culture Archives

Ashleigh Brookshaw, M.A. on Changing Community Culture

October 31, 2023 By Jim Storer

If there are aspects that are measured either through a sentiment survey or functionality, make sure that they’re highlighting cultural elements, and have a mechanism to gather that feedback.
Ashleigh Brookshaw, M.A.

As a member of the 2023 State of Community Management Advisory Board, Ashleigh Brookshaw provided guidance and expertise for research in the Culture competency of the research. She shared three ideas on the state of culture in communities with us.

On focusing on the positive…

“Through many conversations with community managers, I’ve realized that sometimes we get focused on the bad things within an organizational culture and kind of get stuck on that. It’s really important to highlight the positive, and find those elements that you can use – and are also measurable. If there are aspects that are measured either through a sentiment survey or functionality, make sure that they’re highlighting cultural elements, and have a mechanism to gather that feedback.”

On community and change management…

“One of the main things that is difficult for many community professionals is continuously reinforcing the business value of community. [This is where] having the organizational structure, policies, and procedures to affect that culture change long-term, enables those business conversations with the appropriate stakeholders. You have to be able to articulate what is the business value of community in terms that they understand: impacting the bottom line, etc.”

On disrupting “tap on the shoulder culture”…

Community is a great place to enact meaningful culture change. Ashleigh shared an example from her career, “There was a lot of what I’ll call “dissent” among marginalized groups within the community, on seeing the same types of speakers at the annual conference. It’s always the same people, that organizational culture was what I would call a ‘tap on the shoulder culture’, they kept tapping the same people over and over to show up in different spaces. So in the community, I saw some conversation, “Why do you guys always have the same speakers?” I took that to the professional development team and showed them, “There is a gap that’s being discussed via the members, let’s address that and then circle back to them.” It was a very real world, tangible way to use community to kind of disrupt that ‘tap-on-the-shoulder’ culture that had been there all along. This led to a holistic DEIB strategic discussion, and resulted in the organization acting meaningfully and highlighting opportunities across all channels not just through cliques.”

About Ashleigh Brookshaw

Ashleigh Brookshaw, M.A. is a detail oriented and digital change enthusiast with expertise in online community engagement, cultural & transformative change management through DEI, and strategic digital marketing communications to drive business results.

She has worked with both internal and external audiences with a variety of organizations including nonprofits like Chicago Gateway Green, Fortune 500 companies like Allstate Insurance and professional associations like the American Society of Safety Professionals.

Ashleigh holds a B.A. in Advertising/Public Relations and minors in Marketing & Spanish from Loyola University Chicago. She also holds an M.A. in Multicultural/Organizational Communication with a concentration in Training & Development and a project management certificate from Depaul University.

Contact her at ashleigh@c2mdigital.co

Three Ways to Improve Your Community’s Culture

October 30, 2023 By Jim Storer

The Community Maturity Model’s™ Culture competency pertains to various aspects of your organization or community’s habits, motivators (intrinsic and extrinsic), social norms, communication, decision-making processes, development processes, and learning approaches. By recognizing and anticipating cultural obstacles and embracing change, organizations can effectively manage risks and successfully establish their community program

This is almost always easier said that done. Like many individuals, organizations and even single communities are hesitant to change – even when it is clearly in their best interest. The three suggestions below are research-backed ideas to help you begin to (slowly) shift the culture in your organization to be more productive, transparent, and community-focused.

Three Ways to Improve Your Community’s Culture

1. Ride the wave. Acknowledge the idiosyncrasies of your corporate culture and lean into those aspects that will help community approaches be successful. Not all cultures are all-in on community, but by focusing on the aspects that are supportive you’re more likely to achieve success.

2. Build consensus with small wins. When you identify people that are embracing new approaches, encourage them to help you share throughout the organization and/or with other people in the community. Ask them to focus on recognizing small changes that are moving behaviors in the right direction. As the Chinese proverb says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

3. Blow your horn! It’s not enough to grow a successful community initiative by staying within a division or group. Get out there, talking about how the community is supporting other business units with their goals. Identify community cheerleaders (and skeptics) across the organization and answer their questions to bring them along for the ride.

Don’t be discouraged if traction for this ideas takes longer than you’d like. Culture is a such an ingrained part of a community, even small changes should be considered big wins!

Download the State of Community Management 2023 to learn more about how you can leverage communities as effective behavior change-makers at your orgs.

Communities are behavior change-makers.

August 7, 2023 By Jim Storer

Communities are behavior change-makers. When you give people a faster, easier, or more effective way to do something, they typically adopt this new approach. Our 2023 State of Community Management research showed that external-facing communities continue to grow across nearly all behaviors we index. Best-in-class communities show dramatic improvement in three areas:

Faster response to support questions
Growing % of support handled in the community
Increased product usage

Legendary management guru Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and while he didn’t mean to minimize the importance of a good strategy, he firmly believed a strong culture could be a surer route to organizational success. The same is true with community programs. We’re interested in how they’re viewed within organizations and how they act as behavior change-makers.

For the first time in this research’s history, no respondents reported that their organization’s culture “is toxic to” community.

We see this as a promising trend! At the other end of the spectrum notice that best-in-class programs see their organizations “reward” community approaches at more than twice the rate of the survey average. Perhaps ironically, we see this as even more evidence that you need to push your program to adopt more advanced strategies in order to influence what your organization’s culture values and supports.

Behavior change-makers in action.

External communities also continue to report that they “reduce the sales cycle” at an accelerating rate. But it’s still a relatively small percentage of the overall sample, so we hesitate to give it too much weight just yet.

Not surprisingly, 75% of respondents report that their communities are at least “moderately effective” at facilitating behavior or culture change, consistent with the 2022 sample (74%). This is uplifting news, but compare those figures with this years best-in-class sample (94%) and you might be inspired to conduct a gap analysis to figure out what you need to level-up your community program.

Download the State of Community Management 2023 to learn more about how you can leverage communities as effective behavior change-makers at your orgs.

Ashleigh Brookshaw on DEIB in Community

August 25, 2022 By Jim Storer

Lessons from The NEW Community Manager Handbook is a limited-run podcast series, featuring the 21 community leaders showcased in the Handbook in conversation with Anne Mbugua.

Episode 11 features Ashleigh Brookshaw, Senior Manager – Customer Experience & Community at NICE CXone.

Ashleigh Brookshaw has spent her career building community in the insurance, association, and now software spaces, so she knows her way around the foundations of community management. Still, some things surprise her.

Listen in as Ashleigh, and host, Anne Mbugua discuss how to build an authentic focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in online community programs.

Listen to Ashleigh Brookshaw on DEIB in Community

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About Ashleigh Brookshaw

Ashleigh Brookshaw, M.A. is a detail-oriented and digital change enthusiast with expertise in online community engagement, cultural & transformative change management through DEI, and strategic digital marketing communications to drive business results.

She has worked with both internal and external audiences with a variety of organizations including nonprofits like Chicago Gateway Green, Fortune 500 companies like Allstate Insurance, professional associations like the American Society of Safety Professionals, and the SAAS industry like NICE CX One.

Ashleigh holds a B.A. in Advertising/Public Relations and minors in Marketing & Spanish from Loyola University Chicago. She also holds an M.A. in Multicultural/Organizational Communication with a concentration in Training & Development and a project management certificate from Depaul University.

About NICE CXone

At NICE we are passionate about removing the friction between companies and consumers, creating extraordinary experiences that build brand loyalty and create unbreakable bonds.

We enable organizations to address today’s consumer and employee expectations, by delivering effortless, consistent, and personalized digital-first experiences with CXone, the world’s leading cloud CX platform.

We are known for our innovation and comprehensive end-to-end CX approach, combining digital entry points, journey orchestration, smart self-service, prepared agents and complete performance suite, all embedded with our purpose-built CX Analytics, AI, and domain expertise.

About The NEW Community Manager Handbook

The NEW Community Manager Handbook features 21 profiles of community leaders sharing advice and ideas on everything from accessibility, hiring, strategy, gamification, defining the digital workplace, technology, and more. Each profile is paired with research from the State of Community Management reports and includes tactical advice for implementing what you’ve learned.

Learn from community management experts at Easterseals, Glencore, Microsoft, UKG, the World Bank Group, Analog Devices, Inc., AAMC, Zapier, Doctors Without Borders, and more.

Anne Larsen on Community Culture

August 22, 2022 By Jim Storer

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

Episode #83 of Community Conversations features Anne Larsen, Applications Consultant at Grundfos.

On this special State of Community Management 2022 episode, Anne Larsen and host Anne Mbugua discuss the importance of culture in online communities. Anne shares her experiences with the effect of culture on organizations and their online community, best practices for thoughtful consideration of global cultures, and explores the most surprising findings from the 2022 report.

Listen to Anne Larsen on Community Culture

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About Grundfos

Pumps are our business. Every day, our energy efficient pumps provide comfort, deliver drinking water, remove wastewater, or help farmers water their crops all over the world. Just to mention some of our expertise. We set the standard within our work areas and keep raising the bar when it comes to energy efficiency and protecting the environment. Since 1945 we’ve honed our skills in order to produce the perfect pumps. Pumps which can move liquid to where it should be – using as little energy as possible, making a real difference for the people and the world we live in.

About The State of Community Management

Now in its 13th year, our annual State of Community Management report provides strategic ideas and tactical benchmarks for global community management professionals.

The State of Community Management 2022 explores the state of the community management industry through the lens of the eight competencies in the Community Maturity Model.

Each section includes data, ideas, and expert practitioner perspectives to give you new insight into the community management industry. Download your free copy of the State of Community Management 2022.

Online Communities Drive Business Outcomes

August 8, 2022 By Jim Storer

The Culture competency of the Community Maturity Model™ addresses habits, motivators (intrinsic and extrinsic), social norms, communications, decision-making processes, development processes, and learning approaches in an organization and/or community.

Organizations that acknowledge and prepare for cultural challenges — and change — will better navigate and reduce risks when building their community program. A trend in the 2022 State of Community Management report is community programs’ increasing ability to connect community participation to tangible business outcomes.

Online Communities Drive Business Outcomes

The forced shift to remote and hybrid work due to COVID-19 saw organizations leveraging communities to connect with employees, customers, and prospects. By tying this to business outcomes community teams can prove the value of community approaches, which leads to positive perceptions of — and increased spending for — community.

In 2022, more community programs can directly attribute sales-related metrics to community — namely higher retention/new purchase rates, increased qualified leads, and reduced sales cycles. This is exciting, especially when coupled with the two highest growth outcomes (external factors) cited this year.

While revenue growth and profitability aren’t prevalent enough to crack the top three just yet, their year-over-year jump shows many community teams are developing the business skills needed to characterize their program in terms old-school executives understand. They’re proving community’s impact on the top and bottom line.

Use community to lead the way.

For culture change, that is. Globally, we’re facing a hybrid future where connecting with employees and customers (and everyone else, really) will take place in person and online. Community’s incredibly effective at powering behavior change, and if you’re reading this, you probably know a thing or two about community. Leverage that power to help facilitate organizational change.

Get more community ideas and advice in our 2022 State of Community Management report:

Using Online Community to Transform Internal Culture and Communications

April 27, 2020 By Jim Storer

Humana is a healthcare company that has transitioned through its 50+ years from operating nursing homes to operating hospitals to offering health insurance to millions of people. In recent years, Humana has focused its efforts on the senior population through Medicare Advantage products, as well as promoting value-based care through providers.

Historically, internal communications were one-sided, and increasingly employees wanted to have a voice in the organization.

Their internal community, called ‘Buzz’, was created so employees could:

ENGAGE in conversations.
LEARN about the latest company updates – events, announcements, and more.
REPLACE lengthy, siloed email communications with public-facing interactive conversations.

In this case study, Jeff Ross, Community Manager at Humana shares how he and the Humana Community Team used their internal community to transform the internal culture and communications at their organization.

Download the Humana Case study.

Measuring Engagement and Culture: TheCR’s Community Engagement Framework

March 27, 2017 By Rachel Happe

How do you measure engagement? or culture? The state of the art in measuring engagement is to measure click-throughs. That’s not asking very much. And it certainly won’t get you to collaboration, co-creation or innovation. Far too often engagement is thought of as one specific activity and therefore a switch; either someone is engaged or they are not.

The reality is far more nuanced.

In communities, viewing and clicking on content is not enough to build relationships or community value. Unless community managers can create a culture that makes individuals feel comfortable enough to share their experiences, answer other people’s questions and ask their own questions, the community will fail.

Because of that, community professionals have always thought about engagement differently and see it as a rich range of behaviors from viewing content to collaborating on innovative ideas that create strategic opportunities. You can see this in The Commitment Curve from Douglas Atkin.

Community professionals have also learned that engagement levels depend on comfort, familiarity, and trust of a person’s social environment – the community around them.

What community managers know about intentionally creating a trusting culture has far-ranging consequences for those in marketing, customer experience, communications, HR and leadership. Community managers hold the key to helping organizations change behaviors and with it, cultures – and in ways that are sustainable and efficient.

Over the past year, we’ve worked with our clients and members to edit and revise what we originally called TheCR’s Work Out Loud Framework. We’ve used it for training, coaching, analytics and dashboards. Our clients have found that it helps everyone quickly understand the value and trajectory of engagement – and what’s required to develop a culture of trust that supports collaboration. It is a powerful tool to focus stakeholders on the behaviors that are most likely to lead to ROI. More importantly, it provides a narrative for how engagement and culture evolve so stakeholders can grasp the interim steps and markers on the path to developing a collaborative culture.

We’ve renamed the framework; now TheCR’s Community Engagement Framework – its name changed to reflect the critical link between engagement and community.

Many leaders see poor engagement as an issue but they have yet to realize that well-managed communities are the solution.

Communities, managed well, are the mechanisms to establish and extend social trust, which is required for broad and deep engagement. By breaking down engagement behaviors into four categories, the Community Engagement Framework allows organizations to measure their culture, understanding what percent of their constituents are:

Validating
Sharing
Asking & Answering
Exploring

By measuring what percentage of a community is exhibiting each of these behaviors and in what volume, you can see how passive, reactive, open or proactive the culture is. Does the culture support only passive and reactive behavior or do individuals feel confident enough to take ownership of problems and solutions? You can see that in the prevalence of questions and open-ended explorations.

Community managers use this data to prioritize and focus their approach – creating programming and engagement strategies to nudge the community incrementally along the engagement curve, ensuring social validation and rewards along the way. As behavior in the community changes so too does the management approach.

Culture is often thought of as something vague that can’t really be measured. But community managers see it every day in the way people are willing to interact with each other when they are not required to do so. That is very telling of how generous, supportive, open, caring and innovative the culture is – and it can be measured. By measuring the culture, you can also then measure the effectiveness of its leadership. This can be done for one small community or for an entire network. It can be done across multiple channels. And it can be done for an entire organization or its customer ecosystem.

We’ve seen our clients use this model with great success by making it easy to tell the story of their community, educate stakeholders, demonstrate effectiveness, and prove ROI. What can it do for you?

Does your community culture make you a Lake Wobegon community?

August 2, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

I was reviewing data from the State of Community Management from the 2016 report when a data point caught my attention that wasn’t part of the initial publication. Even at the Stage 1, our lowest level of community maturity, nearly half of community leaders said they were satisfied with their community culture. How could this be? I had noticed the sharp correlation between community maturity and satisfaction with culture – our most mature communities were almost universal in their satisfaction. That didn’t surprise me. But I wondered about those early stage communities, some decades old, where satisfaction outstripped levels of success.

And because it’s summer, I started to think about communities as famous lakes.

Clockwise from lower left: Lake Karachay, Russia; Lake Wakatipu, New Zealand; Lake Como, Italy; Lake Wobegon, USA

The place everyone wants to go we’ll call Lake Como, after the Italian lake that draws the rich and powerful to its beautiful shores. It’s the place you want to be – breathtaking in its beauty, active with people enjoying their time there, and the evidence of its wealthy, success attracting people is all around you – beautiful villas, upbeat conversation. It’s a hot spot – it knows who it is and embraces it. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it works. It takes savvy management to keep Lake Como from jumping the shark – but it’s got the ability to demonstrate engagement and impact.

Everything the “Lake Como” community offers, the “Lake Karachay” community doesn’t. Lake Karachay is a Russian lake in the Ural Mountains that is so polluted that just standing next to it for an hour gives you a radiation overdose. It’s a place almost beyond salvage. It will need either a massive investment or just the acceptance that it’s easier to start someplace else than fix this one. Maybe Lake Karachay can be reclaimed with enough ambition and investment, but it won’t be easy.

Then there are those communities with potential. I honeymooned in New Zealand and was struck by the stunning beauty of Lake Wakatipu. It was beautiful, not overly developed, and loaded with possibilities. Some early communities are at this most excellent place. They have room to grow, but how they do is up to the manager. You can go big. You can stay intimate. You can attract investment and new members, or you can focus on behaviors and value. In the meantime – “Lake Wakatipu” is a community its members truly value and appreciate, and it’s great.

If that’s where you want your community to be – here’s the place you don’t. Welcome to Lake Wobegon.

But Lake Wobegon looks like a beautiful place. Its surface stats are wonderfully above average – and community leaders are happy to keep the illusion alive. They point to the number of members, the number of posts, and pat themselves on the back. Executive see the stats, too, and are pleased.

That is, until times get tough, or someone asks what’s really going on. What’s the value of Wobegon? What’s the purpose of Wobegon? Does it solve problems, foster solutions, or answer questions? At Wobegon, not really. There’s engagement, maybe – but not enough value. Behaviors that matter don’t change, and when times get tough, Lake Wobegon fades away.

Truth is, while Lake Karachay is a miserable and knows it, Lake Como flaunts what it’s got, and Lake Wakatipu’s visitors cherish it. Lake Wobegon is dangerous. Its good looks are a false face.

As a manager of a successful community – ask yourself: “Can we define our value?” “Can we measure it?” “Do we have a strategy, systems and tactics to keep it up?”

If you think your community is doing great – you may be right.

Just make sure you’re not Wobegon.

The Link Between Communities and Culture Change

March 28, 2016 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder, The Community Roundtable

This month, at JiveWorld, I presented Becoming a Community Ninja: 5 Secrets of Community Black Ops. One of those secrets was using communities to create culture change.

Most organizations do not understand how powerful communities can be in support of goals like creating collaborative and innovative cultures or executing on digital transformation.

I didn’t fully understand this connection, either, until a few years ago when I read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. In it, he itemized three things required for behavior change:

The mechanics of the change
The belief that the change is desirable
A community of the changed

You can establish behavior change with just the first two but, when stressed, people revert to old behaviors, Duhigg noted. However, if they are part of a community of the changed their peers will help them maintain the new behavior. That insight shifted my own thinking about the work we do to advance the practice of community management. I always knew communities could effectively deliver on business outcomes, but this insight helped me to understand that communities are the only effective way to change culture.

But there’s a problem.

First, most of the conversations around culture change and digital transformation are completely separate from the conversations about communities. As I’ve delved deeper into the research on behavior change, I also see another issue with the traditional approaches to culture change. There is very often an emphasis on creating a vision of change and then selling that vision as a driver for behavior change at the individual level.

Changing beliefs in this way is very, very hard – and expensive. It’s also a huge missed opportunity for both those who are investing in culture change and for community program owners, who could better understand and articulate the value communities can deliver to their organizations.

Community managers very rarely tell people to do anything. Instead, they generate behavior change by creating an environment where some behaviors are easy and others are hard through community architecture, UX, behavior modeling, rewarding desired behaviors, triggering incremental new behaviors, moderating out negative behaviors and ensuring positive behaviors are socially reinforced.

When you take a community management approach to behavior change, it triggers a series of ‘aha’ moments for individuals that lead them to change their beliefs about what is possible – and leads to even more behavior change. Operationally, that means instead of investing in getting agreement on a new belief first, the belief becomes a natural result of engaging in new methods. The makes the community approach to culture change more cost-effective and agile.

At The Community Roundtable, we collaborate with clients to use community approaches to change culture. Much of that work is helping community program owners effectively understand, assess, measure and trigger culture change. TheCR’s Work Out Loud Framework is our tool that articulates four stages of culture change, and documents how cultures move from transactional relationships to collaborative relationships that allow people to explore out loud, a core attribute of collaborative and innovative cultures.

Download the high-resolution version of TheCR’s Community Engagement Framework here. Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the Framework inside the Network here.

– and get in touch if you would like to explore how to use this approach to change the culture of your community – or your organization!

Acknowledgments: The ‘Work Out Loud’ concept is not new – for a history of the evolution of the term, see Jane McConnell’s post from 2014 here. Two of my favorite other resources on this are John Stepper’s book, Working Out Loud: For a Better Career and Life and Jane Bozarth’s book Show Your Work.

This model is the second iteration of a model first published by me for The Community Roundtable in June of 2015. In TheCR model, we link the concept of working out loud to communities – a link we feel is critical for sustained behavior change and something that differentiates this model from some of the other work in the space.