The Community Roundtable

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

All About Building Member Personas

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Community managers know their members better than anyone, right? But knowing individual members on a personal level isn’t the same as knowing your community population, or what brought them to you in the first place. This short guide walks you through the foundation of building member personas for your community program.

Inside we cover:

  • the definition of community member personas (and how they differ from traditional marketing personas
  • six essential persona mapping questions
  • three critical persona mapping characteristics

Download the the All About Building Member Personas ebook.

Community Conversations – Episode #81: Allison Brotman on Community Strategy

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Community Conversations is a long-running podcast highlighting community success stories from a wide variety of online community management professionals.

Episode #81 of Community Conversations features Allison Brotman, Vice President, Learning & Community at UKG.

On this special State of Community Management 2022 episode, Allison and Anne Mbugua discuss the importance of strategy in online community programs. Allison shares the role community strategy plays in the UKG community, and explores the most surprising findings from the 2022 report.

Allison also shares advice for online community professionals embarking on new strategy building, including how a listening tour sets a solid foundation for community building.

Listen to Allison Brotman on Community Strategy

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About Allison Brotman

Allison Brotman is the Vice President, Learning & Community at UKG. She has over nineteen years of distinguished performance in the development and leadership of community, learning, and knowledge management programs for multiple industries. She has experience developing new and improving existing programs in accordance with business objectives, customer specifications, regulatory requirements, and industry standards. Allison is obsessed with the customer experience and enjoys working closely with customers and subject matter experts.

About UKG

UKG was born from a historic merger that created one of the world’s leading HCM cloud companies, they help 70,000+ organizations across every industry anticipate and adapt to their employees’ needs beyond just work.

UKG is a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions for all people. But don’t take our word for it: They are the only enterprise vendor ranked as a leader by all major analysts and peer review sites and have been recognized around the world for our workplace culture, innovative practices, and commitment to customer success.

CommunityConversations-Transcript-AllisonbrotmanDownload

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.

Throwback Thursday – Community Strategy 101

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community strategy 101By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable

Too often new community managers (or veteran community managers faced with a brand new community) will dive right in – because from day one, the to-do list can be daunting. We can’t urge you strongly enough: STOP! DROP! STRATEGIZE!!

To liberally paraphrase the great Ben Franklin – an ounce of stratigization is worth a pound of community success. (Our apologies to Mr. Franklin…) But seriously – time and time again our research has shown that communities that spend time thinking about their long term strategy are simply more successful. Join us for this week’s trip in the way-back machine as we explore community strategy 101.

This week’s #throwbackthursday focuses on Community Strategy 101 – getting back to basics with the fundamentals of building a community strategy.

  • The Basics of Community Strategy – Are you just getting started and looking to build your community strategy? We recommend using the Community Maturity Model to help in building a community strategy.
  • Why is a Community Roadmap Important? – A roadmap highlights your community’s objectives and how you will community strategy 101achieve them. When you have a roadmap, your conversations with stakeholders become more productive. Instead of talking about “why we should invest in community,” you can discuss where to target your investments.
  • I need to build a community strategy. Where do I start? – Whether you are starting from scratch with a new community, or taking over an existing community that could use some love there is a good chance you’ll be tasked with building a community strategy.

  • For TheCR Network Eyes Only: Community Pitch Deck – Are you a member of TheCR Network? Check out this community strategy pitch deck that a fellow member put together to make the case for their community strategy!

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

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CCC 2015 Fun Fact #4: Community strategy is YOUR job

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By Ted McEnroe, Head of Research, The Community Roundtable

Want to send your boss through the roof in under five seconds? Tell them these four words.

“It’s not my job.”

Want to send your top talent out the door as fast as their resume can carry them? That might take five.

“It’s not up to you.”

Legend has it that in the old hierarchical world of the workplace, bosses decided, workers implemented and the world spun quietly on its axis. Whether you believe that or not, in 2015-2016, it doesn’t hold true in community. Data from the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 report shows that from the lowest rung to the highest on the community career ladder, community professionals value their skills in setting and implementing community strategy.

Our survey found that community strategy development was the most valued skill in every community-related role we examined in the survey. And not by a small margin.

This has powerful implications for leaders of community programs. Directors of community should expect that their community specialists, managers and strategists want and need to have a say in defining and implementing community strategy. Hiring managers need to seek out people they think can couple that desire for strategic input with the skills to develop, implement and review. For community managers, the shared power comes with shared responsibility. New hires should expect that they will  be held accountable for their participation in community strategy development.

Hierarchical chains of command still exist in workplaces, but they are shrinking in number. And in communities, having your entire team on board with your strategy is a critical precursor to community success.

community strategy

Want to learn more about the salaries, roles and career opportunities for community management professionals? The Community Careers and Compensation 2015 summary report is available now – and to get the full report, take the CCC 2015 survey at https://the.cr/ccc2015survey or join TheCR Network, our practitioners’ network for community professionals.

Community Strategy Needs Resources

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

We’ve said many times in this space that having a community strategy is a critical part of getting your community to succeed. Strategy is critical, but it’s just the first step in the process of building a successful community. It needs to be coupled with a roadmap and the resources to execute on that roadmap for your community to succeed.

Seems logical, right? Your strategy is like your map laid out before you that shows you where you want to go. Your roadmap more specifically plots the route you will take to get there, and the resources provide the fuel to move the community ahead.

So why is it so rare to have all three? 65% of the communities in The State of Community Management 2015 say they have an approved community strategy. But of those, barely a third have a resourced roadmap to get them there. Best-in-class communities take a different approach – but they aren’t perfect. All of our best-in-class communities have approved community strategies, however, more than 4 in 10 of them lack the resourced roadmap they need to deliver on that strategic plan.

So if you’re thinking about your community strategy – great! Don’t stop. But don’t forget to give yourself (or ask for) what you need to turn that strategic vision into a strategic reality.

The Community Roundtable has produced a number of resources, including an eBook, Building a Community Roadmap, devoted to roadmap development. Learn more about it and all of our other research at communityroundtable.com/research. 

State of Community Management 2015 Monday Fact #3: Strategic Investment

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

As more and more organizations join the community bandwagon, what separates the best from the rest? In part, it’s that the best communities are integrated into their organization’s overall strategy.

The State of Community Management 2015 report finds that best-in-class communities demonstrate a commitment to making community more than just a tool in the toolbox – they make strategic investments in community that align with broader business goals.

SOCM2015_FunFact3_BICStrategicInvestment

Among the evidence:

  • Best-in-class communities were more than twice as likely to have developed a measurable community strategy (85% to 37% overall)
  • 90 percent of best-in-class communities track activity as it relates to the community strategy (versus 53% overall)
  • More than 70 percent of best-in-class communities align their content strategy and/or program calendars with their community strategy – fewer than half of communities overall did that.

Proving the value of your community to the larger organization gets much easier when you take an intentional approach to integrating the community strategy with larger business objectives, and when you collaborate with key stakeholders. You are more likely to find alignment opportunities, and it makes it easier for you to put your community successes in a context that resonates with the broader business.

Need strategies for integrating your community approach to other pieces of your organization? TheCR Network and its member resources are a good place to start! Learn more about membership here.

Is Your Community Approach a Hollow Bunny?

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Yesterday was Easter and for many kids, that means lots of candy. But when I was a kid, I remember the disappointment of certain candy too. The biggest one? That big, delicious looking chocolate bunny in the basket wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. It was hollow.

Chocolate-Easter-BunnyWe have learned a lot about communities recently, thanks to a new service we launched last year –  the Community Performance Benchmark. We use the research and knowledge we’ve developed with the annual State of Community Management survey to analyze a community program’s maturity on the eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model. If your community strategy maps out your plan, and your community roadmap lays out your route, the Community Performance Benchmark is basically your GPS – it tells you where you are relative to where you want to be.

What we’ve learned is that sustained, productive engagement is more than good tactics. It’s more than good strategy. It’s more than a good operational approach. In fact, it requires all three. Without one of these elements, community value is hard to achieve and community management is, well, a bit hollow. The challenge today is that most communities are doing one of these things well. More mature communities are doing two of these well and almost no one has a well developed strategy paired with an operational system and good tactics.

We worked with one client recently whose answers to the initial benchmarking survey suggested they were a highly-mature community, but they weren’t seeing the results they were expecting from those investments.

They looked good – they had a strategy in place, and the right operational structures to move that strategy forward but they hadn’t really invested in good tactics to ensure that great strategy and structure resulted in engagement. In short – their community looked good on paper, but something was missing.

Hollow bunny.

A second client has a solid strategy in place – they knew where they wanted to go – and had invested in great tactics. They were welcoming new members, they had a lot of engagement, but things were chaotic and inconsistent. Taking a closer look via the benchmarking analysis, it became clear that while they had community managers generating interest and engagement, the organization hadn’t put in place the operational pieces to structure and capture the value of all that interaction. They had the external elements of successful communities, but no unified operational plan to ensure their managers were working efficiently and effectively. At first glance it looked great, but something was missing.

Hollow bunny.

When you are seeking to move your community forward, strategy, operations and tactics have to work together for you to succeed. Strategy shapes and defines your approach. Operations structures that strategy, puts it into motion and keeps engagement focused on value. And your tactics are the ways you make it happen on a day-to-day basis. Easy to say, but hard to do – most organizations can really say they hit the mark on 1 or 2 out of 3. The Community Performance Benchmark has proven to be one way to illuminate those gaps for some of our clients.

How do you find where your bunny is hollow?

The Community Performance Benchmark uses our extensive research database to provide organizations with a comparative community maturity analysis and recommendations to enhance community performance. Learn more about the CPB and other services from The Community Roundtable on the Services page of communityroundtable.com.

2015: The Year Community Management Goes Mainstream

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By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable

2014 was a great year for community management generally and for The Community Roundtable specifically. Because of that, I spared you a year-end wrap up (you are welcome), but I do think it is worth taking the opportunity a new year presents to pause, reflect and set intentions for the new year amidst the whirlwind of other activities.

We have said for a long time that the future of all management is community management and 2014 was the year we started to see that transition begin to happen. We think 2015 will be the year it becomes more widely acknowledged.

Ironically, at the same time there has been a good deal of discussion about the end of the social media era, capped off by confirmation from Fred Wilson, a well known VC. However, what that means is that the end of social media adoption is over – growth is no longer primarily going to come from new users or a new social network that is significantly better than what is available today, which means investors are no longer as interested in the space. The prices of many social media stocks are slumping and I think this is reflective of this trend. In the early days, social networks could justify their value through growth. Now that social media adoption is fairly saturated, they are going to have to dig deeper and think about how the tools support more complex behavior change – and in so doing, generate value not possible through traditional channels.

Despite this – or maybe because of it – I think we are just entering the era of social media value creation where value is not achieved by adoption or growth, but by using the new tools effectively to create value in new ways.  Given this dynamic, there is renewed and increased focus on the role of community management. It’s clear that the tools alone do not reliably produce value because their primarily emphasis to date has been on ease of adoption and use, not reinforcement of behavior change or rich collaboration.

We see this change in emphasis directly from our members and clients who are increasing the size of community teams, investing in internal community management consulting and creating internal community management centers of excellence as they start to realize that all of their management and leadership need to understand and use the principles of community management. It’s an exciting time for us and for community management, even if this trend has gone largely unnoticed by analysts and media because it does not generate the hype that technical innovation tends to – but it’s innovation nonetheless.

What this all means for The Community Roundtable is that we have evolved to not only serve individual community managers but also enable enterprises – through training assets, benchmarking, content and advisory services.

2014 was a great year, including:

  • Growth and strategic attention for many of our clients’ community teams (we love seeing our members’ teams grow and succeed!).
  • Expansion of TheCR Network membership to include Pegasystems, Schneider-Electric, Bit9, IEEE, DirectTV, Oracle, EY, Akamai, Lenovo, Skillsoft, Steelcase, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Baxter, MasterCard, Cox Automotive, and Applause among others.
  • Publication of our 5th State of Community Management research, which identified objective measures of community management maturity developed in conjunction with TheCR Network members.
  • Launch of Community Performance Benchmarking, a service which allows us to consistently assess and make recommendations to community teams regarding their progress and their opportunities.
  • Announcement of our first TheCR Network Champions, a program that highlights experts who help us lead interest groups within TheCR Network.
  • Delivery of internal and external community management training assets to partners, which include on demand videos and worksheets that enable participants to complete a community strategy and plan.
  • Publication of the first report from a new research platform – the Community Management Salary Survey

It was a heck of a year and what encouraged us the most is the progress our members have made in their own programs – and the support they are getting from senior executives to extend their work.

Looking forward, we are excited to dig in and extend the way we collaborate with clients to demonstrate the value of community management. For us, 2015 includes:

  • Kicking off with CMAD (Community Manager Appreciation Day… or as we like to refer to it, Community Management Advancement Day) in collaboration with Higher Logic with events in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Milwaukee and the launch of the Community Manager Handbook, which will profile some of our community management superheroes. Sign up here!
  • The 2015 State of Community Management, which we will refine based on what we learned last year especially from our benchmarking projects where we were able to dig in and see where organizations were most in need of guidance so that community management processes result in reliable value creation.
  • New training assets for advanced community management topics.
  • Content to help executives understand the language of engagement and how they can get value out of participating in communities.
  • Making our training assets available to individuals as well as to enterprise clients and partners.
  • Enabling community management centers of excellence through our content, training assets and advisory services.
  • The 2015 Community Manager Salary Survey. We learned a lot in the first year of this research, which we’ll incorporate into next year’s research while keeping some longitudinal data consistent so we can report on trends.

As it is every year, our focus will be on making our clients and members successful by continuing to demonstrate the value of community management generally and their value specifically.

I would love to hear your thoughts on community management – do you see things the same way I do or do you think community management is like social media and its heyday has passed?

 

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.

Becky Carroll on Using Educational Content and Idea Exchanges

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The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this 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 series continues with episode #26, featuring Becky Carroll, Community Program Manager at Verizon. Podcast highlights include:
  • Using educational content rather than product-focused content, to cater to customer lifestyle rather than a  hard sell in the “Room to Learn” community.
  • Using an idea exchange; workflows, processes and partnership with product team
  • Advice for getting started in community management

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.