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Communities are Change Agents

May 29, 2018 By Jim Storer

communities are change agentsResiliency and the ability to change quickly are becoming key competencies for all organizations as new technologies create rapidly changing market conditions. Organizations need to acquire and apply new knowledge faster, and the more traditional learning and professional support mechanisms cannot keep up.

Online communities and engagement ecosystems support rapid learning by capturing tacit knowledge as it develops, transitioning that knowledge into more explicit practices, and flattening access to it. The ability to adapt efficiently and effectively is at the core of organizational success in the digital era. For any organization to be successful, it needs new practices to gain widespread acceptance and enthusiastic adoption. Mechanisms that prompt and inspire organizations to change successfully are change agents. While the potential for online communities to support learning and change has been discussed for many years, it has only been recently that we can start to see the multifaceted impact that communities have across organizations and their markets, as well as on individual behavior. Our 2018 analysis concludes that communities have evolved into powerful agents of change.

COMMUNITY APPROACHES PROLIFERATE

Communities are impacting organizations broadly and deeply, changing functional approaches, stakeholder categories, and workflows. Community programs, which once were only applied to narrow functional goals with single-purpose use cases, are now often large, complex, and multifunctional entities that influence organizations in a wide variety of ways.

Nearly 70% of community teams collaborate with other departments to integrate various workflows into communities. This “hidden” work is in addition to executing the direct day-to-day community engagement and management work community professionals do. Almost 47% of community teams provide consulting assistance to other departments, effectively acting as centers of excellence that build community management skills and capacity across organizations. Only 8% of community programs are explicitly tasked with the center of excellence role and resourced for it.

Community programs contribute across many functions (like marketing, customer support, knowledge management, and learning and development) simultaneously, regardless of where the community program resides in the organization. Community programs that fall within the customer service department, for example, provide benefits not only for marketing (91% of the time) and knowledge management (59% of the time), but also for the learning and development function (35% of the time). This dynamic is true for both internal and external communities and illustrates why communities are such powerful change agents.

Community management responsibilities are now also dispersed throughout the organization, suggesting that community management is fast becoming a key discipline of all management. Community engagement is part of individual performance metrics in departments outside of the community team 43% of the time, and explicit community management responsibilities are allocated to individuals in other departments 53% of the time. The ability for communities to reach deep into and across organizations is expected to grow rapidly, as 50% of community teams expect either additional workflows to be implemented or a greater adoption of current workflows in the next year.

These trends suggest that community teams are shifting from a predominant focus on direct community engagement and management to one of supporting and enabling the discipline across the organization, where the community team acts as internal consultants and subject matter experts. While this is an exciting shift, it requires more resources and additional skill sets to be successful.

Learn more about Communities as Change Agents in the State of Community Management 2018 report.

communities are change agents

Using the Community Maturity Model for Internal Consulting at Microsoft

June 26, 2014 By Jim Storer

One of the perks of TheCR Network membership is the opportunity for community managers to collaborate and solve challenges in working groups. Last fall, TheCR Network members formed a Community Maturity Assessment Working Group, with the goal of building a tool to measure the maturity of communities. Members of the group worked on persona exercises to understand member behaviors in different types and maturity stages of communities, and then used this information to outline maturity markers based on the competencies in the Community Maturity Model.

Community Maturity Model

This work helped extend the Community Maturity Model in new ways — both for TheCR and other members. We’ve already shared a couple examples on the blog here:

  • The maturity artifacts helped develop the survey for the State of Community Management 2014 research
  • On March’s Community Manager Spotlight webinar, working group member Heather Ausmus shared how she uses the Community Maturity Model to build a community roadmap

Most recently, another working group leader, Alex Blanton of Microsoft, shared how he’s using the Community Maturity Model for internal community consulting as part of TheCR Network’s weekly programming. Internal community consulting has been a trending topic in the network – we’ve hosted two other Roundtable calls on the topic – because our members are being asked to extend their skill sets to the rest of their organizations, through training and advisory services. We were excited to have Alex share how he has used the Community Maturity Model as a framework for the advisory work he does with internal engineering communities at Microsoft.

Alex adapted the working group’s assessment tool to align with the needs of the teams with which he consults. One of the services Alex offers is a 90-minute consultation including a maturity self-assessment based on the Community Maturity Model. Alex follows this session with a comparison to industry norms, recommendations and additional resources.

Alex Community Maturity Model Microsfot

Alex demoed his maturity assessment tool on a Roundtable call for TheCR Network.

Some lessons from Alex for starting internal maturity assessment consultations:

–Do consultations on paper. Don’t focus on a “score.” Alex starts his consultations on paper by printing out the Excel-based assessment tool (that automatically generates maturity values), so that clients focus on discussing where they are instead of on trying to achieve a number.

–Use the Community Maturity Model to start a conversation. Alex observes that as clients review the model, they sometimes disagree with colleagues about where their community belongs in certain competencies. Coming to alignment on the maturity level sparks conversation about community activities and progress in a way that helps identify gaps or opportunities.

–Offer a variety of service offerings. Recognizing that not all communities need the same level of support, Alex offers a tiered service model for consulting. For example, he developed an “8-Step Community Jumpstart” for new communities that aren’t yet ready for a full assessment and instead need to prioritize getting started.

If you use the Community Maturity Model in your work, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more about the Community Maturity Model and how other organizations are using it here.

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