Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.
Heads of Networks
At-a-Glance:
Member Since | 2021
Superpower | Building a fire
#teamcat or #teamdog | #teamcat
Sean comes to community management after years in the not-for-profit world. From program management to stakeholder communication, Sean loves translating all of those skills into a community practice.
You can ask Sean about:
1. Tabletop RPG’s
2. Anything on hyperallergic.com
3. Where to camp in Maine
Head of Networks
At-a-Glance:
Member Since | 2017
Superpower | Comma placement
#teamcat or #teamdog | #teamdog
Kelly is a veteran community engagement practitioner in the journalism space and loves applying this knowledge and experience to the community management world.
You can ask Kelly about:
1. New Jersey beaches: the official ranking
2. Anything Martin Scorsese related
3. How to work the offline into online communities
Community Strategist
At-a-Glance:
Member Since | 2017
Superpower | Planning and organizing
#teamcat or #teamdog | #teamdog
Passionate about all things process, Emma loves a list. She is here to keep the team on track with all things advisory. You will find her tackling project planning in Wrike and transitioning projects from pipeline to process. A newcomer to the USA and to Community Management, Emma moved from the UK in July 2016 with her family. Consequently, Emma spends much time wondering if people understand her British humor and correcting her spelling and punctuation. In her spare time, you will find Emma on a ski slope or a beach with her family.
You can ask Emma about:
Connect with Emma on Linkedin.
By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.
(Illustration by Sarah Lazarovic)
Despite it being not quite halfway through March we are very ready for winter to be over. After an unseasonably warm weekend it snowed twice in Boston this week. Enough!
We are already looking forward to April – and not just for the (hopefully) nicer weather. April marks our five year anniversary and we are ready to celebrate. This week we announced our 5th anniversary celebration – a Happy Hour in Cambridge, MA. If you’re in the Greater Boston area we’d love to see you!
That’s all for this week, friends. Have a great weekend, beware the ides of March and we’ll see you back here on Monday!
—–
Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input available inside the Network improves the quality of their work? It’s true!
Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.
By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.
If you had asked me a decade ago whether I wanted to start a company, the answer would have been a resounding no. But a funny thing happened on the way to the circus – technology, communications and organizational development collided in a way where my experiences gave me unique insight – some of which is personal and some of it through my previous work.
I am a minister’s daughter and not just any minister, one who worked in a church where the congregation was responsible for hiring and firing their leaders. And as a child I had an odd fascination with church meetings and listening to people resolve issues collectively. I also watched as my father had to balance factions in an intense culture (in the midst of Cambridge, MA where people do not lack for opinions). It was its own education in people, relationships and power dynamics.
Later on, I had the opportunity to row on a crew team and first experienced the concept of swing, which profoundly impacted how I thought of group performance. I was never the best student (or the best athlete) but I realized that I could be an important member of the best team and that together, when there is swing, groups can do profound things.
Professionally, I’ve had almost nine lives; as a research assistant looking at health care systems, working in government, as an analyst assessing operational strategies, managing software products, managing start-up teams and as a technology market analyst. I’ve had experience working with the implications of organizational structures, with the application of cutting edge technologies (I was building SaaS-based ideation and partner portals in the late 90s), and from my youth I understood how you manage in environments you can’t control.
So now I’m eating frogs – our team’s term for getting critical but not necessarily inspiring things done – and helping to lead The Community Roundtable. I believe passionately that new communications environments enable individuals to be rewarded proportionately to what they contribute because those contributions can now be seen by everyone in an online community. For me, this means more equality and more access for more people – without the traditional barriers that limited talented people from succeeding; like the school you went to, your family’s social circles or where you live. It also gives individuals the responsibility and the opportunity to determine their own contribution balance. For organizations, it means lowering the transaction costs of creating and distributing value. My job at TheCR is to help organizational leaders understand how to execute on this opportunity by applying what we call community management instead of traditional management approaches. In the end, my hope is that I can improve lives by improving people’s control over the work they do.
One of the things that I am most proud of is that as an organization we collaborate with our members and clients to create value that neither one of us could deliver on our own. Recently for me, that meant working closely with a client to build a training program for internal community managers. The training program consists of short videos paired with worksheets that allow participants to immediately translate what they learn into actionable plans. While we had the content, our client pushed us to create a format that allowed part-time community managers to immediately put best practices to use. It’s a great example of how to create value that is a win for the client, a win for us and ultimately a win for other clients who need similar programs to make their social business initiatives a success.
—–
Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input improves the quality of their work? It’s true!
Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.
Co-Founder and Principal
At-a-Glance:
Member Since | 2009
Superpower | Simplifying the complex
#teamcat or #teamdog | #teamdog
Rachel is the chief wonk at TheCR and oversees the research, content and thought leadership.
You can ask Rachel about:
1. The secret lives of eight-year-olds
2. Tips on how to travel for fun and profit
3. Why our approach to enabling human potential needs to be community-centric
Connect with Rachel on Twitter or LinkedIn.
More About Rachel:
Rachel has spent the last 25 years helping organizations implement emerging technologies to advance their business strategies.
She understands how networked communications environments can transform how people work, their productivity and their personal satisfaction by aligning their passions, skills and relationships.
Rachel co-founded The Community Roundtable to support business leaders developing their community and social business strategies. Clients including SAP, Aetna, BASF, CA, H&R Block, and CSC benefit from Rachel’s ability to make sense of abstract trends and her ability to see the implications that technical and operational decisions can have on people and processes.
During her career Rachel has served in analyst, product management, product marketing and executive roles.
