The Community Roundtable

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

Communities Drive Meaningful Change Management

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From improving customer satisfaction to providing fast and easy support and empowering members, online communities drive increased revenue, boost customer satisfaction, and make connecting easier than ever before.

This eBook contains new, unreleased data from the 2022 State of Community Management report, explores trends in online communities, and showcases what success looks like in communities at the forefront of this innovation, like Spotify, Flexera, and Zoom.

Meaningful Change Management - Zoom
Power remote collaboration
Meaningful Change Management - Budgets
Drive business outcomes
Meaningful Change Management - Advocates
Turn customers into advocates

You’ll learn about how online communities add business value to the organizations and get tactical ideas on how you can implement similar community-based programs at your organization.

Communities Drive Meaningful Change Management

Download your copy of Meaningful Change Management here.

We partnered with community platform company, Khoros, to dive into what customer support communities look like today. Through unpublished data from the 2022 State of Community Management research and in-depth looks at real community programs, this ebook provides a practical guide for anyone looking to increase the impact of their online community program. Don’t have an online community yet? You’ll learn what success looks like – and get ideas for starting your own.

3 Reasons You Should Have a Community Roadmap

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community roadmap

A community roadmap gives direction to your community program. Your community strategy describes your destination. The roadmap helps steer you there.

​ Roadmaps often look like project plans, detailing specific activities and the resources required. Roadmaps mark milestones in a community’s journey, making tracking progress easier. Roadmaps are common in product and technology lifecycle planning and can be a useful tool when communicating plans for the future of your community program with your team and executives.

Here are three reasons you should have a community roadmap if you don’t already!

Align tactical and strategic priorities.

A roadmap highlights your community’s objectives and how you will achieve 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.

A community roadmap translates your strategy into an action plan. Map community activities and initiatives to the key objectives they will address. This exercise will help you uncover what is important and what is not:

  • If you don’t have any activities linked to an objective, spend time planning what you need to do to meet that objective and add to or edit your roadmap.
  • If you are planning activities that don’t meet any community objectives, consider whether these activities are worth the resources you spend on them.

Communicate value.

​ A roadmap shows which activities are important to invest in to grow your community. ​ As a communication tool, it documents community decision-making.

If you’ve articulated the value your community brings to your business in your community strategy, you can map specific activities and plans in your roadmap back to those objectives and their value to the business.

Your roadmap can serve as a communication tool in various scenarios:

  • Planning discussions: When building your roadmap, highlight the objectives of each activity.
  • Community performance discussions: Link activities to metrics in your community scorecard/dashboard.
  • Staff performance evaluations: Incorporate specific business outcomes in the performance evaluations of team members based on the activities they manage in the community roadmap.

Organize planning

Roadmaps translate strategy into action because they itemize the resources needed for effective outcomes. ​ Connecting resources to how they will advance the community strategy makes it easier to measure value.

Your community roadmap translates your community strategy to action, outlining the activities required to help your community achieve value for the business.

Having an organized work plan helps you decide what resources you need and when. Areas to consider include:

  • Internal staff time
  • External consultant fees
  • Budget for external resources like training
  • Budget for community events and promotions

Not sure where to start?

You can download our free Building a Community Roadmap ebook. In it we explore the elements of a productive community (aligned to the eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model) and share tips and worksheets for getting started. (Jump to page 17 to dive right in!)

Building a Community RoadmapDownload

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Foundations Of Community Success

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Over the last two years, the place of community in organizations shifted, with community programs becoming a commonly required investment at all types of companies. The COVID-19 pandemic tipped communities from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Suddenly, the value of connecting employees and customers via an equitable and widely accessible digital network was obvious.

Well, obviously to community professionals. It’s not always easy to get organizational leaders on board with the resources and support needed to build comprehensive online community programs.

In this new look at data from the State of Community Management 2021 research, Foundations for Community Success explores:

  • Checking your community health: How do you decide what defines a healthy community for your use case?
  • Contributing to organizational success: With community becoming visible across the organization, it’s more important than ever to make sure your community directly contributes to defining organizational outcomes. How can you ensure that your community is aligned with business goals?
  • Building for long-term success: Community hasn’t ever been a ‘build it and they will come’ proposition. How can you use meaningful content and programs to lay the foundation for long-term engagement and success?

Based on the 2021 State of Community Management research, Foundations of Community Success was produced by The Community Roundtable and made possible with support from Higher Logic.

Download the ebook here.

The Evolution of Customer Communities

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In 2021, online communities are table stakes for brands that want to connect and engage with their audience.

Community professionals are now handed the task of not just connecting with a brand’s audience, but deciding what kind of engagement is needed, and how to build a long-term strategy to foster and maintain that activity.

Today, customer communities typically fall into one or more of three core categories: support communities, brand marketing communities, and innovation communities.

We partnered with Khoros to explore these three community types, and to look at how community professionals can make their customer communities more valuable to their brands.

This ebook takes new, unpublished data from the State of Community Management 2021 and looks at how online customer communities contribute to both audience engagement and satisfaction (like higher CSAT scores) and how they make a meaningful impact on the organizations broader goals.

The Evolutions of Customer Communities
The Evolutions of Customer Communities
The Evolutions of Customer Communities

In addition to this new, externally-focused data, we profile three innovative online communities, that are using their customer interactions to drive advocacy, empowerment, and innovation.

Download your copy of this State of Community Management eBook for free.

Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities

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A lot has changed in the community landscape in the last few years. We’ve seen movement on the vendor side, increased executive support for community programs, and the continued maturation of community roles.

​To further explore some of these changes in community roles and responsibilities, we partnered with Higher Logic to provide in-depth looks at the roles defined in the Community Careers and Compensation report and profile six real-life community professionals in a number of different roles.

The resulting eBook, Community Management: Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities, provides a practical guide for community professionals, hiring managers, and HR teams looking to better understand community roles and responsibilities today.

What skills does a community manager need
Katie Baumer Community Manager
Community Management resources

Through Community Management: Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities you will:

  • Understand distinctions in community management roles. The Community Careers and Compensation research collected data for three common community roles – and the years of experience, salary, and skills required for each.
  • Meet real-life community professionals. Six community professionals share how they found their current community role, and share advice for those interested in pursuing a career in community management.
  • Prepare job descriptions. Use the research data to determine the qualifications necessary for different community roles and the responsibilities and main priorities of each.
  • Explore resources that advance community management skills. Whether you’re looking to build your own skills or are a manager looking to increase your team’s skills, the research highlights the top resources professionals use to network and build their capabilities.

Learn more and download the free eBook now.

Four Ways Online Engagement Impacts Members

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All engagement is not the same…and different engagement behaviors generate different outcomes.

Engagement is challenging to measure because engagement is not a single action, but a range of behaviors. Without getting more specific about what kind of engagement is meaningful – and what is meaningful changes based on the objective of your community initiative – it is impossible to measure and connect to business value.

The Community Roundtable’s Community Engagement Framework is designed to help categorize, measure, and understand the impact of different types of engagement. We break engagement behaviors down into the following categories:

  • Explore
  • Ask
  • Share
  • Validate

These categories require different levels of connection, motivation, and cultural maturity and produce different outcomes.

Download this free ebook to learn more!

CMGT 101: The Power of Engaging Community Programming

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Note: This content appears in a slightly different form in our ebook: CMGT 101: 17 CommunityLeaders Share Their Secrets for Success.CMGT 101 is packed with engagement ideas, governance tips, career advice, and more from community leaders working at innovative organizations like CA Technologies, Aetna, Electronic Arts, SAP, Pearson, Akamai, and Atlassian. 

Download the ebook here for free.

Lori Harrison-Smith is a Community Strategist at Steelcase and has worked in community management for six years. Her community has ~8,000 members. She shared her best practices for creating engaging programming in CMGT 101.

We use a question of the week to successfully engage our members. Posting a weekly question in your community can help to spur some of your hesitant users to get engaged. It’s a simple, low-effort way for users to participate and get to know each other – around business or personal topics. And from there it will become a habit to interact.

DO KEEP THINGS SIMPLE

Questions shouldn’t require a novella to answer. This is important, especially in the beginning. One of the first questions asked in our campaign was “Where are you from?” It was super easy for people to jump into the conversation.

DO GET USERS INVOLVED

We reached out to some of our power users with some sample questions and had them start the conversations. That way it didn’t come across as a “planned” promotion, but instead seemed more organic.

DON’T LEAVE THE QUESTION ASKER HANGINGengaging programming

Some questions are easier to jump into than others. If we noticed a question was sitting without a response for a few hours, we would reach out to some of our users behind the scenes and ask if they would help generate some interest.

PRO TIP

Come up with a wide list of questions beforehand so you can carry out the campaign for a while. We then built a “calendar” with people who agreed to participate and had them post their questions each Monday.

Download the CMGT 101 ebook and learn more! 

 

CMGT 101: Why use storytelling in your online community?

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Note: This content appears in a slightly different form in our ebook: CMGT 101: 17 Community Leaders Share Their Secrets for Success. CMGT 101 is packed with engagement ideas, governance tips, career advice, and more from community leaders working at innovative organizations like CA Technologies, Aetna, Electronic Arts, SAP, Pearson, Akamai, and Atlassian. Download the ebook here for free. 

Chris Catania is the Community Team Lead and Strategist at ESRI. He shared best practices for using storytelling in a powerful way in your online community.

Why is storytelling a powerful tool for community managers?

Stories move us. And community professionals must prioritize and master the art of storytelling in their daily work. Storytelling is vital to communicating the business value of community to stakeholder audiences. An inspiring well told community story can win minds and transform an organization.

Do Demonstrate Value

Focus on WIIFW: What’s In It for We. Appeal to the shared common good not just individual gain and you’ll connect with your audience and make a greater impact.

Do Target Your Message

Focus on having different stories to share with different people. Always be ready to share your stories at a moment’s notice in a meeting or in the elevator.

Do Seek The Right Stories Out

Stories don’t just come to you. You have to know what stories you’re looking for and then go get them. You have to put on your journalist hat, ask the right questions, be constantly curious and discover the gems yourself. And once you find the story you have to mold, shape and refine it so it’s ready to share. But don’t wait for perfection. Sometimes just beginning and sharing it over time is part of refining your story.

Don’t let your story get stale

Evolve your story. Adapt and grow your community story to show how your community is growing and evolving, too.

Happy CMAD 2018 – Community Management Advancement Day

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HAPPY CMAD 2018, EVERYONE!

I’m going to be honest – CMAD is one of my favorite days of the year. While CMAD started out as Community Management Appreciation Day, we like to imagine it has evolved into something more – community management advancement day. Because really, what shows more appreciation than saying, “we see you and we want to help you get to where you want to be!”?

We started brainstorming a way to celebrate CMAD 2018 that would both highlight some of the amazing community management leaders we know and provide a tangible asset for community professionals everywhere to enjoy. Thus, CMGT 101 was born. We worked closely with 17 community leaders to get their advice on specific topics, like member retention, effective engagement, community UX and more and compiled this ebook: CMGT 101: 17 Community Leaders Share Their Secrets for Success.

CMAD 2018

We could not have published this ebook without the thoughtful contributions from: 

  1. Lori Harrison-Smith, Steelcase
  2. J.J. Lovett, CA Technologies
  3. Aaliyah Miller, Aetna
  4. Patty McEnaney, Envestnet
  5. Monique van den Berg, Atlassian
  6. Jerry Green, The Community Roundtable
  7. Kirsten Laaspere, Akamai
  8. Jay Graff, JM Family Group
  9. Marjorie Anderson, PMI
  10. Jerry Janda, SAP
  11. Dana Baldwin, Electronic Arts
  12. Dina Vekaria, Pearson
  13. Judi Cardinal, Akamai
  14. Lisa Allison, Analog Devices
  15. Heather Ausmus, Ciena
  16. Chris Catania, ESRI
  17. Stephanie Field, Carbon Black

You can head here and download your own copy of CMGT 101: 17 Community Leaders Share Their Secrets for Success and check out the best practices that this amazing group of community leaders shares.

If you are a community professional please know that we do appreciate you, and all the work that you do every day to advance the world of community management. If you aren’t a community professional – what you are waiting for? Quick – find one and thank them!

A final shout-out to ALL the community leaders in TheCR Network – we only highlight 17 of them here, but there are hundreds more who inspire us daily and it is immensely gratifying to get to work alongside them.

Happy CMAD!

Five Can’t Miss Community Programming Ideas

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Our State of Community Management research makes it clear: thoughtful content and programs increase engagement and drive the long-term success of communities.

Content and programs are often seen as one collective entity, but they serve two different roles for communities: content connects people into the community, while programs create opportunities for members to connect with each other. Both have value and both are needed.

In this new ebook we share five programs that drive long-term engagement and increase the ways your members connect. You’ll learn about:

  • member spotlights
  • ask me anythings
  • work out louds
  • photo sharing contests
  • questions of the week

and how to implement them in your community. Pro-tip – it might be easy to launch a new program, but don’t expect overnight success. This is definitely a case of “slow and steady wins the [engagement] race.” Get your members used to these new, regular programs and engagement will follow. Do not be discouraged if it takes awhile – stick with it.

https://www.slideshare.net/rhappe/five-cant-miss-community-programming-ideas

Download the free ebook.