The Community Roundtable

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

Podcast: SOCM 2019 Highlight – Communities Propel Engagement

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

Jeff Ross SOCM 2019 Podcast

Join TheCR’s Shannon Abram as she chats with Rachel Happe, Principal and Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable, and Jeff Ross, Community Manager at Humana about the State of Community Management 2019 report.

In Episode #59, Rachel and Jeff discuss key finding #1 from the 2019 research: Communities Propel Engagement

Jeff shares a look at how he uses the State of Community Management research, as well as ways he drives engagement in the Humana community.


Download the SOCM 2019 Report for Free

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Profiles of Emerging Community Leaders

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Community roles have long been misunderstood as positions “merely” requiring social skills and the ability to interact. In fact, they neither represent just one role nor are they simple. Great community leadership is mostly hidden work focused on enabling others to interact constructively in service of creating agile and collaborative cultures. This approach is far from easy to learn and community roles are more complex than most knowledge jobs because they require a deep understanding of people and power as well as the ability to make decisions in constantly shifting situations.

Community leadership employs influence and enablement to inspire and ensure people are rewarded for new behaviors. To do well, community leadership requires metacognition – the ability to understand one’s own thinking, how it differs from others, and how to bridge that divide. Community positions often require many adjunct specialties like strategy or content or are infused with expertise in one specific domain.

Community leaders typically come from a range of functional backgrounds, with the most common being marketing, communications, and customer support. The rest come from a variety of functional areas including product, strategy, communications, legal, sales, HR, consulting, operations, and even finance. This reinforces the fact that community building is a method of approaching any work versus the goal of work – and the best organizational communities are built to achieve a business objective. In fact, this is how many people come into a community leadership role – they identify a community approach as a better way to do the functional work that they have historically done.

Given the complexity of community leadership, it is no surprise than that the community professionals we surveyed had an average of 17.6 years of work experience and 6.3 years of community experience. The vast majority of community professionals have a college degree and a significant number also have a master’s degree. That earned them, on average, $107,807 in total compensation with a base salary of $98,569. Within the data, however, is a wide range of salaries, suggesting that job roles and salaries vary quite a bit. This is likely due to industry and geographic differences, but also suggests a lack of standardization and rationalization, which we see anecdotally. Because community leadership is an emerging field, those being hired often know more about the role, its demands, and its objectives than the hiring and Hr managers. This dynamic makes it a challenging field for both the people hiring and the people being hired.

Download the State of Community Management 2019 to read case studies, access more data and read the full report.

Note: This post contains content originally published in the State of Community Management 2019 report. Download your free copy here.

Inconsistency in Community Roles Creates Uncertainty

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Community roles are more differentiated than they were just a few years ago, but they still lack consistency and rationalized salaries. Our sample includes individual contributors all the way up to vice presidents and over a third of community teams include more specific roles, including community analyst, community strategist, and community engagement specialist.

Salary ranges show inconsistency between responsibility levels and a huge range within each level. Some of this inconsistency is due to geography, company size, use case and industry, but it also calls into question how well rationalized job descriptions are with compensation. because community leadership has moved from an implicit responsibility to an explicit role and its value has only recently become clear, organizations are still grappling with the implications.

Only 19% of organizations have a clear career path for community professionals and only 25% have community roles that are formally defined and approved by their HR departments.

This suggests that refining community job descriptions would help reduce uncertainty and its related risk – and provide clear expectations for community professionals themselves, 36% of whom point to issues of clarity or confusion as their top frustration.

Looking at salaries across responsibility levels and by use case, we see that managers, on average, make less than individual contributors. This is likely due to the number of community professionals that are still a team of one, representing 34% of this year’s sample. In the case of the solo practitioner, they act as moderator, manager, strategist, and program lead requiring a high level of proficiency in more areas than the manager of a team of moderators might have, for example. While that may explain the salary disparity, it also suggests a suboptimal use of expertise and it may also explain how many individual contributors can jump into director-level roles in other organizations.

In aggregate, this inconsistency in role definition makes it hard to understand who to hire or what jobs to pursue. For the 75%
of community teams that do not have roles defined and approved by Hr, doing so would go a long way toward contributing to a better employee experience.

Given the lack of formalized and rationalized roles, it makes sense that only 8% of community leaders trained specifically for a community role. For that group, the majority of the training was in masters programs like the Masters of Learning and Organizational Change at Northwestern University or the Masters of Science in Information and Knowledge Strategy at Columbia University.

Note: This post contains content originally published in the State of Community Management 2019 report. Download your free copy here.

Be Heard! The 2019 State of Community Management Research is now open.

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There are A LOT of changes going on in the community industry right now. From some amazing data in last year’s research to some exciting trends to strategic interest from new verticals like government, education, and NGOs.

Industry research like the State of Community Management matters more than ever. 

But this research does not collect itself.

We need to hear from you!

You know what to do:

  1. Schedule 30-60 minutes this week to take the survey
  2. Share the link to the survey with your networks http://the.cr/SOCM2019survey
  3. Feel great about being part of an exciting change to the way organizations operate and the way we all related to each other!

Our hope is that while we are asking for a big commitment of your time – it pays you back immediately by giving you perspective and insight. We are also adding some bonuses to choose from at the end, like the opportunity to donate to Playworks, a $5 Amazon gift card, or discounts on our online training classes.

Thanks in advance – we can’t wait to share our 2019 research report with you in May!

The Community Roundtable’s 2019 Research Agenda

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A Rapidly Changing Community Market

2019 is going to be an interesting year for the community leadership and management space.

It’s becoming clear to executive stakeholders that community approaches are critical for ALL leaders and managers to employ. They are also seeing that it is an effective way to transform the cultures of their organizations for a new era.  I’m seeing a lot of exciting trends – from more hiring to new verticals investing in community leadership. My 2019 predictions for the community space are here.

Shifting Community Research Priorities

The shift from communities being a tactical asset to a strategic asset has been happening for a while and in 2018, we shifted our research priorities to reflect that, exploring how communities were transforming and impacting their organizations. Those discussions and research culminated in a re-imagined 2018 State of Community Management report, which is well worth a read as community teams think ahead to 2019 and resulted in 3 key findings:

  1. Communities Are Change Agents
  2. Communities Generate Transformational Value
  3. Community Teams are Underfunded

TheCR’s 2019 Research Priorities

Where do we go from here?

One of the big themes coming out of TheCR Connect is given the rapid evolution of community’s impact on organizations, the community profession needs to mature. Community leaders are the new era of organizational leaders and we have the experience and research behind us to act assertively in showing our organizations the value of community, asking for more resources, and stepping forward to take on big challenges.

Another big conversation within TheCR Network this year is one of the more obvious topics – the fragmentation of attention, technology, and channels. How do we weave together all these different environments and tools to enable communities in new ways and help measure and report on their value? The picture gets more complicated as organizations deploy communities for hundreds of different ways, making communities both more impactful but also harder to orchestrate and support.

And finally, we are all wrestling with what is becoming the biggest barrier to community success now that the mechanics are more well-understood; the fundamental mindset shift in how value is created and distributed. Communities co-create the future in an inclusive and transparent way that makes many people uncomfortable. That approach is a huge shift from how organizations and many leaders think about value creation, competition, and the customer experience today – and that shift involves changing core assumptions about what is possible. That is a big ask – and a big challenge – for those with traditional business mindsets. It is also absolutely critical to address for community approaches to reach their potential.

The Community Roundtable’s research themes for 2019 are:

  1. Community Leadership Comes of Age
  2. The Community Market Diversifies
  3. Mindsets Determine Community Success

Want to be a part of these conversations?

These research themes structure and prioritize Roundtable Calls with TheCR Network members, topics for TheCR Connect event in September, and drive the research agenda for the 2019 State of Community Management report.

 

Community Management is Becoming Everyone’s Job

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Communities have an immense cross-functional impact, but the State of Community Management 2018 also showed us how far that impact goes. Not only are community professionals responsible for the community and engagement, but individuals across organizations are increasingly responsible as well. What does that mean for community programs?

Community Responsibilities are Dispersed

 According to this year’s data, 52% of respondents say that individuals outside of the community team have community engagement as a performance goal. That means that more than half of the community professionals who took the survey have individuals from their organizations that are required to be fully invested in the community program.

Additionally, 43% of respondents say that there are individuals outside of the community team who have community management responsibilities directly in their job descriptions. Not only are individuals from other functional groups responsible for community engagement as an internal goal, many are being told from the start that they are responsible for community management.

This is a sea change from a few short years ago when very few people in organizations were even aware of communities, never mind responsible for their success.

Community Responsibilities are Gaining Importance 

If we look back at last year’s report, this year’s data, 52% and 43%, are far higher than the 20% of respondents who reported that community management was a part of their own performance reviews. That difference is significant.

That difference also shows how community responsibilities, and consequently, community programs, have gained visibility and importance in organizations – becoming integrated into core work processes rather than sitting adjacent to them.

We reported on how community positively affects strategic objectives across organizations, with a variety of functional groups seeing anywhere from 20% to 80% increases in such objectives as communications efficiency, case deflection, and revenue growth. While community teams have seen community’s positive influence for some time, functional groups across organizations are now more deeply involved and, in turn, also seeing that value. With this increase in visibility, community teams are showing their organizations how important the community program is to the success of the entire enterprise.

Community Programs Deserve Recognition and Resources

This visibility is all well and good, but if nothing comes from it, then what is the point? While understanding and the reach of community is growing, community team resources are relatively stagnant, even while they take on new responsibilities to support, coordinate, and train these emerging community members and leaders across their organizations.

We know that community teams are taking on “hidden” work and that they are burnt out, so how do we get them the recognition and resources that they need? As community management becomes everyone’s job, what are the strategies that can help those that support the discipline secure needed resources and support?

To read more about how we suggest community teams pair this community success and reach with gaining resources and recognition, download the State of Community Management 2018. 

 

CMGT 101: The Power of Engaging Community Programming

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Note: This content appears in a slightly different form in our ebook: CMGT 101: 17 CommunityLeaders Share Their Secrets for Success.CMGT 101 is packed with engagement ideas, governance tips, career advice, and more from community leaders working at innovative organizations like CA Technologies, Aetna, Electronic Arts, SAP, Pearson, Akamai, and Atlassian. 

Download the ebook here for free.

Lori Harrison-Smith is a Community Strategist at Steelcase and has worked in community management for six years. Her community has ~8,000 members. She shared her best practices for creating engaging programming in CMGT 101.

We use a question of the week to successfully engage our members. Posting a weekly question in your community can help to spur some of your hesitant users to get engaged. It’s a simple, low-effort way for users to participate and get to know each other – around business or personal topics. And from there it will become a habit to interact.

DO KEEP THINGS SIMPLE

Questions shouldn’t require a novella to answer. This is important, especially in the beginning. One of the first questions asked in our campaign was “Where are you from?” It was super easy for people to jump into the conversation.

DO GET USERS INVOLVED

We reached out to some of our power users with some sample questions and had them start the conversations. That way it didn’t come across as a “planned” promotion, but instead seemed more organic.

DON’T LEAVE THE QUESTION ASKER HANGINGengaging programming

Some questions are easier to jump into than others. If we noticed a question was sitting without a response for a few hours, we would reach out to some of our users behind the scenes and ask if they would help generate some interest.

PRO TIP

Come up with a wide list of questions beforehand so you can carry out the campaign for a while. We then built a “calendar” with people who agreed to participate and had them post their questions each Monday.

Download the CMGT 101 ebook and learn more! 

 

The Cross-Functional Impact of Communities

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Executives are struggling with how to rapidly transform their organizations.  There is so much that needs to be addressed and so quickly, that it’s challenging to know where to start.Communities point to a possible approach.

Community impact is broad and deep 

Communities are reaching the breadth and depth of organizations and functions.

Community programs seem poised to take off as the new area for developing a competitive edge. While the ability of communities to affect ‘a’ function or ‘a’ department is relatively well acknowledged …the extent to which they have cross-functional reach within organizations, was a revelation. This is a huge opportunity for organizations if they are willing to invest in communities.

Organizations can learn from the evolution and success of another function; Human Resources

The State of Community Management 2018 findings regarding communities remind me of what another function was facing nearly two decades ago…the human resources function.

Human Resources was always perceived as a stand-alone department serving primarily payroll/vacation processing needs.  The realization that (1) HR had the ability to reach across the organization to wherever there were employees, (2) that this reach provided a unique opportunity to increase engagement and loyalty through HR policies and (3) engaged employees were profitable and core to organizational success, was key to HR becoming a vital function with strategic implications.

This enabled organizations to gain a competitive advantage by leveraging their workforce. Southwest comes to mind as an early adopter of this view of HR. They combined logistics and employee engagement to achieve early and continued success.

Communities can provide engagement at deeper levels

Communities are even more powerful in my view since not only can they engage employees across the organization, they can engage customers, vendors, experts, leaders, and anyone external to the organization.

The nature of community can adapt to fit a specialized group of practitioners sharing knowledge and experience, an alumni network providing value to their educational institution, departments working to get new team members up to speed, dedicated customers contributing ideas and suggestions for new product lines…the possibilities are endless. An organization could even have communities within employee groups that share expertise and troubleshoot issues collaboratively. They can be formed across functions and thus serve multiple functions simultaneously.

From a business perspective, this is an incredibly exciting finding

We found 15 different functions that communities are active in. The overall list is much more. Customer service was the most popular at 59% followed by Knowledge Management at 48% and Marketing at 47%. There were communities for PR (37%), Strategy (26%) and Product Engineering (35%). Many communities though formally defined as single communities were supporting multiple functions.

These community programs are bringing multiple benefits to processes they affect.  Read more in SOCM 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The State of Community Management 2018 Report: Communities Accelerate Organizational Transformation

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The State of Community Management 2018 is here and we could not be happier to share it with you. This ninth State of Community Management report includes data from 383 companies that represent a variety of industries as well as both internal and external communities.

This year’s research documents the success community programs are having and identifies a critical disconnect between that success and securing needed resources to realize the potential of community approaches.

Communities are key mechanisms that accelerate organizational transformation.

The impact of communities is broad and deep, addressing strategic, functional, and individual performance by making knowledge transparent and easy to access. Our research confirmed things we have seen anecdotally but have never been able to measure, namely:

  • Communities are change agents: Community programs impact multiple business objectives, functions, and individuals in organizations. They have immense potential to be agents of change by efficiently dispersing knowledge and information across organizations and their markets.
  • Communities create transformational value: Community programs show an average ROI that exceeds 2,000%. They enable behavior changes that directly impact profitability and revenue generation, while also having an overwhelmingly positive impact on brand and cultural sentiment.
  • Community teams are underfunded: Community professionals are burned out due to increasing success and responsibilities without the accompanying increase in resources and support. This has created strategic risk and limits the potential impact of communities.

Download the full report here.

Save the Date: The State of Community Management 2018 is Coming in May

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Update: The SOCM 2018 is now availble for download

Next month we will publish our ninth edition of the State of Community Management (SOCM). 

When we released the first SOCM in 2010 community management was largely an undocumented niche role to a strategic professio

n and a recognized discipline of leadership in a digitally connected world. We’ve had a front row seat to watch the profession “grow up” and become recognized as a critical emerging field.

We have always prioritized the advancement of the industry, as we believe it critical to both the long-term success of management as a whole, and the success and happiness of the amazing practitioners driving community forward. The State of Community Management research has evolved with the industry, moving from qualitative to quantitative.

Initially, the research focused on the practices and tactics of community management (from 2011-2013). In 2014 we started quantifying those practices and then by 2015 we could benchmark the operational approaches needed to do community management well – and critically, calculate community ROI. Because if that work, what community management is and how it is effectively executed have now largely been documented. This key milestone helped grow the discipline of community management and help it get recognition from senior executives. As those operational metrics have matured, we felt the time was right to reimagine the SOCM research yet again to keep up with the rapid changes we see in how organizations are applying community approaches.

The SOCM 2018 has been reimagined for an executive audience. 

Unlike years past, the SOCM 2018 focuses more on strategy and how communities are impacting organizations today and less on tactics and operational benchmarks, making the 2018 report an excellent resource to share with your stakeholders, executives, and wider organizational decision-makers.

The key themes we explored in 2018 include:

  1. Do community programs have the potential to be change agents?
  2. Can community programs create transformational value for an organization?
  3. How is the role of community professionals evolving?

Communities are impacting every facet of organizational life, from empowering individuals to generating strategic value, and the SOCM 2018 backs up the widely accepted ‘theory of communities’ with proof that communities are the way that organizations are making learning, adaptation, and influence into core competencies and the means to integrating these competencies into core workflows.