The Community Roundtable

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

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.

Community Management Skills That Matter: Engagement

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Engagement: The day-to-day lifeblood of communitiesCommunity Skills Engagement

Engagement skills are likely what comes to mind when one pictures the life of “typical” community manager, and these daily skills are indeed what helps communities form and grow. Engagement skills are a core community management skills family for all community roles — without engagement fundamentals, it is impossible to understand or influence communities.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Behavior change and gamification are buzzwords in community, and they resonate as the top training need across all community roles. Boiled down, these skills allow community professionals to leverage key motivators to engage, influence and change behavior in their community. A related topic — promoting productive behaviors — was second choice.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Want to become a community strategist or a Director of Community? Your skills managing the day-to-day moderation, content, programming, and connections that create engaged communities won’t go to waste. As you move up, though, you may spend less time inside the community, and more time building relationships between the community and the organization as a whole — engaging stakeholders who can ensure the community succeeds along with community members.

Want to level up more of your community management skills? Click a skill set to learn more:

community manager skills community manager skills

Community Career Profiles: All About Community Strategists

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

CommunityStrategistIconEngagement and people skills rank as most important skill set for a successful community strategist, but strategic and business skills were most important to nearly 20 percent of those in this role. Strategists also have the highest technical skills among the three job profiles in this research.

External strategists have a wider range of responsibilities than internal strategists profiled and are more likely to be responsible for overall program management. Internal strategists’ top priorities include building the community strategy and roadmap, measurement, internal consulting, advocating for the community, training and consulting with IT on platform integration.

The poster below shares some of the most interesting findings from the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 in regards to the Community Manager Role.

  • The average salary for a Community Strategist is $85,075
  • The average Community Strategist has 14.3 years of work experience
  • 38% of external Community Strategists have been promoted

Top three responsibilities for Community Strategists: 

  1. Monitoring activity & listening
  2. Developing the community strategy
  3. Measuring and reporting community performance

Top three priorities for Community Strategists: 

  1. Specific business outcomes
  2. Activity rates
  3. Membership growth

CMSS Blog Assets 6

 

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Have you filled out the 2015 State of Community Management survey yet? The findings help shape the dialogue about community management and this year, upon completing the survey you can see how your community sits within TheCR’s Community Maturity Model. Learn more at https://the.cr/socm2015survey.