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The Community Roundtable

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

What is Conversation Research? An Infographic Explainer

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jason falls

Recently, Jason Falls, the Co-Founder of the Conversation Research Institute (CRI) joined members of TheCR Network for an exploration of conversation research. With years of experience in social technology, both on the agency side and brand side Jason developed the concept of conversation research. Even though people may think that this is a new concept, Jason believes community management professionals will be familiar with the premise of his work. He’s simply put a new label on it.

Based on the great discussion inside the Network we put together an infographic highlighting what Jason taught our members. Jason stress to the participants that they should not expect to replace traditional research with conversation research. Conversation research is more of a supplement to traditional research, and a great way to augment what you might already be doing.

Conversation Research - Jason Falls

Members can access the full roundtable report, including three case studies that Jason shared, as well as best practices for applying conversation research and lessons learned here.

Not a member of TheCR Network? Learn more and join today to have exclusive access to expert practitioners like Jason Falls – and our complete archive of over 350 roundtable reports on community management, community strategy, metrics and measurement, and more! Join TheCR Network.

Community Management Limericks

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I’m just going to say it: The State of Community Management 2017 survey closes this Friday. By the time you read this there will be less than 72 hours to contribute to the industry’s leading community research. If you sleep eight hours a night, that’s only 56 hours! Subtract time for eating, hitting the gym, working, tweeting, being stuck in traffic, and feeding your cat/dog/fish/iguana and there are really only a few hours left! To say ‘thank you’, our team has written these very serious community management poems for your enjoyment:

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

Five reasons to take The State of Community Management 2017 survey right now

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Eight years. That’s like a century in community management, but that is how many years we have been pouring hundreds of hours of our time into creating The State of Community Management. This is my third year at the helm, and I’m excited. With new questions, new data analysis tools, and another year of comparative data, I can say without hyperbole that this will be the best, most informative State of Community Management ever.*

Why the asterisk? That’s you.

You see, our research – the carefully crafted questions, intensive data preparation and analysis, writing, graphics, design, and thought leadership – is only as valuable as you make it by taking part. Last year,  339 community professionals invested their time and entrusted their data to us. This year, we want even more participation, and so do you.

By filling out the survey – you are making the results more valuable for you.

Why? Well, because in data – more is better. The greater data set last year allowed us to compare communities across industries, use cases and sizes without fears of having a small sample size. That meant being able to share items in the report and blog posts that dug in on the issues facing subgroups of communities. Those subgroups? They’re customer support (or innovation) communities like yours. They’re in the nonprofit (or health care) space like you. They have a lone wolf community manager (or a team of community managers) like you. A big sample means we don’t just spot the big trends in community management – but the little ones as well.

In 30 minutes (or less), you’ll get a scorecard of where your community management stands, and maybe some things you haven’t thought about.

The survey data isn’t just for us, it’s a way for us to report back to you on where your community management strategies, practices and engagement patterns put you in our Community Maturity Model. We won’t publicly rank you – don’t worry – this is material for you to use to celebrate your successes, and maybe target some areas for improvement. We’ll also push your thinking about your community, your community engagement, and your community value.

In the past three years, we’ve built powerful cases on the need for community managers, the fallacy of the 90-9-1 rule, and the ROI of community. Knowledge is power.

It’s a survey developed with community professionals, for community professionals.

The State of Community Management is unlike any other survey, in that it’s both tech-neutral and developed in partnership with a team of experienced community managers from TheCR Network. Our working group spends hours discussing and reviewing questions to make them relevant to community practices across industries and use cases. We, too, live by the findings – we use what we learn in our own community for community professionals, TheCR Network.

We have a history of treating your data responsibly.

There’s a lot of important data in the survey. Budgets, staffing levels, other competitive information. That’s why each year we reiterate our pledge. We will not sell, use or otherwise share your individual survey response with anyone. Period. We won’t even report on groups that are too small to guarantee anonymity. The only time you’ll hear from us is if there is a question about your data, or to let you know the research report is available. Our business is built on the strength of our research.

Coffee. And a chance for much more.

OK – there’s one other reason we get in touch. In exchange for your time, we want to buy you a coffee – one of those fancy ones, even – with a Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts gift card. (You can also donate your $5 to Save Our Strength and feed the hungry.) And when all is said and done, one person will win a gift card worth $1 for every completed survey.

So – what are you waiting for? If you have any questions, shoot me a DM on Twitter.

Take the survey (and share the link!) athttps://the.cr/socm2017survey

Community management salaries are on the rise

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Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day, everyone! We enjoy CMAD as a chance to recognize the hard work thousands of community professionals do every day. But thank yous don’t pay the bills. That’s why this year for CMAD, we wanted to see how salaries for community professionals were trending.

So we seized on a unique opportunity.

In November, we reached out to a group of community pros for whom we already had a lot of data – the 403 respondents to our Community Careers and Compensation 2015 survey. We asked them for five minutes of their time, to update us on their salary and career path. It was a challenge – people who have moved around change email addresses, others decline to be contacted, and others don’t take part. When all was said and done, though, we had gotten year-over-year updates from more than 110 community professionals. The great news is captured in our new infographic.

Salaries for experienced community managers are rising. Sharply.

Quality community professionals are in high demand, and that means higher salaries. Salaries and bonuses for our survey group jumped an average of almost 10 percent between 2015 and 2016. Some folks boosted their income by changing jobs or roles. Others got raises by proving their value. The bottom line was this – the average community manager compensation in our sample approached $80,000. Community strategists and community directors are regularly earning over $100,000. Those numbers won’t hold true for everyone in every industry, but the broad trend of rising salaries was clear and pretty consistent across use cases and community types.

The average community manager compensation in our sample approached $80,000. Community strategists and community directors are regularly earning over $100,000.

Community pros are a mobile bunch.

One way to boost your salary is to change jobs, and community professionals live that fact. One in four survey respondents changed organizations from 2015 to 2016. Some were merged or acquired into new roles, but most made the leap on their own.

And they’re moving UP.

Community managers, in particular, aren’t just moving around – they’re moving up into management. About 20% of our respondents who defined themselves as community managers in 2015 had risen to a strategist or director role in 2016. And across the board, our sample was reporting to higher levels of their organizations. Forty-five percent of the overall sample said they reported to a Vice President, Senior VP or C-level manager, up from 36 percent in 2015.

Other high-level trends:

There are a few other trends that were in evidence, but not strong enough to be statistically sound. They’re all on my list for the next full Community Careers and Compensation survey!

  • Geography: Our coastal respondents, particularly those on the West Coast, saw the highest salary spikes, which could suggest high demand. We saw positive salary trends in every region, though.
  • Experience/Community Size: There was no evident correlation between salary change and years of experience or community size.
  • Industry: High tech and software community pros got the biggest bump in our sample, but neither the difference or the sample size was enough for us to send people running into the tech sector for a big raise.

Enjoy and share the infographic – and happy Community Manager Appreciation Day! You deserve it.

Community Careers and Compensation update january 2017

Download the infographic. 

Looking for more resources to help you in your community career?

  • How Do I Find a Community Manager Job? – Community management is a profession of relationships – use your network to discover your next role. Most community jobs are not currently found through traditional job listings.
  • 50 Skills of Community Management – The Community Skills Framework represents the five skill families and top 50 skills that are required to build a successful community program.
  • How To Win That Community Manager Job – As organizations begin to increasingly recognize and reward the value of good community management the market for jobs has begun to heat up. While at any given moment there are literally dozens of interesting community jobs open around the country (and truly, the world) the competition for these roles is getting stiffer. How can you set yourself apart?

Throwback Thursday – Community Management Research

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We are gearing up to launch our 8th annual State of Community Management Survey, so I thought it would be a great time to share an overview of all the community management research we publish. This week’s #throwbackthursday highlights our four major research platforms for community management professionals.

Community Management Research

The State of Community Management

Report: The State of Community Management is our annual research platform that tracks the performance of communities and community management across the eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model. The State of Community Management 2016 marked the seventh year of this vitally important resource CCC2015_Cover_ShadowTiltfor community professionals and organizations and built on the insights and expertise of our past reports.

Community Careers and Compensation

Our Community Careers and Compensation research traces its roots to the Community Manager Salary Survey, which TheCR first launched in 2014. In addition to questions about the salaries, roles and titles of community professionals, with the CCC, we expanded our efforts to capture the skills that community professionals across the spectrum find most valuable, and added questions about where community sits within the organizational structures of businesses, nonprofits and other organizations.

The Social Executive

One of the major challenges of the community and social business teams with whom we work is the education of their executives, who vary widely in expectations, priorities for and engagement with social tools and approaches. Because this is such a critical issue, we consider The Social Executive research platform to be key in helping our members and clients make progress in their own organizations.

The Community Manager Handbook

The Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes combines research findings and advice from The Community Roundtable with short case studies and tips from some of the smartest community professionals in the space, for community managers looking to start, build and grow their communities. The superheroes include current and recent members of TheCR Network, sharing their tested approaches to address the challenges facing communities large and small, old and new.

Have you used any of TheCR’s community management research in your work? We love to hear about our research in the wild! Drop us a line and let us know! 

 

More Community Management Resources

community_metrics_button community_strategy_button newsletter_signup_button

Can’t find what you’re looking for? Drop us a line and we’ll do our best to help you find the community management info you need!

Want community engagement? Make your organization care about it.

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By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training, The Community Roundtable

Honey Badger don't care about community.Convincing skeptics about the value of community is a part of the job for all too many community managers. When faced with adversity, there’s almost a “fight or flight” choice. The “fight” choice in this case is to strive to win converts and create a better vibe for the community. The “flight” response is to turn inward, recognize the difficulty of engaging the larger organization and focus on creating the best possible community.

While focusing inward may have short-term advantages, the research suggests that in the long run, working to improve the perception and understanding of community in the organization pays off.

SOCM2016_Fact_#2

There are two elements of this graphic I want to highlight. The first is that organizations whose culture encourages or enhances community approaches get significantly higher engagement in the community itself. It’s not a surprise. If the organization values community, then the people in the organization can more readily see evidence of that value even before they get involved. It effectively pre-qualifies members for the community, and then once they are in, the community culture itself takes over.

But the second piece to me is just as interesting – maybe more interesting. It’s that there’s basically no difference between organizations that are neutral to communities and those whose cultures are perceived as constraining community. The enemy of community approaches, it seems, is not opposition to community, it’s not caring about community.

“If we build it, they will come around,” may not be the best approach, after all.

What does this mean for community managers? It may mean that connecting community to the organization needs to happen early on, even though that external effort may take up time that you’d rather use making the community stronger. Setting up the community, establishing your core group of advocates and setting behavioral norms don’t necessarily need buy-in from the larger organization, but once your community efforts are ready for prime time, having the organization on board becomes critical for the long-term success of the community program.

Bottom line: Healthy communities thrive in supportive environments.

 

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Member feedback creates engagement opportunity

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By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

June is wedding season, but engagement happens year-round.  At least that’s what community managers hope.

For The State of Community Management 2016, we wanted to get a better sense of some of the cultural elements that drive higher engagement in communities – and it turns out one of the best ways to get members involved in your community is to ask them for their opinions of it.

SOCM2016 member feedback impact

Communities that had formal systems to get member feedback about the community had on average 43% higher active engagement than communities without those systems. (We define active engagement as contributing to, creating or collaborating on content in the community.) More than a third of members in communities with formal feedback systems were actively engaged, versus a quarter of those in “feedback free” communities.

Not every community has the available resources for formal surveys and systems – but even informal systems to encourage feedback correlated with higher engagement. If you think about it, it’s not that surprising. Feedback systems effectively encourage engagement by making the community operations a two-way street and giving members a shared interest in the community’s success.

Of course, collecting feedback is only part of the process. Soliciting input and then ignoring it can undermine your efforts by telling potential advocates – those with the interest level to provide feedback – that their thoughts are not valued. Make sure you combine your efforts to create a feedback system with the follow-up to act upon that feedback. That means thinking about the process you might undertake, and getting the stakeholder support to respond to member needs.

Ask for feedback. Act on it. A commonsense approach to building connections with your members. We’d love your feedback on the post, and the report – leave us a comment!

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

How do community managers spend their days? An SOCM2016 Preview

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By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training, The Community Roundtable

“How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives.”

-Annie Dillard

calendar-checkmark-sobor-monitoring-vrcAsk an overworked community manager what they wish they had more of – and you’re likely to get one of two answers: resources or time. How a community pro spends his or her time matters greatly to their communities, but how much? We asked our participants to share how they and their teams spent their time – and saw some interesting trends.

More advanced community managers emphasize content less, and strategic and business matters more, than their peers.

There was an interesting shift as we looked at communities across our community maturity scoring. Community managers in less mature communities said content skills were most important for them. But those in more mature communities highlighted strategic and business skills. (Everyone said engagement was at or near the top of their skill priority list.)

Despite that, engagement and content take up the majority of community professionals’ time.

Even in more advanced communities, community professionals still have content and engagement on their plates a majority of the time. The difference, though, is that more advanced communities typically put more emphasis on creating engagement – items like planning programs, asking questions and connecting members, rather than creating content for the community.

What goes on in the community platform is just half the job.

In the past, we’ve talked about the iceberg effect of community management – and the data this year drives that home. The average community manager in this year’s survey spent slightly over half their community time working within their community platform, and the rest connecting with the community on email, on the phone, and in person.

Blog Quote SOCM 2016 1Of course, “in the platform” does not equate to “visible in the community”, either – a reminder again both that much of your important work can go unseen by members, and that “working out loud” is a great way to bring visibility to work (yours and others’) that makes a robust community possible.

One other note – community managers in best-in-class (The top 20% highest scoring) communities divided their time almost exactly the same ways as the average among platforms. It’s not where you spend your days that determines your community success. It’s strategically leveraging that time to meet your community goals.

We hope you’ll set aside some time for The State of Community Management 2016. It’s set to come out on May 18! Want to be notified when the SOCM 2016 is released? Sign up below!

(Are you a member of TheCR Network? As always the research will be available for direct download inside the Network immediately upon release – no need to sign up here!)

Four key takeaways from The Community Careers and Compensation 2015 report

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CCC2015_Cover_ShadowTiltWhat are the most valuable skills for a community manager? What is the career path? And how much can one make? Those are among the key questions being answered in the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 report, which we released today at The Community Roundtable.

It’s the second year we have done the survey –called the Community Manager Salary Survey in 2014 – and more than just the name changed for this year. We expanded the skills in the Community Skills Framework, introduced questions about where community and community professionals sit in the organization, and looked more closely at the training needs of community professionals.

So what did we find?

Key finding #1: Strategy is everyone’s job.

Community strategy development was the most valued skill of the 50 we asked about in the CCC survey, for each of the three job roles we examined in detail – community manager, community strategist and Director of Community. It was also the highest-value skill among the full survey population.

What it means: Your team sees the value in being a part of the strategic plan. You should, too. Treating strategy as a thing handed down to your managers makes them less effective – and cripples your community management.

Key finding #2: Business, strategic and technical skills are rewarded.

We split up business and strategic skills in this year’s survey, and added – and it shed some new light. Community professionals who placed high value on business, strategic and technical skills made more money than their peers. Strong business and strategic skills were more likely to be found among community strategists and directors – but technical skills were scattered across roles, suggesting a technical specialty is a way to increase earning without taking on managerial responsibilities.

What it means: Three possible growth routes for community managers – up the ladder to Director, out to a wider audience as a Strategist, or deeper into a skillset in any number of specialized roles like community architect, community data specialist or UX expert.

Key finding #3: Community pros are “movers and shakers.”

Community professionals are taking advantage of new opportunities to improve their salary and role. While 60% had four or more years of community experience, nearly ¾ had worked in their current role for three years or less. And more than half of those we surveyed with over five years community experience were able to make more than $100,000 per year.

What it means: Successful community professionals get rewarded for their efforts – and networks play an important role in building bridges to new opportunities.

Key finding #4: Communities are everywhere. Communities can be found throughout organizations to serve a wide variety of goals. One sign of their growing credibility – more than 80% of Directors of Community report to vice presidents or C-suite executives. But communities’ flexibility can be a challenge – because they fit everywhere, they can be marginalized or misunderstood because they don’t fit neatly into a department or org chart.

What it means: Communication is critical – those outside the community ecosystem may have limited or incorrect information about what you do, and there’s no textbook definition of where communities fit.

Salaries are strong – and positive signs for teams.

Salaries for community professionals are again strong – ranging from an average of about $55,000 for community specialists to $70,000 for community managers, $100,000 for community strategists and $113,000 for Directors of Community. Years of experience and the number of direct reports correlated with higher salaries, and external communities tended to pay less.

And there was another striking thing about this year’s sample. Few of them worked alone. Only about 1-in-7 said they were truly “lone wolf” community managers – working as the only person in their organization on community. Community team size averages ranged from four full-timers for internal communities to five for external and seven for communities with both internal and external facets – and overall, 56 percent of those surveyed said there were two or more full-time people in their community team.

These numbers just scratch the surface of the report, which is being released in two forms – as a 20-page summary for the general public, and a full report that looks in depth at the roles and skills of community for TheCR Network members and those who contributed their data to the survey.

To get the summary report – click here!

To get the full report, you can complete the 10-minute survey now at https://the.cr/ccc2015survey. (If you took the survey this year check your inbox for the download link!)

We’ll also be digging into the data in blog posts over the coming weeks. Watch this space for that – and download the report for further exploration.