Community Management

December 21, 2015 By Jim Storer

We’re going to take a break from our weekly series of facts from the Community Careers and Compensation report to review the 50 essential community manager skills from the Community Skills Framework™.

We updated the Community Skills Framework™ as a means to explore the value of 50 essential skills of community management. This is the second iteration of the framework, which was launched in 2014 as a set of 37 skills in 4 skill families. Reviewing the data from 2014 with members of TheCR Network, we recognized that we hadn’t tapped into the full family of business and strategic skills — which we separated into two families, and added a number of other skills that we noted were absent from the first edition of the framework.

In the Community Careers and Compensation Survey — we asked community management professionals to rank the skills that are most valuable to their role and surface those skills which carry the greatest value across all community roles, as well as those that are most critical within individual community roles and use cases.

We also see an opportunity to use the framework as:

• A structure for strategic planning

• A tool for online community manager training and professional development

The Community Skills Framework™ gives community leaders a way to better identify and understand skill gaps and opportunities for creating stronger teams

The 50 Essential Community Manager Skills

—ENGAGEMENT COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SKILLS—

Listening & Analyzing
Response & Escalation
Moderation & Conflict Facilitation
Promoting Productive Behaviors
Empathy & Member Support
Facilitating Connections
New Member Recruitment
New Member Welcoming
Member Advocacy
Behavior Change & Gamification

—STRATEGIC COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SKILLS—

Community Strategy Development
Roadmap Development
Policy & Guideline Development
Needs & Competitive Analysis
Measurement, Benchmarking & Reporting
Trendspotting & Synthesizing
Consulting
Executive Coaching
Content Strategy Development
Evaluating Engagement Techniques

—BUSINESS COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SKILLS—

Program Management
Business Model Development
Budget & Financial Management
Team Hiring & Management
Contractor Hiring & Management
Selling, Influencing & Evangelizing
Community Advocacy & Promotion
Training Development & Delivery
Vendor Management
Governance Management

—CONTENT COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SKILLS—

Communication Planning
Writing
Graphics & Design
Multimedia Production
Narrative Development
Editing
Curation
Program & Event Planning
Taxonomy & Tagging Management
SEO &/or Internal Search Optimization

—TECHNICAL COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SKILLS—

Systems Administration & Configuration
Data Collection & Analysis
Tool Evaluation & Recommendation
Technical Support
Member Database Management
Platform Architecture & Integration
Technology Issue Resolution
Software & Application Programming
UX & Design
Algorithm Design & Data Manipulation

How do your community skills stack up against the list of essential community manager skills? Any areas you’d like to focus on for your personal growth as a community manager? What is your list of essential community manager skills?

Want to dig deeper into the essential community manager skills?

Check out our free Community 101: Models and Frameworks course to walk through the Community Skills Framework™. Use the worksheet included with the free course to document where you are and how you can level up your essential community manager skills.

Community Management Models and Frameworks Free Online Course

The three career paths of the community professional

November 24, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Ted McEnroe, Head of Research, The Community Roundtable

One of the target goals that we had for the Community Careers and Compensation survey in 2015 was to be able to shed more light on the skills of community. That’s why we undertook a significant review and revision of the Community Skills Framework, growing it from 37 to 50 skills overall. We also changed the lens for how we looked at those skills. In 2014, we wanted to know if you had a skill and/or responsibility for that skill in your role. This year, we asked how much value each skill had to you.

The difference is subtle but significant. You may have a skill. You may even be responsible for using it. But you may think it’s not really valuable for your community role. For example, a Director of Community may know how to moderate. They may even have titular responsibility for moderation in the community (because they oversee moderators). But the ability to moderate is not something they might use on a daily basis.

Looking at the skills framework in this way, we saw something interesting happen. We started to see a connection between some of the skills people valued most and their compensation.

Take business skills. Those who said business skills had the greatest value for them in their role earned an average of over $97,000 per year, compared with our overall average of just under $85,000. Those who scored strategic skills highly benefitted, too. They earned an average of about $91,000 – a slight but noticeable bump over the overall average. Both of those results fall into the “noteworthy but not surprising” category: those who most highly valued business skills were more likely to be Directors of Community, and those who valued strategy were more likely to be community strategists (and make higher salaries in those roles.)

But a third set of skills also generated value. Those who valued technical skills in their jobs earned a premium over the average as well, but they weren’t any more likely to be higher up the org chart. Our tech specialists parlayed their skills to an average salary of over $92,000.*

What does it all mean? It highlights three types of career paths for community professionals.

An upward path – where a community manager sharpens their business skills and moves into a Director of Community role overseeing a community program, for example.
An outward path – where a community manager focuses on a specialty and builds that out across a number of communities as a community strategist, for example.
A skill-based path – where a community manager parlays an interest in a specific (often technical) skill into a more important role, whether or not they move up the organizational chart.

One reason this technical path exists is the nature of technical skills. Unlike content skills, which are more-or-less universally beneficial to community team members, you don’t need everyone on your team to be understand data manipulation, API creation or UX design. But having one team member with those skills is a huge benefit, and not always easy to find or keep.

Needed + in demand = more highly paid.

That’s great news for community professionals. We don’t just see a single way up the career ladder, we see three possible options that allow people with different strengths to grow and succeed.

And that can pay great dividends for communities in the long run, giving them opportunities to retain a wider range of talent.

*-These numbers have been updated with new data we have received since the data deadline for the CCC report. The original numbers were $96,000 for business skills, $90,000 for strategic and $89,000 for technical skills.

Want to learn more about the skills that matter for community professionals and the career opportunities that await. The full Community Careers and Compensation report is only available to survey participants and members of TheCR Network, our network of community professionals. Take the survey at https://the.cr/ccc2015survey, or learn more about the exclusive programming and benefits of TheCR Network!

Introducing the Updated Community Skills Framework

September 9, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Head of Research, The Community Roundtable

What do you say when you’re asked to describe what you do as a community professional? I’m betting it’s not an easy question to answer – particularly when it comes from Aunt Betty at the Thanksgiving table. What about when you try to explain how overwhelmed you are to your manager – or your HR department?

Without a frame of reference, it is all to easy to struggle with explaining what you can and cannot accomplish given your skills, experience and time limitations.

We’ve also found that community job descriptions can be all over the map – often expecting one person to address a huge range of diverse responsibilities.

Our mission at The Community Roundtable is to listen, synthesize and distill the practice of community management in a way that is easy to understand and communicate. We do this through our models and research. Last year, we published our first iteration of the Community Skills Framework as well as part of the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 – and we learned a lot in the process.

This year, we’ve evolved both the research and the framework and have recently launched the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 survey, which is now open.

The updated Community Skills Framework includes five skill families with ten skills in each family, prioritized based on what we learned from our 2014 research.

A draft of the Community Skills Framework in the Community Careers and Compensation survey

How Does This Help You?

First, when Aunt Betty asks you what community management is you can say, “It’s a mix of engagement, content, technical, business and strategy responsibilities.” This may or may not mean anything to her but it adds enough detail about your job without being verbose – and in plain language.

Second, and more importantly, it frames the conversation with your stakeholders about the scope of your role, its priorities, what is reasonable for one person to do and where your strengths and weaknesses are… incredibly helpful as you look to navigate your career and where you want to head next.

At The Community Roundtable, we use the Community Skills Framework to:

Scope our research and report on what skills are priorities for different community roles (moderation, specialist, manager, strategist and director roles).
Identify and report on those skills seen as consistent blind spots – areas where community professionals need the most training and resources.
Prioritize programming in TheCR Network, identify where training would be valuable and determine areas to dig deeper on with our research.

If you’re a community professional, we hope the survey sparks ideas and gives you a better understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses.

Take the survey now!