The Community Roundtable

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

Save the Date: Customer Community Summit is June 15th

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After a two-year hiatus, we are thrilled to welcome our community audience back to Boston for a one-day, exclusive customer community summit. This all-inclusive experience will take place at Convene Boston on Wednesday, June 15, 2022.

This event is designed for community professionals working with external communities – including customer or partner communities focused on support, product innovation, and marketing/brand awareness.

We’ll combine live product demos featuring new features and functionality from leading customer community platforms, with expert panels and case studies from some of the top customer communities today.

What: The Customer Community Summit is a one-day immersive learning experience for customer community professionals.

Why: Launching, maintaining, migrating, and managing online communities can be overwhelming and, without an experienced team, can lead to expensive and time-consuming mistakes. Learn from solutions providers and online community professionals who have been in your shoes.

Who: Anyone responsible for launching, managing, and evolving online community initiatives. Community managers, project managers, stakeholders, IT professionals, and more are welcome!

We’ve also built in a lot of time for networking with community peers, and connecting with community technology providers to help you get the information you need when selecting a new community platform, or migrating an existing community to a new solution.

The Customer Community Summit will take place at Convene Boston – which means the food will be amazing, and there will be unlimited coffee, drinks, and snacks all day.

We’ll cap the Summit off with a casual cocktail party and head to a series of dinners hosted by our community partners. This is a the perfect event if you’re looking to learn more about the customer community landscape, are currently evaluating a new community platform, or just want to connect with community professionals facing similar challenges.

You can view the agenda and learn more about registration here.

Welcome to the 2020 Connect Technology Track

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This is a guest post by Technology Track Chair, Jillian Betjlich.

If there was ever a year for technology to demonstrate its reach, 2020 has been that year. Amidst chaos and confusion, technology has been a common denominator allowing us to connect, engage, and collaborate with individuals around the world. It has allowed us to transition to virtual workplaces and educational institutions, get the information we need instantly, or simply just spend time with a familiar face and voice.

We knew technology had changed how we work, play, and interact, but this year it has truly proven its immense impact on how we live and thrive. Technology is here to stay. (The pandemic and 2020 are not. Phew!)

Some of the sessions at the Technology Track 2020.

Behind the scenes of all that chaos, confusion, change, and transition are community professionals harnessing the use of technology to bring about the environments we need and want. We’ve created digital worlds, changed behaviors for the better, dug deep into code and data, and leveraged every last drop of functionality. And we’re so ready to share our experiences, lessons learned, best practices, and more with you.

This year’s technology track will feature live demos, interactive panels, and practitioner-led case studies on can’t-miss topics, covering everything from online community platforms to community analytics and vendor roadmaps. Whether you’re a full-on techie, community nerd, or just getting started, this year’s track is sure to leave you feeling like a platform expert.

We look forward to nerding out with you!

Jillian Bejtlich
2020 Technology Track Chair

Lili McDonald on Being Comfortable with Community Technology

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Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professionals. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI and more. 

Episode #69 features Lili McDonald.

In this episode of the podcast, Lili shares her experience with online community technology platforms, how community managers can streamline community operations, the power of an online form, and how setting boundaries can help you stay sane.

Listen Now:

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Find more episodes of Conversations with Community Managers here.

About Conversations with Community Managers*

To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.

Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.

These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.

Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Webinar: Best Practices for Evaluating Online Community Platforms

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Best Practices for Evaluating Online Community Platforms

Each month our community manager extraordinaire, Kelly Schott, shares a behind the scenes look inside TheCR Network.  She’ll explore the research, programming and professional development available exclusively to Network members and highlight best practices for community management excellence.

November’s webinar focused on best practices when evaluating community and engagement platforms.

Are you evaluating and assessing community or engagement platforms? You are in great company – a lot of people are. This is being driven by shifts in the vendor space, the growing importance of these technologies to organizations, and the maturity of current programs.

Watch Kelly as she shares five tips for evaluating online community and engagement platforms.

Watch the Webinar Archive:

Watch more webinars.

Matthew Radford on Executive Engagement

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Welcome to the latest episode in our community management podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.”

Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about their community journey. They ask the community questions you want to know the answers to, including:

  1. What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
  2. What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
  3. How would you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

Episode #50 features Matthew Radford, Manager, Internal Communications at Ontario Medical Association. 

In this episode, we chat about how to manage community through a re-org, engaging executives, his community wish list, and more!

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Don’t miss the whole series of Conversations with Community Managers featuring community professionals from GM, Sony, Mastercard and more!

available on itunes—-

Did you know you can subscribe to “Conversations with Community Managers” iTunes? You can!

Online community platforms: Feel the meh.

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Online community platformsThe rise of communities as a powerful tool for behavior change has brought with it no shortage of new platforms and technology.  There are large enterprise level platform providers, smaller niche offerings, community offshoots of major social and CRM platforms, and hybrid community-collaboration platforms for community professionals to choose from. (Check out how our own Rachel Happe feels about what’s going on in the vendor space in her post “A 2017 View of the Community Platform Market.“)

Yet for all the possible options, community professionals in the State of Community Management 2017 survey gave their own platforms a lukewarm rating this year. Just one-in-five respondents to the survey gave their own platform a 9 or 10 on a 10-point Likert scale question overall, and only 1-in-9 said their community’s mobile experience was a 9 or 10.

Online community platforms

The “good news” for vendors? Despite their dissatisfaction, more than 70% of respondents said they would be unlikely or very unlikely to change platforms in the next 12 months.

Far from perfect, but hard to get rid of is a brand tagline no one really wants – but it might be where we are.

Why is this? We didn’t get into the details of the scores in the SOCM 2017, but the anecdotal evidence is clear – community managers express frustration with ease-of-use, admin challenges, difficulty finding and surfacing content and activity, issues with metrics and many other areas, depending on the platform. Some of that might be expected – communities are often being bolted on or connected with a number of legacy platforms, making integrations difficult. They are often afterthoughts, an additional burden for IT staff. Community vendors are asked to measure more complex outcomes while fitting into existing tools and technology.

It’s the old Ginger Rogers joke. We want our platforms to dance like Fred Astaire, and do it backwards and in high heels.

That said, vendors would be wise to plug more into what community professionals need from their community solutions, and to focus on developing elements that CMs can use to capture, enhance and measure key community behaviors. As noted in the SOCM 2017, the fact that a number of major community platforms do not allow community managers to see search volume and/or tag best answers is entirely unacceptable.

In community, as in so many other industries – don’t let the desire to develop new features keep you from perfecting your core features.

TheCR’s Community Platform Requirements Library & Vendor Comparison Tool

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Vendor Comparison

Do you need to evaluate community platforms?
Are you being asked to justify your existing platform?
Are you looking at platform gaps but are not sure you are thinking of everything?

The Community Roundtable has collaborated with our members to develop two new tools to support this work:

  1. The Community Platform Requirements Library
  2. Community Platform Vendor Comparison Tool

The Community Platform Requirements Library

The requirements library is everything you might want to include in an evaluation – and probably a lot more, categorized by primary and secondary themes and, when applicable, the behaviors they support as defined in TheCR’s Community Engagement Framework.  While many IT groups treat community functionality as one big feature, community managers know better. This tool, which includes over 400 features, helps IT and other stakeholders understand the complexity of a robust community platform.

Vendor Comparison
Community Platform Vendor Comparison Tool

This tool is a high-level comparison tool. It allows the assessment to be weighted by primary and secondary requirements categories (which align with the requirements library), depending on the specific priorities of the organization. This is a great tool to use with stakeholders to help them understand how different vendors address needs.

A note of thanks: This tool was developed by TheCR team with a lot of input from our members – in particular, a set that participated in a requirements workshop at TheCR Connect. Collaboration like this is at the heart of what makes TheCR Network so valuable.

Would you like access to this and other tools that save you time and make you work smarter?