The Community Roundtable

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

3 Quick Community Wins for February

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Check these three easy community management to-dos off your list and set yourself up for community success.

We are delighted that in recent years February has become a time to practice love in all its forms. If you’re into all that Cupid stuff? Awesome! But the rise of Galentine’s Day, along with increased calls for self-care is what really warms our hearts. Our quick wins for February focus on online community love.

1- Put your oxygen mask on first.

If you aren’t taking care of yourself, can you really do your best job taking care of other people in your online community? No. So, February is a great time to reflect on the parts of your online community management role that help you thrive. Thinking about your role and your future isn’t selfish; knowing yourself and where you excel and where you want to grow is only good for your community.

If you aren’t familiar with our Community Skills Framework, it’s a great way to assess your strengths and identify areas for growth and areas for outsourcing. You aren’t going to be great at every single community thing and that’s ok (more than okay – normal!) Identifying the places you should ask for help, hone your skills, and better use resources will make you happier at work and more productive. This short video walks you through all 50 skills in community management and helps you prioritize your time.

2- Show Your Superusers Some Love

Every online community – internal (employee community) and external (custom community) – has a handful of dedicated members who contribute more than the rest. Whether you have a formal superuser, advocacy, or membership leadership program, or informally track and interact with these members, now is a great time to show them some love.

5 Ways to Show Super Users Love in Your Online Community:

1- Swag. Everyone loves free stuff, and it doesn’t have to be an expensive investment. A hand-written note and some stickers go a long way with your superusers.

2- Shout-Outs. Highlight these members in the online community with a quick mention. Feeling seen and appreciated by online community managers makes super users feel valued.

3- Online Badges. If your online community uses badges, create a special badge to identify your superusers. This will also highlight your superusers as a resource to new members who may not understand how to engage when they join your online community.

4- Personally thank active contributors. It seems simple, but it helps increase member satisfaction.

5- Give them a sneak peek at an upcoming program, feature, or initiative. You’ll get valuable feedback and your superusers will love feeling like they got a behind-the-scenes look at something before everyone else does.

How to Start a Super User Program

If you don’t already have a superuser program in place you might consider putting that on your 2022 to-do list. Our State of Community Management research shows that when a member of an Average External Community shifts from a passive recipient of information to an active participant, their activity increases by more than 10x. Their ROI – the return they get for the time they invest – increases by over 200%. This makes investing in advocacy and member leadership programs a no-brainer.

This case study from Mimecast highlights how their community team nurtures their superusers, resulting in the growth of customer participation over 3x in two years.

3- Encourage Your Community to Say Thanks

Everyone is tired. Everyone is burnt out. Everyone is over being on Zoom. Ok, maybe not everyone, but definitely a lot of people. This last quick win is as much for your sanity as for the good of your community. Find a way this month to bring out the good people are feeling.

Maybe it’s a shout-out thread where members can recognize people or ideas that have inspired them recently. Maybe you start a gif-off channel in slack where people can share thank yous accompanied by delightful memes. Maybe you start an appreciation discussion where you tag three people who have made your work life easier/better/more fun/less crazy and ask them to tag three people, and so on.

A wise man (ok, it was Ferris Bueller) once said “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Use February as an excuse to slow down and show some love.

If you have other ways you like to show appreciation in your community we would LOVE to hear them! Please share in the comments below, in our free Facebook Group with over 1500 members, or tag us on twitter @thecr.

PS – We love you. After 14+ years in the community business, we know that we are only as successful as our community. You’re killing it out there, and we’re proud of you. Stay strong!

Three truths of successful communities – the SOCM2014 in review

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By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training, The Community Roundtable

TheCRLibrary_SOCM2014_ThumbnailThe State of Community Management 2014 marked a major step in the evolution of the quantitative ways we were able to assess what worked in community management – and in successful communities. The prior year, the State of Community Management 2013 gave us a quantitative understanding of what community management looked like – but by 2014, we were ready to measure the indicators of what made a community mature.

It was the culmination of something we had already begun to do with our members in TheCR Network – use the Community Maturity Model as a framework with which to benchmark community maturity. Our ability to understand and identify the artifacts of community maturity led to the introduction of something new – our “best-in-class” segment. We were able to highlight the 20 percent of communities who scored the highest overall in the survey, and highlight those elements that really made them stand out relative to the overall survey population.

successful communities
The findings from SOCM2014 included several research-backed findings that hold up just as well today as they did then. Among them:

Community maturity delivers business value. Our “best-in-class” communities were much more likely to be able to measure their value to the business.

Advocacy programs increase engagement. Community leadership and advocacy programs correlated with higher engagement, the ability to measure value and executive engagement, suggesting empowering informal community leaders were a powerful tool for strengthening community

Executive participation impacts success. Getting formal leaders – executives – to take part helped communities secure resources, improve engagement and take a more strategic approach to community, including resourced roadmaps for community development.

For the first time, too, we were able to see measurable evidence of something that until then was known but unproven. Communities that scored well in one competency usually scored well in other areas. For example – communities with well-developed strategies didn’t just score well in strategy. These successful communities usually engaged leaders more effectively, empowered and supported community managers and developed the policies and governance structures to help communities succeed, too. If they didn’t, it was a sign of untapped opportunities to grow – and a clearer direction to pursue.

By 2015 – we were able to take the next step.

SOCM2016_GetStarted_Badgetake the survey buttonThis post is part of a series summarizing The Community Roundtable’s annual State of Community Management reports. The full reports are available on our website, and you can take the State of Community Management 2016 survey through March 18 at https://the.cr/socm2016survey