At The Community Roundtable, we try to practice what we preach and lead by example. Our business model relies heavily on building relationships, which in financial terms means we are constantly focused on generating more value for our stakeholders – friends, guest experts, members, clients, team members – than they contribute. We believe this is how generative and compounding business models work.
Because of this approach to running a business, we’ve always been customer- and value-focused first and revenue-focused second, although we also believe in a sound, sustainable financial model.
Eight years in, we’ve benefited enormously from this approach. One of the outcomes of a relationship-first approach is that we’ve had very few contentious conversations with any of our constituents. Building great relationships is wonderful from a personal perspective, but it also returns amazing value to the business.
A reflection of that approach is our 2017 Member Advisory Board. We worked to create a board that is diverse, both personally and professionally. They come from different sectors and include an ex-Marine, a former English professor and people from consulting, client and vendor organizations. They represent manufacturing, professional services, and software companies and all have storied community careers. Perhaps most importantly, they are all friends and supportive critics – helping us see more sharply what we have to offer and challenging us to do better.
We are incredibly honored to have these members of TheCR Network step up to advise us as we make choices about where to spend our resources and focus our efforts. They have already done so much to help us understand their needs and challenges by being open and honest with us.
2017 is already flying by and we look forward to flying even higher because Amy from EY, Carrie from Talk Social to Me, Chris from ESRI, Christopher from Knowledge Architecture, Claire from Jive, J.J. from CA Technologies, Lori from Steelcase, and Monique from Oracle are in our corner.
Welcome to the latest episode in our community management podcast series, “
One of the many wonderful things about an association having a member-facing online community is that there’s something in it for everyone. Maybe one of the most challenging things about an association that has a member-facing online community is getting staff and internal stakeholders to see that there’s something in it for everyone.
ct sense for them to create a profile and get a pulse on what’s going on in the community and what your members are saying. After all, this is information they may not be able to gather through normal market research avenues. But does it make sense to them to be there? Do you know what their business goals are and how their involvement will ultimately help them succeed? If your answer to this is “no,” you may want to rethink who you’re trying to engage and why.
Spring has finally sprung here and I don’t think that it is a coincidence that engagement has been growing like the flowers in my yard! Have you been seeing lots of new life in your community? Check what’s been going on inside TheCR Network this past month:
Moderation and governance, when applied well, contributes to productive and healthy community cultures. On this call we learned how one fast growing community went from hostile and unwelcoming to productive and helpful. The member team shared how they turned their community culture for the better with the implementation of clear governance policies and a no nonsense approach to moderation. (Want to learn more about this? You can download the case study 
Those are my big highlights for the month, but I’m going to cheat and add in one more member activity that took place outside the Network. I traveled to Las Vegas, along with several other members of TheCR Team for Jiveworld 2016. While Vegas is always an experience this was a special trip.
