director of community Archives

Community Role Profile: Director of Community

April 20, 2021 By Jim Storer

OVERVIEW OF ROLE
Directors of community lead community programs and typically lead teams that include community specialists, managers, and strategists. The often have operational backgrounds and are paired with community experts with their focus on securing internal support, integrating across the organization, managing a team, and communicating strategic progress.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Directors of community focus on the health of a community program. They are responsible for operations – planning and delivering on the community roadmap. Their priorities tend to be governance, internal advocacy, training, and measurement.

A large part of the director of community role is as an internal champion – ensuring that executives and other stakeholders understand the value of the community, are getting the information they need, and that the community is aligned with their priorities. While directors still participate occasionally in tactical responsibilities and a community background is valuable, their main focus is on operational strategy.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE COMMUNITY
Successful directors of community exhibit strong leadership, relationship building, and communication skills.

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

Community Management Skills That Matter: Business

June 20, 2018 By Jim Storer

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 Career Profiles: The Director of Community Role

March 21, 2018 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Directors of community are responsible for community programs – strategy, governance, team management and budgets. Not every community has a director – instead, a functional executive often takes on these responsibilities. The director of community role is more common in mature communities, in large organizations and in organizations where the community program is central to the business model.

Directors of Community in the Organization

Directors of Community command respect in organizations, both in terms of the number of people they oversee in the organization and the place they occupy in it. 4 out of 5 of those who identify themselves as Directors of Community have direct reports, and most of those have 3 or more of them. When we think about communities being truly integrated into the business, Directors of Community sit in a place to make that happen — our research shows that 83% report to vice-presidents or higher in the organization, including 43% who report to the C-suite.

Access to top managers and connection to the business side of things comes at a small cost for Directors of Community, who are expected to be in the office, rather than work remotely. Just 1-in-5 Directors of Community in our sample works remotely most of the time, and a majority are generally found in the office on a daily basis.

Skills and Training Needs

Directors of Community don’t forget their roots — highly valuing engagement and strategic skills just as strategists and community managers do, but it’s not surprising their biggest training needs revolve around understanding, gathering data and telling the story of the community in a business context. Skills that feed into understanding the value of the community to the organization and to members are also seen as critical.

Want to be a Director of Community?

Your best opportunities may be within your current organization. About half of Directors of Community in our research say they were promoted into their community management role, and nearly two-thirds say they either defined their own position or were approached directly by the hiring manager. Just 13% of Directors of Community say an external job posting led them to their current role.

Are you a Director of Community at your organization? We’d love to hear how your responsibilities and priorities stack up against our survey participants. What is your top community focus for the coming year?

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Want to learn more about the director of community role?

Download our Community Careers and Compensation report for free.

J.J. Lovett, CA Technologies

November 1, 2016 By Jim Storer

Welcome to the latest episode in our community management podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers” featuring J.J. Lovett, Director, Communities at CA Technologies.

Join TheCR’s founder and principal, Jim Storer and director of marketing, Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about a variety of community topics, including:

What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
How can you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

Episode #46 features J.J. Lovett, Director, Communities at CA Technologies. Join us as J.J. quotes “Glengarry Glen Ross” and we chat about his 10-year community journey at CA Technologies, best practices for building a dynamic community team, and his upcoming summer roadtrip!

Check out episode #46 featuring J.J. Lovett here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

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Did you know you can subscribe to “Conversations with Community Managers” iTunes? You can!

Throwback Thursday – All About Community Management Careers

September 15, 2016 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable

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 important 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!

Six skills to make you a successful Director of Community

April 18, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

You may run an online community – but to own an online community program, you need to add some skills to your toolset.

“Great player. Couldn’t cut it as a coach.”

“She was such a great reporter – but I hate her as an editor.”

“Man, I can’t believe his startup crashed and burned like that. He was so good…”

Which one is the Director of Community?

In every business – there’s the stereotype. You’re great at what you do – so you get promoted. You get a new office. You get a pay bump. And often, you fail miserably. That’s because the skills that make you good at what you do are often not at all the same skills to make you good at managing people who do what you do.

That’s the case in community management, too. The Community Careers and Compensation research highlights that Directors of Community and Community Managers share a role in community – but the specifics take them in very different directions. Community managers focus on what goes on in the community – content, engagement and community strategy. As a director, though, you don’t own the community – you own a community program, and need to prioritize building, promoting and connecting community to the business, and need to manage the community as a cost center.

The manager sits at the edge of the community and looks into it. The director sits on the edge and looks out from it. So if you’re a community manager with an eye toward growing your career, what do you need to think about?

Here are six skills that move you to the front of the line as a Director of Community.

Managing people – Not a shocker here, but directing community should (unless you are building to your first hires) involve managing a team of community professionals. What makes a good team? What skills do you need? What skills do you have on board? How will you support your team’s continued growth? Having a system to know what you have, hire what you need and grow what you can is critical.

Building a business case – Thinking about your community strategy is critical, and as a director-level hire, you need to think about how the community works in the business context. Defining the value of community – and the shared value upon which you can connect members and the organization, is important. From there, you need to understand the community benefit in business terms. What’s the ROI? How can you demonstrate that community gets into making your organization a more effective business?

Converting your executives – Executive engagement is a powerful force in community success, but too often, we set unrealistic expectations for converting executives from skeptics to believers. (How many of your members at any level go from disinterested to community leaders, anyway?) Being able to strategically explain the value of community to your executives and other stakeholders can get them on board. Using a system like The Social Executive framework can help you pique their interest, show them the opportunity and get them to see the value.

Enabling training – You’re not just a teacher and evangelist, you’re head of curriculum for a community training program. Developing training that gets new members into and engaged with the community can be a daunting challenge, and in most communities, training is too big to handle alone. Creating a learning mindset and preparing advocates and trainers to help put your system into action is a critical and valuable business skill.

Empowering advocates – As a Director of Community, you’re likely in an organization with the opportunity to build a robust advocacy program for your most important members. What do you do to build that program, and get your most active and important community members to scale your community management efforts while giving them real value for their contributions?

Capturing how it works – Getting stakeholders engaged in community strategy? That may be the easy part. The challenge after that point is developing your roadmap and benchmarking your programs, so you can compare where your community is now to where you want it to be – and then figure out how to move it forward.

Of course, as a community manager, you have a leg up. Your job has been dealing with people – but you have a new set of “customers” in a Director role. Being able to translate what you do as a manager can help get you hired – and being able to turn that into practice can make you a success.

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TheCR is pleased to offer a guided course in Community Program Essentials to help you take the skills you have built within communities and apply them to making community a stronger part of your organization. The 8-week course starts April 26, and gives you a cohort of peers and weekly office hours in addition to self-paced video lessons and worksheets you can use to put the course ideas into practice. It’s an opportunity for Community Managers looking for their next role, and for Directors of Community to hone their skills. Click here to learn more!

CMSS Stats You Can Use: All About Directors of Community

February 4, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Directors of community bring a community management skillset – strong engagement skills, a knack for contentdevelopment – to the table, but spend most of their time on strategic and business objectives. While similar in skill profile to strategists, directors of community spend a great deal of their time advocating for the community, managing the program and managing team members.

Interestingly and despite the fact that it is the bulk of their work, only 33 percent rank strategic and business skills as most important to their role. This suggests that while the business skills are important, a firm grounding in day-to-day community management is critical, and the responsibilities of the role cannot be fulfilled without that grounding.

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

The average salary for a Director of Community is $106, 356
The average Director of Community has 16.2 years of work experience
65% of Directors of Community have been promoted

Top three responsibilities for Directors of Community:

Developing the community strategy
Advocating for the community
Developing community policies and guidelines

Top three priorities for Directors of Community:

Activity rates
Specific business outcomes
Membership growth

Are you a Director of Community at your organization? We’d love to hear how your responsibilities and priorities stack up against our survey participants. What is your top community focus for 2015?

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Directors of Community may find a lot of great ideas for their team in the new Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes, available starting February 4. Learn more at https://www.communityroundtable.com/CMHandbook.

CMSS Stats You Can Use: The Role and Compensation of Directors of Community

January 7, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

It’s the time of year when many community professionals are making career resolutions – whether to strengthen their current role in their organization or take that next step on the career ladder. With that in mind, it seems like a good time to surface more of the great and useful data from the Community Manager Salary Survey that illustrate the career path of community professionals. So in the coming weeks, we are going to use Wednesday as our day for sharing statistics from our research.

Director of Community Profile from the CMSS 2014

Today, we begin with some information on Directors of Community – once a rare unicorn indeed, but a role now popping up more and more in our community travels. Directors of Community typically own community programs at their organizations, and are responsible for community strategy, governance, team management and budgets. Not every community has a director – instead, a functional executive often takes on these responsibilities. But the Director of Community role is becoming common (as well as some VP of Community roles) in mature communities, in large organizations and in organizations where the community program is central to the business model.

Through our research in the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 we found that true to the title Directors of Community have more community and more general work experience than the average Community Manager or Community Strategist. And there are signs that they are being treated (as they should be) as members of management – with higher salaries and bonuses as part of their compensation – in fact, 65% of Directors of Community receive a bonus.

That high percentage is good news for the Directors, and it also sends a signal that organizations are developing an appreciation for the demonstrable value that community can provide.

Does your organization have a Director of Community as part of your community team? Are you a Director of Community yourself? We’d love to hear your perspective on the challenges you face in your role, the way you demonstrate value – and the information and research that would be most helpful to support you in demonstrating and getting compensated for your value.

Click the link to explore the full Community Manager Salary Survey 2014, now available from The Community Roundtable.

Are you a Director of Community? Build the connections and skills that can move you forward in your own career. TheCR Network provides dozens of professional development opportunities and opens doors to connect you with one of the largest networks of experienced community managers and directors in the world. Join us!