The Community Roundtable

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

The State of Community Management 2020 Webinar Archive

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The State of Community Management 2020 is the 11th edition of The State of Community Management research, the longest-running, and most comprehensive industry report for online community professionals. This webinar will explore top trends and key findings from the 2020 report.This year, online communities and digital engagement are taking on dramatic new relevance. We have made considerable progress in translating the generative business model of communities into financial benchmarks, which are critical for organizations as they consider using community approaches to transform their organizations. We can now communicate the generative creation of value in financial terms.This year’s three key findings:

  1. Advanced Communities Create Generative Value
  2. External Communities Elevate the Customer Experience
  3. Internal Communities Reveal Untapped Potential

This year we have added more comparison segments, which have revealed new insights and allow us to report how external, customer community programs are differentiating themselves and maturing more quickly than internal, employee community programs.

Note: Members of TheCR Network can watch the archive here.

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The Business of Community

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Business of Community

Organizations around the world are discovering the immense potential of online community programs. Whether you are scrambling to engage remote employees on an intranet (online employee community), or stay connected to your members and audience in virtually, community can solve for nearly every organizational challenges.

Rachel Happe explores how online community programs increase meaningful engagement, empower members, employees, and audiences to contribute and collaborate online and make a significant impact on overall ROI. This one-hour session covered:

  • What are online communities and what makes them so powerful?
  • The dynamics of communities and how they generate value
  • The strategic, operational, and tactical impact of great communities
  • How communities are being used to change the way organizations operate

This webinar is a great intro to the business aspects of a well-executed online community program for stakeholders, executives, and any one interested in learning more about how community can positively impact the financial and cultural health of your organization.

Access the archive:

View upcoming webinars.

Creating Safe Spaces for Online Learning with C.C. Chapman

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Creating Safe Spaces for Online Learning with C.C. Chapman

In episode #2 Rachel is joined by C.C. Chapman, to discuss the implications and challenges of the sudden shift to distance learning.

Every week Rachel Happe chats for 30 minutes with a new guest – no script, no rules.

Some people have been working online and remotely for years. Others, not so much. Rachel and C.C. chat about the COVID-19 crisis and the effect on learning. How do you move courses online and create a safe space for learning in an already stressful environment?

Watch the chat:

In the conversation, C.C. mentions checking out https://montagueworkshop.com/bookclub as the one cool thing he’s into this week. Check it out!

About C.C. Chapman:

Helping others learn and inspiring them to achieve their goals is the most fulfilling thing I do.

Currently, I’m a Visiting Instructor of Business and Management at Wheaton College where I am also the Program & Partnership Director for Wheaton Innovates with MassChallenge.

I’ve been an Adjunct Professor of Marketing and Communications at Bentley University and have also developed and taught courses for LinkedIn Learning, Lynda.com, CreativeLive, and Treehouse.

View All Episodes.

Using Digital Channels in a Crisis: Community Best Practices for Connecting and Collaborating

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Using Digital Channels in a Crisis_ Community Best Practices for Connecting and Collaborating

The coronavirus, and its impact on travel and events, has organizations scrambling to adapt.

Digital channels will take up much of the slack by providing alternative ways to connect. Online community professionals are experts in helping organizations engage online, whether with customers or internally with employees.

Today, most organizations have the digital infrastructure that supports engagement but without professional community management, those spaces and channels are often poorly used and sub-optimized.

Join Rachel Happe, Alex Blanton, and Erica Kuhl, as they offer tips and recommendations on how to create programming that connects and engages in creative ways.

They discussed:

  • How to build trust in online spaces so that engagement thrives
  • Ideas for creative engagement programs to prompt participation
  • Best practices for effectively engaging an online workforce

Access the Archive:

5 Online Community Predictions for 2019

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2018 was an amazing year of change for the community management industry – and a year where I have seen more progress than in any of the preceding years in terms of strategic attention, maturing of community management practices, and impact on the organizations using community approaches to learning, change, and innovation.

As I look ahead to 2019 I’m excited about the potential for community approaches as organizations figure out how powerful they can be across strategic, operational, and tactical dimensions – and will help them change how they change.

5 community predictions for 2019

 

1. COMMUNITIES GET BOARD ATTENTION

Ecosystem and community strategies are becoming recognized at the board level for their value. Communities can address complex challenges and opportunities like creating agile organizations, continuous innovation, and building trust.

2. COMMUNITY SKILLS ARE IN DEMAND

Successful communities require skilled community professionals who know how to facilitate behavior change, engagement, and relationships without controlling people. These unique skills will increase in demand as more executives understand the power and value of community approaches.

3. COMMUNITY STRATEGIES UNLOCK DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

As digital transformation approaches come up short of expectations due to organizational inertia, community strategies that nudge people effectively toward learning and change will increase in value.

4. COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP PRIZED IN C-LEVEL HIRES

As more organizations use community strategies successfully, the biggest barrier facing them is traditional strategy and leadership mindsets. Increasingly, the ability to inspire movements, foster leadership in others, and create business strategies that assume abundance will be critical for executive hires.

5. ORGANIZATIONS USE COMMUNITIES TO CHANGE HOW THEY CHANGE

As information and data processing speeds increase, change becomes a critical core competency and constant adaptation becomes the norm. Communities provide the mechanism for this constant co-creation of the future and are key change agents for organizations.

 

What did I miss? What do you think will define 2019 for the online community management industry? We’d love to hear what you think in the comments below!

Assess your Community Management Maturity

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Eight years. The Community Roundtable has been doing its annual research on the landscape of community management for close to a decade.

We have learned a lot in that time and this research has contributed to the discipline by:

  • Consolidating and determining standard practices within community management, making it less of a mystery and more predictable
  • Documenting the complexity of doing community management well, while at the same time providing a structure that helps people understand it
  • Emphasizing the need to take a strategic, intentional and proactive approach to efficiently build communities
  • Highlighting the practices that correlate with success; practices like building roadmaps, advocacy programs, welcome processes and more
  • Defining the strategic value of community, culminating in a standard community ROI model

Just in the last year, we’ve made huge strides in adding financial and analytic rigor to the discipline – and just in time, because executives are paying attention. With strategic attention comes more scrutiny and the need to prove that communities return meaningful results while at the same time requiring education about how to make these programs successful – and the investment required to do so.

There has never been a better time to participate in our State of Community Management research.

By simply participating you will get three important benefits:

  1. Ideas about what is important to successful community management
  2. Scores for each competency in the Community Maturity Model that will help you prioritize projects and compare your progress against the research
  3. Your current community ROI

We’ll also throw in a gift card for coffee to thank you for your time, as it is more than your average online survey and will take you about 30 minutes.

Please consider helping us make this year the best year yet for our research.

Also, please consider sharing the survey with your peers who run communities or community programs: https://the.cr/socm2017survey

The Benefits of Community Benchmarking

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Do you ask these questions as you do community planning?

  • What’s next for my community?
  • How do I provide community insights to my organization and executive stakeholders?
  • Where is my community budget best spent?
  • How do I help my stakeholders understand what goes into community management?
  • How do I make the case for community at my organization?
  • Is my management approach is aligned with my community approach?
The Benefits of Community Benchmarking

If you’ve asked yourself even one of the above questions then a community benchmark can help.

Learn how the community benchmarking process provides a valuable assessment of where your community actually stands. This is the information that gives you the ability to set priorities, make decisions, and manage budgets with confidence.

Courtney R. Zentz, Sr. Manager, Collaboration & Solution Center at Ricoh shares why Ricoh undertook a community benchmark, what they hoped to learn, and the results of their benchmark.

Watch The Benefits of Community Benchmarking

Download the Benefits of Community Benchmarking deck.

Ready to Complete a Community Benchmark for Your Community Program?

The Community Performance Benchmark evaluates a community’s management maturity on each of the eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model, compares the community with the communities that took part in our State of Community Management surveys, and makes recommendations for how you can strengthen your community performance. The Community Performance Benchmark compares your community with average and best-in-class communities – giving you a multi-dimensional plot of how you are doing, relative to other communities.

The Community Performance BenchmarkSM provides a valuable assessment of where your community actually stands – benchmarking your management processes and providing you with recommendations. It’s information that gives you the ability to set priorities, make decisions and manage budgets with confidence.

Stop the Technology Madness – Organizational Cultures Are Decades Behind

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By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

technologyRecently the term ‘Digital Transformation’ keeps popping up as the latest buzzword bandied about by analysts and vendors and every time I hear it, I twitch just a little bit. We’ve been here before. Remember the dot-com craze? The term Digital Transformation got batted around a bit then too.

The biggest problem for me is that we haven’t even learned to effectively use the technology we already have. In fact, we haven’t even learned – at the organizational level – to use technology that is three decades old. Witness email. Email’s CC feature has reinforced passivity in our organizational cultures around decision-making. Instead of deciding, we reply and copy five people who have some involvement in the topic. Everyone has an opinion but they often complicate the issue rather than adding clarity, which makes it even harder to actually make a decision. So the decision sits there and everyone moves on to the next email. Email’s BCC if even worse – it encourages passive-aggressive covering-my-ass behavior, instead of forcing people to respond directly and learn how to express disagreement constructively. Unfortunately, organizations never stopped to really think about how that technology was going to affect they way work happened in their organizations. Should we blame the technology? Not entirely but it certainly makes this destructive behavior very easy and that does affect our collective behavior, and culture.

We are getting slightly smarter. These days with things like social media and internal social networks, we have paused to consider that it may not be just about technology. Change and adaptation happens slowly though. It’s frustrating and we seem to eventually get bored of the process or find it too complex to take on. And oh look, there’s SOA! and BIG DATA! and Mobile! and Digital Transformation! There MUST be a technology that can solve this problem, right? So we move on before we’ve really fully digested that last wave of technology – and there are vendors and analysts aplenty to help convince us that a new technology is the answer, because their revenues depend on it.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a technologist and product manager by training. I love technology and it’s come a long way in helping us create new opportunities for our organizations. But technology is moving much more quickly than our organizational’s ability to change or take advantage of it. I tend to think it might be wiser if the CIOs of the world partnered with COOs and focused on structure, management and process change before skipping on to the next shiny object. Our IT infrastructures are such hairballs at this point that people literally cannot get work done – let alone take advantage of collaborative environments and the sharing economy. We have a lot of work to do and only a small part of it is on the technical side.

So, you want digital transformation? Spend most of your budget and time on management and leadership issues.

Event Report – BIF10: Love as a Platform

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By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

BIFGoing to BIF10 was a treat for me. My life is full of demands – running a business, mothering a small child and attempting to keep dinner on the table can get in the way of investing in myself… yet it is mentally draining and I recognized that I had to feed myself in order to keep feeding others. BIF, I hoped, would be some sorely needed brain candy and it did not disappoint.

I wasn’t sure what to expect – seeing the focus on storytelling did not really capture what I heard about it. What I found was that for me BIF is a conference about using love as a platform and springboard for potential. You might think this is a strange statement coming from me – I am analytical, use the language of business, can be a bit remote and introverted and am not particularly compassionate. I always thought of love as this vague, indefinable thing. BIF helped me to see that love is the actions of seeing, encouraging and supporting the potential of others.

Love was demonstrated by everyone we heard from –

  • David Bolinsky, a medical illustrator who happened to sit next to an extraordinary young woman in China and instead of moving on, reaching out and investing time to help her thrive.
  • Matthew T. Fritz, a career military leader who instead of telling Afghans everything the U.S. knows about building an air force, stopped to ask them what they needed and wanted first – and built up from there.
  • Cheryl Dahle, a person who felt broken by abuse, giving herself the permission to ask for and look for what she needed – and then moving on to use that pain to drive her work – understanding that complex environmental issues are not lost causes.
  • Angela Blanchard, a visionary entrepreneur who has spent her life revealing the value of people and communities by listening, appreciating and showing them their own potential – and in so doing, enabling them to thrive.

Some of the insights these stories revealed to me are this:

  • One person is not enough. The stories suggest that individuals don’t understand or appreciate what makes them exceptional until someone else really sees their unique value and its significance – and spends the time to encourage that in them.
  • Love is an action. It’s the cup of coffee my husband brings me every morning. The attention you pay to someone when they speak. The introductions you make that are relevant to both people because you took the time to understand what each needs and values. The lunch you make for your kids every day. Love is, in fact, not ambiguous or abstract – it is quite tangible.
  • The best solutions are built on love. This is a weird and odd concept to a lot of organizations, which speak the language of efficiency, productivity and revenue…. but the reality is that those all flow from people who feel secure enough – because they have love and support – to risk pushing further. You want engaged employees? You must figure out how to create a platform of love and support for each employee. You don’t have to call it love but you do need to figure out how to make them feel significant, secure and valued for their uniqueness.
  • Being challenged can be an expression of love. Those who challenge us push us to do better and be better are often the trigger for action. Challenge may come from the parent who remains unimpressed, the boss who asks the deeper question or the colleague who presents us with an alternative perspective.
  • It’s up to you to be seen. No one can help you if you do not want to be helped. You have to first be vulnerable and open, in some way, so that others can really see you. Tell your story, write about what you think or share your fears with your friends. Without this first step you cannot find the people that will help show you your own potential.

It was an amazing treat to participate and as much as Saul Kaplan doesn’t seem to want thanks – he has created the conditions for these amazing people to tell their stories and has curated an audience that can hear and appreciate what they have to share. In my parlance he is a master community builder – as is the team that he has assembled. I didn’t get the opportunity to meet him but want to thank him, Renee Hopkins and the rest of the BIF team for creating a community dedicated to exploring and solving problems that matter.