The Community Roundtable

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

Graduation, or Three Things I Learned as a TheCR Fellow

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Note from Hillary: I’m thrilled to share this guest blog post from one of our current community management fellows who is wrapping up her training time as a TheCR Fellow and looking for a new community management role. 

thecr fellow

Rachael Silvano, TheCR Fellow 2017

On my first day as a TheCR Fellow, the team asked me to take a quiz to determine my Holy Grail character (King Arthur for those interested). This quickly led to nine months of learning, training, and exploring every nook of community management, with some fantastic thought leaders at the helm. For those of you unfamiliar with TheCR Fellowship program, it’s a one-year contract designed to intertwine real-world experience with a training environment. For me, that meant working on dashboards, reading the last four years of The State of Community Management Research, and making connections in TheCR Network where I helped manage the day-to-day workings of the community.

With my year coming to a close, I’m walking away with a profound sense of gratitude for the opportunities I’ve had at TheCR, as well as excitement over what my next role could be. I’d love to continue honing the skills I’ve established in building dashboards, collecting and analyzing community metrics, and training (if you have a position that fits those descriptions, feel free to drop me a line!).

Below are just a handful of some of the most important takeaways I’ve learned from all the teachers I’ve had at The Community Roundtable:

1.) Community (and Community Management) Is Not Linear

Working in community means being agile, flexible, and comfortable with the unknown. Maybe you start building out an engagement program and end up reviewing your governance in the process. Or perhaps you begin exploring a metric and you wind up waist-deep in your analytics dashboard finding new reports you didn’t know existed. By approaching your work with a loose grip, you can be ready to take on rewarding (if unexpected) challenges.

2.) More Data Does Not Equal Better Data

Much of my work with TheCR was focused on wrangling TheCR Network data. As such, “more =/= better” quickly became my golden rule. Putting your community maturity narrative first, and then telling that story with data is a valuable lesson for community newbies and veteran pros alike. Saying that your “likes” have gone up 120% doesn’t speak to the dynamic complexity of your community’s journey – detailing who is liking, why, and in what context gives a better (and more important) picture.

thecr fellow

3.) Always Be You

There is something to be said about the virtues of being cookie cutter, but the biggest I took away from my time at TheCR is that the things that make you unique are not only important but vital.  I’ve learned to not only be authentic but to craft my authenticity with intention. Chances are if you read an email from me, it had something about video games, robots, or my cat, Walter- which is all thanks to TheCR letting me be me.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from amazing community practitioners and I’m excited to move onto my next career adventure. You can connect with me on Linkedin.

Join TheCR Team: Seeking a Sales/Marketing Fellow

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Are you interested in learning a community-oriented approach to marketing and understanding social selling? TheCR is thrilled to announce an opening for a Sales/Marketing Fellow in 2015.

What’s a Fellow?

The Community Roundtable has hired a number of fellows over the years because it is a unique opportunity for both an individual, TheCR and TheCR’s ecosystem to benefit.  Our fellowships are intended to last 6-12 months and give individuals a strong background and network with which to find a permanent research or analyst position – you can read more about this program here.

What you will learn:

  • How to creating pull marketing and sales programming – collaborating with prospects and clients to create something together
  • What it means to be a generative business (one that generates more value for every segment of a company’s ecosystem than it takes out)
  • How to work with a fast-paced, transparent and collaborative team that has a bias for action and as little overhead as possible
  • How a community management approach to business transforms work into a series of fluid, meaningful collaborations with a network of individuals that build value

You might be our next sales/marketing fellow if you:

  • Love people and have experience with social technologies and online communities
  • Care about your work and the people with whom you work
  • Bring your best effort to every project but can leave your ego at the door
  • Get excited about content creation – in lots of different formats
  • Love communicating with people through writing and social media
  • Are organized, self-driven and have strong project management skills
  • Enjoy the flexibility – and responsibility – of working from home
  • Have a great sense of humor and want to work as part of a small, driven team
  • Are a good copy-editor and like to ensure communications are professional
Responsibilities:
  • Help TheCR team and our ecosystem to demonstrate the value of community and community management
  • Building content that effectively triggers learning or action – must be comfortable with WordPress and PowerPoint, graphic and video skills are a bonus, as is light website coding.
  • CRM maintenance and analysis – experience with Salesforce is a plus, but not a must
  • Relationship development and sales outreach – you’ll be in the trenches with our sales team generating, managing and nurturing conversations
  • Special projects which, depending on your  skill set and interests, could be related to research, content, business development, marketing, or events

You might be the ideal candidate if: 

You are detail-oriented, recognize the value of community management, and want to help us shout it from the rooftops.

Why a fellowship and not a permanent hire?

As a small organization there are large risks for someone in deciding to work with us and there are risks for us in making a permanent hire. By providing training, access to market leaders, and a stipend to a fellow, we can ensure that she or he is very well positioned to find a great gig with a larger organization at the end of the fellowship. To us, this creates a win-win-win for potential candidates, employers, and for us. It also serves our mission by enabling us to develop trained, experienced professionals for the market. But we liked our last two fellows so much we hired them both into permanent roles, which is also a potential outcome of the fellowship.

Apply Now

Do you have what it takes? Are you excited by what we could do together? Please tell us more about you! While not a requirement for the right candidate, preference will be given to people within commuting distance from Boston.

Join TheCR Team: Community Management Fellow Wanted

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Do you want to join TheCR team and become a skilled community manager? We are thrilled to announce that we are hiring a Community Management Fellow for 2015.

Why a Fellow? 

The Community Roundtable has hired a number of fellows over the years because it is a unique opportunity for both an individual, TheCR and TheCR’s ecosystem to benefit.  Our fellowships are intended to last 6-12 months and give individuals a strong background and network with which to find a permanent community manager position – you can read more about this program here.

What you will learn:

  • What strong community management looks like by shadowing our community manager, Hillary Boucher (who was also our first fellow in 2011!)
  • How to prioritize and execute on the many responsibilities of community managers
  • Techniques to drive engagement and collaboration that creates value
  • How to work with a fast-paced, transparent and collaborative team that has a bias for action and as little overhead as possible
  • How a community management approach to business transforms work into a series of fluid, meaningful collaborations with a network of individuals that build value

You might be our next community management fellow if you:

  • Love people and have experience with social technologies and online communities
  • Care about your work and the people with whom you work
  • Bring your best effort to every project but can leave your ego at the door
  • Have strong written and verbal communication skills
  • Enjoy project management and are very organized
  • Love content creation (maybe you love PowerPoint, maybe the idea of writing case studies gets you excited, or perhaps podcasts are your thing)
  • Are self-organized, self-driven and have strong project management skills
  • Think analytically: you are comfortable with and interested in data and analysis
  • Enjoy the flexibility – and responsibility – of working from home
  • Want to learn more about community management – you will work closely with our Community Manager and must love the internet, people and building community

Responsibilities:

  • Help TheCR team and our ecosystem to demonstrate the value of community and community management
  • Ensure that TheCR Network generates more value for members than they contribute
  • Managing member relationships and being responsive to member needs
  • Program planning & management
  • Content curation & creation
  • Documentation of processes
  • Special projects which, depending on the person’s skill set and interests, could be research, content, business development, marketing, or events projects.

You might be the ideal candidate if: 

You are interested in starting a career in community management but already know how to rock a project from start to finish, loves to tell stories with data and has a penchant for creating compelling content.

Do you have what it takes? Are you excited by what we could do together? Please tell us more about you! While not a requirement for the right candidate, preference will be given to people within commuting distance from Boston.

Join TheCR Team: Research Fellow Wanted

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Do you want to join TheCR team and learn more about community, research and analysis? We are thrilled to announce that we are hiring a Research Fellow for 2015.

Why a Fellow? 

The Community Roundtable has hired a number of fellows over the years because it is a unique opportunity for both an individual, TheCR and TheCR’s ecosystem to benefit.  Our fellowships are intended to last 6-12 months and give individuals a strong background and network with which to find a permanent research or analyst position – you can read more about this program here.

What you will learn:

  • How to execute on complex research initiatives
  • How to build a collaborative, networked-based approach to research
  • When and how to integrate research across organizational functions
  • How to create research that delivers date in actionable and relevant ways

You might be our next research fellow if you:

  • Understanding of, experience with and passion for the potential of social technologies and online communities
  • Care about your work and the people with whom you work
  • Bring your best effort to every project but can leave your ego at the door
  • Are analytical and can synthesize quantitative and qualitative inputs
  • You have experience with data analysis, benchmarking, statistics and/or survey techniques
  • Understand that data is only as good as the story that it tells
  • Love building Excel arguments or algorithms in code
  • Have strong communication and editorial skills
  • Enjoy content creation – our research team is responsible for our annual research, as well as additional content including ebooks, infographics, white papers and more
  • Are self-organized, self-driven and have strong project management skills
  • Enjoy the flexibility – and responsibility – of working from home
  • Have a great sense of humor and want to work as part of a small, driven team
Responsibilities:
  • Demonstrate the value of community and community management with research
  • Survey development and administration
  • Data analysis, segmentation and synthesis – Excel proficiency is a must
  • Content development – must have good writing and presentation development skills
  • Special projects which, depending on your  skill set and interests, could be related to research, content, business development, marketing, or events

You might be the ideal candidate if: 

You are a storyteller and data nerd who is curious about how community management is transforming business.

Apply Now

Do you have what it takes? Are you excited by what we could do together? Please tell us more about you! While not a requirement for the right candidate, preference will be given to people within commuting distance from Boston.