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Community Role Profile: Community Strategist

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Community Strategist

OVERVIEW OF ROLE

​ The community strategist role is an expert role dedicated to what the title implies – community strategy. Typically, strategists are individuals with community management experience who have particularly strong strategic skills; analysis, community architecture, business models, and the ability to understand the interdependencies between different parts of a community ecosystem.

​ RESPONSIBILITIES
​ Community strategists are most likely to work in professional service firms or as part of a centralized community program office that provides internal community consulting to business units and other groups within large organizations. They are more likely to be individual contributors, and they act as subject matter experts within their ecosystem supporting and auditing a portfolio of communities.

​ MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE COMMUNITY ​

Community Strategist

Strategists have a special knack for understanding community performance and the levers that impact it. Successful strategists work with community managers to ensure their strategies and approaches will yield successful shared value and keep the communities productive.

Community Strategist

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

Community Management Skills That Matter: Business

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Community Management Business Skills: Integrating community into the organization

Not surprisingly, the value of community management business skills grows as community managers more effectively integrate their communities with their overall organization. Directors of Community are typically tasked with leading such efforts, and typically work with more mature or strategic communities — and that is reflected in their business skill value rankings.

While every role places value on community advocacy and promotion, Directors of Community value those skills in conjunction with hiring, program management, and budget management. As a result, Directors of Community placed the highest value scores on 9 of 10 skills in this skill family. The tenth: training development and delivery, makes perfect sense for a strategist who works across a number of communities.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Training needs change as community professionals move up the ladder. While managers placed a high priority on community advocacy and promotion, strategists and directors were far more interested in training on developing effective business models. Managers also wanted more training on budget management, while strategists and directors expressed interest in training on selling and evangelizing for their community programs.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Community management business skills had the largest variance between what managers and directors valued. Thinking about a strategist role? Learning how to develop and implement training is valuable for rolling out consistent strategy, operations, and tactics across multiple communities. If becoming a Director of Community is your goal, understanding budgets, and building business models are vital. And Directors of Community can’t do it alone — so being skilled at finding and managing the right talent is critical.

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

community manager skills

Community Skills Engagement

Throwback Thursday – All About Community Management Careers

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By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtablecommunity management careers

It’s no secret we’re a little bit in love with community managers. But, really it goes deeper than that. We love the people that want to be community managers. We love the people that are community managers. And we love the people that have moved on to different, exciting roles after being a community manager. And boy, do community managers do interesting things with their careers!

This week we’re sharing a few posts specifically for those community folks out there thinking about their community careers. Whether you’re just getting started in the world of community, or you’re in place to be building out your very own community team this post has something for you.

This week’s #throwbackthursday focuses on the many stages of community management careers – from getting started to the executive view.

  • Free eBook: Defining Community Management Roles – This free ebook 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. Standards for what defines a community manager role, versus a community strategist or director of community can be difficult to ascertain. As a result, providing proper compensation, support and professional development opportunities is difficult.

  • Community Career Profiles: All About Community Strategists – Engagement and people skills rank as the most Community Manager Profileimportant skill set for a successful community strategist. However, strategic and business skills were most important to nearly 20 percent of those in this role.

  • Community Career Profiles: All About Directors of Community – Directors of community bring a special skill-set – strong engagement skills, a knack for content development – to the table. But, they spend most of their time on strategic and business objectives.

  • Community Career Profiles: All About Community Managers – Not surprisingly, engagement and people skills are an essential part of being a community manager!  Internal community managers have more strategic responsibilities related to change management in their organizations. They’re advocates for the community and are more likely to be responsible for developing executive support and coaching executives and member training.

  • For TheCR Network Eyes Only: Community Careers and Development Group – Are you a member of TheCR Network? Check out this group inside TheCR Network where members share job postings, hiring advice and best practices for landing the community jobs of your dreams!

Want even more #throwbackthursday action? Check out all our throwback posts!

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Community Career Profiles: All About Community Strategists

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

CommunityStrategistIconEngagement and people skills rank as most important skill set for a successful community strategist, but strategic and business skills were most important to nearly 20 percent of those in this role. Strategists also have the highest technical skills among the three job profiles in this research.

External strategists have a wider range of responsibilities than internal strategists profiled and are more likely to be responsible for overall program management. Internal strategists’ top priorities include building the community strategy and roadmap, measurement, internal consulting, advocating for the community, training and consulting with IT on platform integration.

The poster below shares some of the most interesting findings from the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 in regards to the Community Manager Role.

  • The average salary for a Community Strategist is $85,075
  • The average Community Strategist has 14.3 years of work experience
  • 38% of external Community Strategists have been promoted

Top three responsibilities for Community Strategists: 

  1. Monitoring activity & listening
  2. Developing the community strategy
  3. Measuring and reporting community performance

Top three priorities for Community Strategists: 

  1. Specific business outcomes
  2. Activity rates
  3. Membership growth

CMSS Blog Assets 6

 

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Have you filled out the 2015 State of Community Management survey yet? The findings help shape the dialogue about community management and this year, upon completing the survey you can see how your community sits within TheCR’s Community Maturity Model. Learn more at https://the.cr/socm2015survey.

Meet TheCR Team: Jillian Bejtlich, Community Strategist

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By Jillian Bejtlich,Community Strategist at The Community Roundtable.

Jillian BejtlichLike many community managers out there, I never actually set out to work in this field. By education and the first few rungs of my career ladder, I’m an engineer with a focus on architectural and civil technology. I lived and breathed physics. But after a variety of welcome twists and turns, I ended up in community.

As I started my career in community, I remember various folks pointing me towards all sorts of resources ranging from marketing to social media to help me get my bearings. What I remember the most was being overwhelmed by how few resources there really were and how so many of them were entirely built on theory instead of tried and true practice. My engineering brain couldn’t grasp it.

I come from a world of formulas, causes and subsequent effects, and a place where gravity and forces reign. Words like B2B and B2C irritated me (and they still do), and I was suddenly overwhelmed by questions of ROI, NPS, and other terms; terms that in any other field would be accompanied by a set formula proven over and over again. But no. Instead these were words and acronyms that carried great weight – and only theory.

JillianI sometimes wonder what it would have been like to be a philosopher alongside masterminds such as Galileo and Da Vinci. In many ways, community lets me have the tiniest taste of what it feels like to be on the cusp of proving a great and enormous theory that will influence all generations to come. We know that community is an unbelievably powerful tool – but now to prove it and figure out how it can be used to its greatest potential.

When I was growing up, all I ever wanted to be was a scientist. My focus changed frequently ranging from things like marine biology to virology, but the reason was always the same. I’m infatuated with problems and research. While others believe that communities fall within the established realm of marketing and communications, I believe community is a new realm of its own. And it is for this reason, I’ve never longingly looked back to my engineering days.

Community is a seemingly chaotic collision of technology, information, and the human psychology – and it might just be the greatest unsolved physics problem I’ve ever encountered. Somewhere in the mess of metrics, interactions, coding, and graphics, there is logic. Behind that logic are theories. And these theories can be proved – once and for all. In the same way that proven physics theories have shaped the world we know, imagine the potential of understanding the inner workings of human networks. The untapped potential is enormous, and we – the community professionals – are in the thick of it.

Excited? I am.

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On the lookout for more community manager resources like Jillian was? Join TheCR Network and access exclusive resources, research, templates, case studies and more – all designed to help community managers excel.