The Community Roundtable

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

Help Community Programs Scale

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The Policies & Governance competency of the Community Maturity Model™  details operational guidelines for successful online community programs. Policies refer to how a community interacts and can be divided into two areas: Terms of service – How a community is managed in legal terms and Guidelines – Articulate what behaviors are expected and why, plainly. Governance is how the community team is structured, operates within an organization, and supports community-related activities across the organization.

Most organizations could support multiple communities with myriad use cases. The most common include:

  • General employee communities for knowledge sharing and collaboration
  • Customer support communities for providing fast, inexpensive, always-on access to answers to product and service questions.
  • Membership communities for groups like students, patients, alumni, or association audiences

In 2021, we saw the emergence of the “Center of Excellence’’ (CoE) approach, where community work is decentralized, but supported with a host of resources. While responses from this year’s data suggest CoEs are falling out of favor, digging deeper shows a different perspective.

Help Community Programs Scale

Comparing the data from respondents who reported “one community” vs. “a network of communities” at their organization, we found a dramatic increase in CoEs once a network exists (i.e., once they’re past the initial use case). Also interesting, 17% of respondents (8% in networked communities) reported only ad hoc/informal governance. Question: Who’s in charge of the communities there? If this is you, please contact us. We want to feature you in a case study.

Interested in Growing Your Community? Become an Enabler!

On a related note, those with a network of communities are more likely to help communities programs scale by providing enabling resources to their organization than those with a single community. When comparing total data on community resources from 2021 to 2022 there isn’t much to report. Comparing responses from individual communities vs. a network of communities tells a different story (see pg. 45 of the 2022 SOCM or the image above).

It’s interesting to note: 30% of community managers representing a single community provide none of the resources mentioned in the survey, which likely results in a less strategic initiative. For those who want to grow beyond a single community, get out there and coach/evangelize.

Want to help community programs scale? Start a center of excellence?

Check out this short interview with Claudia Teixeira, Senior Knowledge and Learning Consultant at the World Bank Group.

Claudia and Anne Mbugua discuss what a center of excellence entails, the path to centers of excellence at the World Bank Group, and advice for implementing a center of excellence at your organization. Listen now.

Get more community ideas and advice in the 13th annual 2022 State of Community Management report:

Help Community Programs Scale

How can you use community guidelines to support your work?

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Community guidelines For years, community thought leaders in TheCR Network have highlighted the importance of community guidelines and policies that promote healthy community behaviors. Make your community guidelines and policies a trellis, rather than a box, and create a frame for your community to flourish.

That is still true in 2017.

Our best-in-class communities are more likely to have policies and guidelines that define encouraged behaviors, and even the overall sample is becoming more likely to create positive guidelines and policies.

But there’s a second dimension to the trellis. In order for it to effectively support community behaviors, it needs to be built on a strong footing. In the case of communities, that footing comes in the form of policies, community guidelines, and procedures that ensure community professionals know how to handle the situations that are likely to arise in the life of the community, and do so fairly, quickly and consistently.

Community guidelines

That consistent and fair approach comes from properly training community managers, moderators and others with leadership roles in the community, and from developing playbook and procedures that give them a menu of best practices for helping and supporting members. In the State of Community Management 2017 survey, best-in-class communities were far more likely to provide professional development for community managers, give training for moderators and advocates, and develop playbooks for the operation of the community.

Together, these elements give best-in-class communities a strong base for a trellis that can support a strong community.