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The Community Roundtable

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

More Signal, Less Noise – The State of Community Management 2024

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Welcome to the 15th edition of the State of Community Management research, brought to you by The Community Roundtable! We are thrilled to share this year’s research report – the State of Community Management 2024 with you.

When we first published the State of Community Management research in 2010 online communities were broadly used by internet pioneers, but community management was still an emerging discipline within organizations. This research and the related Community Maturity Model™ served as a framework for those nascent community professionals.

Fifteen years later, The Community Roundtable and the State of Community Management endure, supporting community practitioners with the insights, case studies, and recommendations they need to be successful in their community initiatives. We share trends from all respondents and a “best-in-class” cohort”, in order to help all programs level up.

state of community management 2024

There is considerable noise in the market and on the internet in general. This report aims to provide a strong signal for community practitioners, equipping them with the data and insights they need to secure support and resources for continued success.

Take your time with the report, making note of where your program differs from the survey average and/or the best-in-class, and use this information to inform your 2025 planning. Consider joining us in

The Network, where your community peers come together to support one another on their community journeys.

Download your copy for the State of Community Management 2024 here.

Melissa Westervelt on Policies and Governance

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Community Conversations is a long-running podcast highlighting community success stories from a wide variety of online community management professionals.

Episode #89 of Community Conversations features Melissa Westervelt, Product Manager, Digital Engagement at Cambridge Associates.

On this special State of Community Management 2022 episode, Melissa Westervelt and host Anne Mbugua discuss the trends in community policies and guidelines. Melissa explains the difference between community policies and community guidelines, and shares tips for designing effective policies and guidelines for your online community.

Melissa Westervelt

Melissa Westervelt on Policies and Governance

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About Melissa Westervelt

Melissa is an experienced Product Manager with a demonstrated proficiency in SaaS management for digital engagement. Her specializations include enterprise-level community management, community building, and employee engagement strategy. She possesses strong skills in stakeholder alignment, platform search and implementation, IT change management, and managing vendor relationships. What does all of that mean? She loves helping people collaborate by giving them digital tools to ensure their projects succeed.

About Cambridge Associates

They are a global investment firm and aim to help endowments & foundations, pension plans, and high net worth private clients implement and manage custom investment portfolios that generate outperformance and enable them to maximize their impact on the world. Working alongside its early clients, Cambridge Associates pioneered the strategy of high-equity orientation and broad diversification, which since its inception in the 1980s has been a primary driver of performance for institutional investors. Today, they deliver a range of portfolio management services, including outsourced CIO, non-discretionary portfolio management, investment staff extension, and asset class mandates. Cambridge Associates maintains offices in major financial centers across the globe, with headquarters in Boston, MA.

About The State of Community Management

Now in its 13th year, our annual State of Community Management report provides strategic ideas and tactical benchmarks for global community management professionals.

The State of Community Management 2022 explores the state of the community management industry through the lens of the eight competencies in the Community Maturity Model™.

Each section includes data, ideas, and expert practitioner perspectives to give you new insight into the community management industry. 

Kelly Munro on Content and Programs
Download your free copy of the State of Community Management 2022.

Communities Drive Meaningful Change Management

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From improving customer satisfaction to providing fast and easy support and empowering members, online communities drive increased revenue, boost customer satisfaction, and make connecting easier than ever before.

This eBook contains new, unreleased data from the 2022 State of Community Management report, explores trends in online communities, and showcases what success looks like in communities at the forefront of this innovation, like Spotify, Flexera, and Zoom.

Meaningful Change Management - Zoom
Power remote collaboration
Meaningful Change Management - Budgets
Drive business outcomes
Meaningful Change Management - Advocates
Turn customers into advocates

You’ll learn about how online communities add business value to the organizations and get tactical ideas on how you can implement similar community-based programs at your organization.

Communities Drive Meaningful Change Management

Download your copy of Meaningful Change Management here.

We partnered with community platform company, Khoros, to dive into what customer support communities look like today. Through unpublished data from the 2022 State of Community Management research and in-depth looks at real community programs, this ebook provides a practical guide for anyone looking to increase the impact of their online community program. Don’t have an online community yet? You’ll learn what success looks like – and get ideas for starting your own.

Foundations Of Community Success

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Over the last two years, the place of community in organizations shifted, with community programs becoming a commonly required investment at all types of companies. The COVID-19 pandemic tipped communities from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Suddenly, the value of connecting employees and customers via an equitable and widely accessible digital network was obvious.

Well, obviously to community professionals. It’s not always easy to get organizational leaders on board with the resources and support needed to build comprehensive online community programs.

In this new look at data from the State of Community Management 2021 research, Foundations for Community Success explores:

  • Checking your community health: How do you decide what defines a healthy community for your use case?
  • Contributing to organizational success: With community becoming visible across the organization, it’s more important than ever to make sure your community directly contributes to defining organizational outcomes. How can you ensure that your community is aligned with business goals?
  • Building for long-term success: Community hasn’t ever been a ‘build it and they will come’ proposition. How can you use meaningful content and programs to lay the foundation for long-term engagement and success?

Based on the 2021 State of Community Management research, Foundations of Community Success was produced by The Community Roundtable and made possible with support from Higher Logic.

Download the ebook here.

The Evolution of Customer Communities

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In 2021, online communities are table stakes for brands that want to connect and engage with their audience.

Community professionals are now handed the task of not just connecting with a brand’s audience, but deciding what kind of engagement is needed, and how to build a long-term strategy to foster and maintain that activity.

Today, customer communities typically fall into one or more of three core categories: support communities, brand marketing communities, and innovation communities.

We partnered with Khoros to explore these three community types, and to look at how community professionals can make their customer communities more valuable to their brands.

This ebook takes new, unpublished data from the State of Community Management 2021 and looks at how online customer communities contribute to both audience engagement and satisfaction (like higher CSAT scores) and how they make a meaningful impact on the organizations broader goals.

The Evolutions of Customer Communities
The Evolutions of Customer Communities
The Evolutions of Customer Communities

In addition to this new, externally-focused data, we profile three innovative online communities, that are using their customer interactions to drive advocacy, empowerment, and innovation.

Download your copy of this State of Community Management eBook for free.

Community Centers of Excellence Enable Distributed Leadership

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What is a Center of Excellence?

Centers of Excellence are groups that are charged with enabling their organizations with a specific practice or expertise and often have other names, whether that is an Enablement Group, Adoption Team, or Internal Consulting. Historically, this has not been the role of community program teams, who were generally tasked with managing one community.

Community Centers of Excellence Enable Distributed Leadership

However, as communities have become more integrated into organizations and as they address more objectives across the employee and customer experience, more people are involved in their management and leadership. The result is growing demand for community management expertise that falls on the community team to deliver. We see this evolution accelerate as communities mature. Only 11% of early communities are explicitly resourced to be centers of excellence – transitioning to a majority of community teams for the most mature community programs. This dynamic is also seen in the growth of groups outside of the community team producing programs in the community. At Stage 4, a majority of communities have cross-functional peers, community leaders, and community members leading programs – all of whom need guidance or training on how to do so effectively.

What kind of enablement services do community teams deliver?

Early on, community teams universally focus on technical support, training, and to a slightly lesser degree, coaching and templates. As community programs mature, they tackle metrics and reporting, consulting, and for some, enterprise governance. Community budgets reflect this transition. In Stage 1, community management resources are only 19% of the total community budget. By Stage 4, 43% of community program budgets go toward talent acquisition and training.

Community Centers of Excellence Enable Distributed Leadership

These services correlate with increased reporting responsibilities and increased expectations for engagement for cross-functional peers. More people and groups are involved in both managing aspects of communities, interested in their performance, and measured on their engagement. No longer are community programs isolated and discrete. Instead, they are expanding to align organizational groups in order to address myriad employee and customer experience objectives.

Learn more about centers of excellence and online community programs in the State of Community Management 2021. Download your free copy.

Now Enrolling: Developing a Community Roadmap Workshop

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The best way to improve the performance of your community is to ask for the investments you need that ensure it. But asking without context, data, or analysis is just a wish – one that is easily dismissed. A community roadmap is an effective way to educate, set expectations for, and secure budget from stakeholders.

The goal of this workshop is to create a gap analysis and roadmap draft, using industry frameworks to help stakeholders understand where you are, frame where you want to go, and collaborate to get there.

This six-session workshop includes:

  • Creating a defensible structure for community roadmaps
  • Assessment and discussion The Community Score results
  • Identifying gaps, required investments, and how to prioritize those investments
  • Developing a high-level roadmap designed to educate stakeholders and provide them with options
  • Guidance on securing stakeholder commitment and translating a roadmap into a budget

You will complete this workshop with these tactical deliverables: 

  • Results for The Community Score
  • Gap Analysis that identifies community opportunities
  • Draft community roadmap
Community Roadmap

COURSE FORMAT

This course is delivered in six, one-hour sessions, accompanied by homework and a shared space to learn-out-loud with other course participants. Each session includes an expert-led lesson, interactive discussion, and homework. Download the Syllabus.

SCHEDULE

December 8, 2020: 10am-11am ET and 2pm-3pm ET
December 10, 2020: 10am-11am ET and 2pm-3pm ET
December 15, 2020: 10am-11am ET and 2pm-3pm ET

Learn more and register.

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.

Sign up to receive the webinar archive:

Calculating Community Return on Investment (ROI)

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In this brief, we explore a universal formula for capturing the Return on Investment (ROI) of an engagement behavior at the heart of all successful communities.

The Value of an Answer.

No matter what your community use case, questions, and answers are its lifeblood. By capturing the value of this single behavior, you capture the lion’s share of the value communities generate. Drilling in on answers highlights the way that communities surface innovations, strengthen networks, highlight best practices, and drive behavior change.

The result is a straightforward, understandable formula that focuses the heat of the executive spotlight on the results that matter the most to business outcomes.

This brief includes an overview of the power of a tangible community ROI calculation, as well as:

  • Ways ROI models often fail
  • A formula for calculating Community ROI
  • Approaches to identify and refine inputs and assumptions

Learn more here.

Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities

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A lot has changed in the community landscape in the last few years. We’ve seen movement on the vendor side, increased executive support for community programs, and the continued maturation of community roles.

​To further explore some of these changes in community roles and responsibilities, we partnered with Higher Logic to provide in-depth looks at the roles defined in the Community Careers and Compensation report and profile six real-life community professionals in a number of different roles.

The resulting eBook, Community Management: Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities, provides a practical guide for community professionals, hiring managers, and HR teams looking to better understand community roles and responsibilities today.

What skills does a community manager need
Katie Baumer Community Manager
Community Management resources

Through Community Management: Understanding Community Roles and Responsibilities you will:

  • Understand distinctions in community management roles. The Community Careers and Compensation research collected data for three common community roles – and the years of experience, salary, and skills required for each.
  • Meet real-life community professionals. Six community professionals share how they found their current community role, and share advice for those interested in pursuing a career in community management.
  • Prepare job descriptions. Use the research data to determine the qualifications necessary for different community roles and the responsibilities and main priorities of each.
  • Explore resources that advance community management skills. Whether you’re looking to build your own skills or are a manager looking to increase your team’s skills, the research highlights the top resources professionals use to network and build their capabilities.

Learn more and download the free eBook now.