The Community Roundtable

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

Friday Roundup: SOCM 2015 Resources

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

If you haven’t already checked out the SOCM 2015 it’s not too late (it’s never too later for research!) You can still download the report for free, and even take the survey to get your scores for the eight competencies in the Community Maturity Model.

If you have dug in to the report we have even more related resources for you this week. You can:

Things We Are Reading This Week

The State of Community Management 2015 – What’s Next? – It’s been a busy three weeks since we releasedThe State of Community Management 2015. We are pleased with the reaction we’ve gotten to the research – already thousands of people have shared and downloaded it. (If you aren’t one of them, you can fix that by downloading it here.)

Don’t Let Your Community Manager Go It Alone – As the resident expert, the association online community manager often serves as an internal consultant to teach other staff about online member engagement. In the future, though, we may all be community managers.

State of Community Management 2015 Monday Fact #2: Community Empowerment – In The State of Community Management reports, we refer frequently to “Best in Class” communities. From a statistical standpoint, we are referring to the communities that scored in the top 20% overall in the State of Community Management survey (which you can still take here to get your score). Looking at the data, we found the best communities had a number of common features that help make them more successful. We highlight some of those general elements in the report, and note them in our Monday facts.

How Twitter Users Can Generate Better Ideas – New research suggests that employees with a diverse Twitter network — one that exposes them to people and ideas they don’t already know — tend to generate better ideas.

Get Executive Buy-In and Participation – Tip #3 for a Successful ESN – In this third post in my series of advice on how to build a successful enterprise social network (ESN), I discuss the following important tip: Get executive buy-in and participation. I’ll illustrate this tip by sharing my company’s story. Our experience in this regard is a tale of two leaders – very different in their connection to our ESN (called Buzz) and the resultant impact on the reputation and spread of ESN use in the enterprise.

New Social Media and Community Jobs

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Friday Roundup: The SOCM 2015 – Strategy, Operations & Tactics

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

If you’re following along regularly you may have noticed that our annual research report – The State of Community Management 2015 was released last week, and we couldn’t be more excited. The SOCM 2015 is the culmination of not just months of data collection, research and design, but years of community expertise distilled into one document. This year our key findings are:SOCM 2015

  • Strategy: Invest in people and systems, not just platforms
  • Operations: Advocacy Programs are More Than a Checkbox
  • Tactics: Quick Wins Exist to Improve Engagement

These key findings are the cornerstone for the full report, which provides data that helps you:

  • Plan and develop a roadmap
  • Prioritize resources effectively
  • Educate stakeholders
  • Increase your credibility
  • Demonstrating your value as a community professional

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the SOCM 2015 yet you can download the full report, for free – here!

Things We Are Reading This Week

How Can I Use Gamification for Community Engagement? – Gamification is a hot topic in TheCR Network, and among community managers at large. In fact,  – nearly half of our surveyed communities in the State of Community Management 2014 employed some form of gamification (and more than 60% of best-in-class communities do). As gamification tools become more common, more community managers are looking to tap into gamification as part of their efforts to increase engagement. It’s more than just “turning it on.” Everything from how you structure rewards, badges and levels to general usage patterns can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your effort.

11 conferences today’s community professional can’t miss – Community, social, marketing – it’s all about driving business value. Keep up with the latest in innovative growth tactics at these conferences.

It’s here! The State of Community Management 2015 Report –

Each year, we look forward to providing more data to support the work of online community professionals – those that enable, facilitate and inspire network of people to contribute in ways that generate more value than the sum of each individual contribution.

3 Ideas For Growing Your Community Marketing Team – Influitive – What B2B community managers should consider when expanding their marketing team.

Richard Branson Is Right: Time Is the New Money – In the Participation Age, a new form of payment is emerging: time.


New Social Media and Community Jobs

  1. Senior Social Business Strategy Consultant – East Region – Jive Software – Boston, MA
  2. Community Manager – Rally Health – San Francisco, CA
  3. Enterprise Community Manager – First American Financial – Santa Ana, CA
  4. Director, Social Media Strateg – Leading Financial Services Firm – Boston, MA
  5. Director of Network Relations – Scion Staffing – Stanford, CA
  6. Community Manager – Sep Media – Los Angeles, CA
  7. Pro Sports – Director, Social Media – WorkInSports – New York City, NY
  8. Marketing and Communications Director – Non Profit Organization – Oakland, CA
  9. Talent Community Manager – Horizon Media – Entertainment and Media Industry – New York City, NY
  10. Director, Social Media & Community Marketing – Leading Online Shopping Website – New York City, NY
  11. Community Director – Bay Shore Staffing – Boston, MA
  12. Associate Director, Digital Marketing – Sony Music Entertainment – Entertainment and Media Industry – New York City, NY
  13. Social Business Executive – Marketing Communities & Advocacy – USAA – San Antonio, TX
  14. Community Manager – BeMyApp – Boise, ID
  15. Community Manager – Product Ninja – San Jose, CA
  16. Community Manager – Simple Mills, Inc. – Chicago, IL
  17. Community Manager – ThinkCERCA – Chicago, IL
  18. Community Manager – Tendr – Brooklyn, NY
  19. Community Manager, Consumer Operations – Google – Mountain View, CA
  20. Community Manager, Social Media, Consumer – T-Mobile – Bellevue, WA

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Looking for community peers to chat with, vent to and learn from? Check out our Facebook group and make some new community friends!

The most popular data types in the State of Community Management

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Having just enjoyed (survived?) my first season writing and editing for the State of Community Management 2015, one of the most interesting parts of the post-release followup is actually seeing what pieces resonate with people. They seem to fall into three categories.

The Key Indicators Data

State of Community Management 2015 engagement chartNo shockers here. It’s my first time at this rodeo, but there were data that I knew would generate interest in the research – and did, including our look at community engagement profiles. The engagement profile data is like the SAT for community managers. It’s an easy way to compare your community performance with others near and far – even though it’s a stat that can be prone to misinterpretation depending on how you use it.

One thing we worked on for this report was comparisons of how the data changed with different use cases. One piece of the SOCM I enjoyed writing was the discussion of what including inactive users does to the engagement profiles of internal and external communities. The shift in the numbers depending on whether you count inactives (those who don’t even log in) or not shifts numbers markedly, and depending on your community use case it can clarify or obfuscate your “real” engagement. Interestingly, with inactives excluded, the engagement profiles of internal and external communities differed less than you might think.

The Journey Data

The old saw “Where you stand depends on where you sit” might need an addendum – “…and how long you have been there!” There is a series of data in the SOCM that younger community managers may not fully appreciate, but those who have been working in the space for a long time love – data I think of as “journey data.” They’re things like the percentage of communities that have budgets approved by or report to the C-suite.

It’s data that newer community professionals can easily dismiss, but for some of our more seasoned colleagues, it’s a reminder of how far we have come in connecting communities to business objectives. Executives may not understand community in many cases, but awareness, responsibility and engagement are improving.

The Now Data

These are the correlations that can drive actionable ideas, and I don’t have a favorite in this group, because they vary for any community. Looking for things to get new members engaged? There are a lot of things you can do – and there is data to back up the ideas. Feel like you need to get a handle on your strategy, create a roadmap, build that crisis plan to get your community to the next level? There’s data there to back up that assertion.

There’s also data that demonstrate the work we need to do in the community space. Too many communities have a strategy, but no resourced roadmap to get there. That’s like saying you want to move to Mars, but have no idea where it is in the sky and/or no rocket to get there. We obsess about ROI but at the end of the day most of us haven’t figured out how to measure it for our communities. These aren’t easy problems to solve, but each year, we get more data with stories behind them that make us all a bit smarter about solutions. I love hearing people say we’ve given them data that helps them move forward. Research is at the core of what we do – it transforms good ideas into sensible strategies.

Every year, we are honored to have so many people say that SOCM release day is one of their favorite days of the year. We hope you’ll share the stories of the value it provides for your work, and take part in our research to help inform community programs, their members, their professionals and their stakeholders.

The State of Community Management 2015 is an indispensable resource for community professionals seeking to understand their communities, and the State of Community Management survey can provide you insights and scoring of your community maturity. Download the report and take the survey!

It’s here! The State of Community Management 2015 Report

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The State of Community Management 2015 cover

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder and Principal, The Community Roundtable

Today is a big day for The Community Roundtable – it’s the day we publish our annual research, The State of Community Management. Each year, we look forward to providing more data to support the work of online community professionals – those that enable, facilitate and inspire network of people to contribute in ways that generate more value than the sum of each individual contribution.

When we started The Community Roundtable we felt that research into the practices and resulting impacts of community was a core missing piece that could help demonstrate the value of community management. The research we do at TheCR is a collaboration between members of TheCR Network and TheCR research team. We work together with our members to ensure that we focus on and exploring the areas of biggest need to practitioners, so that the research is immediately practical and valuable – and evolves as quickly as the discipline does.

At the leading edges, the discipline of community management has moved beyond the idea that engagement is purely a matter of tactical execution and our members are working to build the operational structures and processes that reinforce a culture of engagement. We are also seeing organizations start to contemplate how business models and organizational strategies will need to change as a result of engagement with their ecosystems. For this reason, we broke up this year’s key findings into three critical categories for those working to make a community approach successful within larger organizations: strategy, operations and tactics. This year’s key findings are:

  • Strategy: Invest in people and systems, not just platforms
  • Operations: Advocacy Programs are More Than a Checkbox
  • Tactics: Quick Wins Exist to Improve Engagement

In each of these areas, TheCR Network members told us that there was not enough data to help them educate their stakeholders, or an understanding of what it meant to do these things well. We took that input to heart, and asked for more detail in our research. As an example, advocacy and advocacy programs are a much-discussed topic but there is a wide variation what people think advocacy programs look like and it is often seen as an easy thing when, in fact, it requires a lot of planning, thought and investment to do well. This year’s research bears that out, showing that basic advocacy programs have minimal impact on engagement but multi-faceted programs, whcih address multiple roles and have significant benefits for advocates do have an impact on engagement and value.

We are particularly pleased this year to be able to break down the markers of community management maturity into maturity stages, which allows you to see more detail about what initiatives are most prevalent in each stage of a community’s lifecycle. This data helps considerably in building community roadmaps and providing stakeholders with data that supports it. Other new analysis features this year include:

  • Reporting on ‘inactive’ populations in our engagement profile – critical for putting the other engagement categories into context.
  • Discussion of some of our ‘data dilemmas’ as we analyzed the data, which will give you some insight into areas of the research that are still immature or non-standard.

Ultimately our goal with this research is to provide data that helps you:

  • Plan and develop a roadmap
  • Prioritize resources effectively
  • Educate stakeholders
  • Increase your credibility
  • Demonstrating your value as a community professional

We hope this research supports your work and contributes to your success. If it does, we hope you will consider joining TheCR Network, contributing to the development of the discipline by sharing what you know, asking questions about what you don’t and participating in the evolution of our research in the future. The results will provide fuel for discussions and programming throughout the coming year, and we’d love to expand the conversation – and the number of people getting the benefits of TheCR Network.

Happy reading and please let us know if you have questions, suggestions or comments!

Download the SOCM 2015 now!

Friday Roundup: The advocacy opportunity, and getting clarity in community roles

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Screen Shot 2015-02-27 at 10.31.54 AMFebruary is (almost) over, but we managed to pack a lot into the shortest month of the year. Our main theme of the month has been the State of Community Management 2015 survey, which officially closes today. We are setting new records for responses, which is a great situation, but we want more if we can get them. On Monday, I published a post on how your data is used to make it clear that we get that you are sharing important data and we won’t be sharing it with anyone else.

We also shared a little glimpse behind some of the early numbers on the CMX Hub blog, where we looked at some early results from the survey about advocacy and community leadership programs, and found that while a significant number of companies and organizations are recognizing and rewarding advocates, there is a lot of missed opportunity. See for yourself, and please if you haven’t, take the survey, because there can be a lot more valuable information where that came from.

Meanwhile, we also launched a new eBook this week that community managers and those who hire them may find of value. Defining Community Management Roles uses data from our Community Manager Salary Survey research to shape and clarify expectations and data for three community management roles: Community Manager, Community Strategist and Director of Community. Thanks to Jive for sponsoring this product, and we hope you’ll dig into it on Slideshare.

And if that wasn’t enough, Rachel published a new thought piece on diginomica – the first in a series she has composed. “Enterprise Communities: The New Management Imperative” traces the clear path toward community approach as the only option to succeed in a world of abundance and change, where structures that emphasize control actually cripple organizations.

Or to put it another way, if you haven’t seen our new t-shirts, control is for amateurs.

Interesting readings for the week

Enterprise Communities: The New Management Imperative – I founded The Community Roundtable in 2009 to pursue my belief in the power of communities. Fundamentally, I believe a couple of things that drive my interest in communities. I believe structure drives behavior, and I believe that if you give people access, responsibility, accountability and commensurate rewards, their potential is unlimited. I believe communities and networks are the most effective structures by which to establish this dynamic, and by employing communities, organizations can more efficiently generate value that is shared by everyone who contributes to it, in equal measure.

Making Wirearchy Operable: Questions and Suggestions -Making Wirearchy operable is hard work. Hierarchy .. clear lines and boxes showing who reports to how, with job titles that say clearly what someone is responsible for, is much easier to see, understand, figure out.  But it doesn’t respond very well to constantly-changing information-saturated markets and challenges  .. every-which-way flows of information about products, services, problems, capabilities and the myriad other activities that make up living in a society

Bosch: When Use Cases Support Connections – “We started in autumn 2012 with the pilot phase. From month to month, we allowed the user base to grow while implementing the use cases that early adopters were discovering when interacting on the platform.” Use cases are anecdotes that show users the steps for achieving a specific goal through the platform. In that sense they are highly educational and can help employees to get up to speed with the tool.

Joining the Customer Journey Using Online Communities – Every marketer from Boston to Bejing seems to be focused on something called the “customer journey.” A Google search on this two-word phrase returns over 627,000 results. It’s one of those “Eureka!” moments – organizations realize buyers start researching a firm’s products and services long before they reach the point of purchase. These firms are now scrambling to find and engage with those customers while they are still on the move and before they arrive at a sales destination decision. But I gotta tell you, this is not news to those of us in the online community world.

Ecosystem, Network or Community: It is the Future of Work – In my book SHIFT I spend a lot of time talking about disruption. The book traces disruptive forces as one old form of economy, dominated by companies, gives way to another, dominated by platforms and ecosystems. This, I believe is the key shift in the economy. It is a disruption with broad consequences for how we work. Also for the opportunity, or life chances, that lie ahead of us. This last point though is the most important. We think of this shift with different terms in mind – ecosystems, networks, community. Regardless of your choice, each speaks to the same future work experience.

New Community and Social Media Jobs

Advertise Your Opening on TheCR Job Board!

Enterprise Community Manager – Akamai, Cambridge, MA

Director, Social Media Strategy – Manulife Financial, Toronto, ON

Director of Global Communications – Social Media – TripAdvisor, Newton, MA

Community Manager – Women Who Code, San Francisco, CA

Social Media Community Specialist – MCP: Faith, Pompano Beach, FL

Communications and Community Manager – New York Univ. – Entrepreneurial Institute, New York, NY

Repository Community Manager – Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL

Community Manager, EA Mobile – EA Sports, Salt Lake City, UT

Social Media Executive Director – JPMorgan, Columbus, OH

Digital Coordinator – Tribeca Film Institute, New York, NY

Community Manager – Bit9 + Carbon Black, Waltham, MA

Community Manager – ThredUp, San Francisco, CA

Knowledge Communities Manager – HP Enterprise Services, Plano, TX

Community Manager, Social Media – Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY

Community Manager – Williams-Sonoma, San Francisco, CA

Magneto Community Manager – Magneto, Los Angeles, CA

Community Manager – Cyanogen, Seattle, WA or Palo Alto, CA

Community Manager – Houzz, Palo Alto, CA

Community Strategist – Context Partners, Washington, DC

Five things to know about the State of Community Management survey

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Stopwatch

Image via Wikimedia Commons

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

We are approaching the deadline on Friday for the State of Community Management 2015 survey. The response has been great, but we still need as broad a sample as we can get to make our data the best it can be. If you have taken it before, you have seen how your information feeds the final product each year – so please carve out the 20 minutes to complete the survey.

But some of you, we know, are deadline driven. To you, we say TIME IS RUNNING OUT!

Others, especially those who may not have taken the surveys before, have had more basic questions about the survey, the data, and what we do with your responses. Here are answers to five frequently asked questions.

Are my answers public? Your answers are confidential.

Your State of Community Management research answers will never be shared with an outside party except as published in aggregate in our research products, and we do not list the specific organizations that have taken part in our survey without permission.

Why do you need my personal information and email? Your personal information is confidential, too.

We will not use your personal information for any reason except to confirm or clarify survey answers or send you follow up messages specifically about the State of Community Management research.

What’s in it for me? You get an individualized community maturity score, and contribute to research you’ll be able to use to help your community efforts.

We will use your specific community data for one purpose – to give you an estimated maturity score on where your answers rank you on the competencies of TheCR’s Community Maturity Model. That score is seen only by you – it will not be shared publicly at any time.

Do you really need my answers? Yes! Your answers matter.

We know that 20 minutes is not a small ask – but your answers are critically important for the research. The greater our sample size, the more ways we can examine the data, by community size, platform, industry and more, and the better the insights we can give.

This year, we are making a push to get responses from mature communities, from communities that use a number of specific platforms, such as Lithium, Higher Logic, IBM Connect, Sharepoint, Yammer, and Salesforce, and for responses from communities connected to more traditional industries, such as finance, manufacturing, health care and professional services. Media and gaming communities – we want you, too!

When is the final report coming out?  Mid-spring.

We need some time to crunch and double-check numbers, to analyze and create the narrative, but you can expect that it will be released in the first half of May. You can also expect we will be ringing cowbells and honking social media horns to make sure you are aware when it comes out.

And keep an eye out for some sneak peeks at what the data is showing us while we work on getting the full report together.

There’s another question that comes up, too.

Can we trust you?

Our reputation is our business. Every product we create, and everything we do in our community, is built on that trust. Not sure I have a pithy single sentence to address that – just six years of hard work and five past State of Community Management reports to demonstrate our determination to protect those who entrust us with their information and produce research that advances the discipline of community management.

Have we convinced you? Excellent. Take the SOCM 2015 survey at https://the.cr/socm15survey

Friday Roundup: A call to the State of Community Management survey alumni (and all CMs)

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

We’re always all about community management here at The Community Roundtable. But recently, we’ve also been all about The State of Community Management survey. As we close in on the end of the month, we need your help to make the survey responses as complete as possible. We’ve been getting the word out in numerous places, including Maddie Grant’s well-read Socialfish blog, numerous mentions from our friends on social media, and a great piece on the history and impact of the State of Community Management report from Siobhan Fagan at CMSWire.

I draw your attention to that last piece because it connects with a group whose responses have been slower than we might like. Managers of more mature, developed communities. Many of you are people who took the survey in past years. You’ve used the results in your strategy, and together we have been able to advance the field of community over the years.

But we need to know where you are now! Each year’s survey is a snapshot of the field – and with you out of the picture, it’s less complete. It also makes it harder for all of us, including you, to make the case for the power of community. Your lessons learned, objectives achieved and use cases built are a critical part of this effort, and without your voice, our chorus is incomplete.

Mature communities are also seeing the value of benchmarking, and as the only community-wide survey in the field, The State of Community Management is a powerful tool for that. You get a score based on your survey results of where you stand on the Community Maturity Model competencies, and you’ll be able to compare your data to the aggregate of communities when the report comes out. Of course, your individual community data submission is confidential – but it adds to the research database in a critical way.

We know you’re busier than ever. But the 20 minutes you spend on the survey will give you knowledge and information you won’t be able to get anywhere else. So carve out some time in your schedule. To make it easier for those of you who need it, we created a Google calendar full of appointment slots so you can grab one for yourself and book the time in just a click!

Now on to other things.

I also talked to Maggie Tunning about her fellowship experience at The Community Roundtable – she must have liked it, she stayed – and had her give 5 reasons you should be a Research Fellow at TheCR. Apply now for that job or either of our other fellowships in community management or sales and marketing today! We’ve started the interview process!

And keep an eye out on Tuesday – we give you a sneak peek at a preliminary SOCM data set and some ideas for strengthening advocacy programs in your community – on the CMXHub blog!

Interesting Items We Are Reading This Week

The State of the State of Community Management Report – The Community Roundtable released its first State of Community Management (SoCM) report in 2010. And in the ensuing five years, the report (and the discipline that it covers) has matured from a collection of disparate practices to a set of measurable competencies with proven business value. While many community managers still face challenges identified early on — most notably underfunding of projects — they now have a set of tools and benchmarks by which to gauge progress, set goals and measure success.

In Europe’s Biggest Firms, Social Business Is All Grown Up – In Paris last week at Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT 2015, it was shortly after the CIO of one of the world’s largest organizations began walking through the progress of social business within her organization, that the realization hit: The leading edge companies are not really talking about adoption any more, that part is largely done, though plenty of work certainly remains. Instead, the half dozen case studies from some of the largest firms in the world made it clear that leading organizations are now making advanced use of social tools in the way that they work.

We Need a Measure for Customer Effort – The way people understand what is on a page is colored by the type of task they want to complete. They scan the environment constantly seeking clues that will get them on the right path for task completion. If there is a link called “Solutions” then people who are doing troubleshooting will often click it because they want a solution to their problems. They won’t find a solution. What they will find is lots of marketing and selling and that just frustrates them.

The Future of Marketing is Community – Communities today are created more deliberately than they were in the past. As a result, communities have the potential to be much more engaging, because they are based on how people identify themselves, not who sits in the cubicle next to them. There are few things that people are more attached to than the fundamental ways they identify themselves: father, daughter, writer, marketer, baseball fan, and so on.

New Community and Social Media Jobs

Collaboration Program Manager – Advent Software, San Francisco, CA

Jive Internal Community Manager – Firmenich, Princeton, NJ

Enterprise Community Manager – Akamai, Cambridge, MA

Community Manager – Yelp, Madison, WI

Community Manager – Social Media Exchange – Ipsos, Culver City, CA

Community Manager – BrainStation, New York, NY

Online Community Manager – PETCO, San Diego, CA

North America Community Manager – Brooks Sports, Seattle, WA

Community Marketing Manager – Sumo Logic, Redwood City, CA

Community and Culture Manager – Spring, Vancouver, BC

Calling all online gaming community managers – step up and shine!

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

There’s often a “we vs they” attitude between different groups of community managers. In particular, those of you in the gaming and consumer media space figured out the power of communities by the time many of the rest of us were just realizing the power of this social media thing. But we all have something to offer the larger discussion of what community can mean for different organizations and industries.

We’re trying to capture that. 2015 marks the 6th year that The Community Roundtable has conducted research for The State of Community Management. Each year, the responses have grown in number and broadened in scope. But gaming and media communities have never been particularly well represented.

We hope 2015 is the year to change that. The 20-minute survey seeks to root out the powerful ways that communities are shaping business, and gaming communities are at the forefront of much of that. How do you stack up? Take the survey and you will receive a score relative to TheCR’s Community Maturity Model, and you’ll contribute to the most comprehensive annual survey of community management professionals there is today.

This research helps shape the agenda and conversation for TheCR and much of the rest of the community sector. We’re hoping this year that research will recognize the true impact of online gaming and media communities, and raise opportunities for gaming and media communities and community professionals in the overall community discussion.

We all have a sense that gaming communities have a lot to teach other communities, and we know from our past research the growth and possibilities that other community-minded organizations can offer their peers. Community management is the future of management – and what we learn today can drive the discussion in the coming months and years.

Take the survey – you do not have to be a member or client of TheCR – it’s just a click away at https://the.cr/socm15survey – and tell some colleagues. We’ll release the research findings this spring.

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Want to play a role shaping the future of community? Take a moment now and set aside 20 minutes on your calendar for the State of Community Management 2015 survey! Go straight to the survey at https://the.cr/socm15survey

Now Open: 2015 State of Community Management Survey

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Screenshot 2015-01-28 09.31.52Yes, it’s that time of year again – time to take stock of where our community programs are and what’s next.

For The Community Roundtable, this is our biggest and most important initiative every year because our shared value with you is to demonstrate the value of community management. We collaborate with you to deliver research that does just that – creating something that generates more value than any of us could on our own.

This year’s research builds on our State of Community Management 2014 report – pushing what we know about the markers of community management maturity and scoring communities in the eight competencies identified in the Community Maturity Model.

We know this research has helped our members plan and budget – creating community programs that are more strategic and have more resources with which to succeed. It will help you understand things like:

  • For communities that can measure ROI, they have an average ROI of x%
  • X% of new member welcome processes include automated welcome emails, x% include personal welcome emails from a community manager and X% include video tutorials
  • The average and best-in-class engagement profiles include x% lurkers, x% contributors, x% creators and x% collaborators.
  • The average community SLA (service level agreement), for those that have them, is x hours.
  • How many communities without a full-time community manager can measure their value compared with average and the best-in-class segment.

This research will help you understand how well your community is addressing a variety of management initiatives – and help stakeholders understand where you have gaps and what is required to address them. Critical information as the community management discipline matures.

However, we need YOU to help us help you. Please consider taking our 20 minute survey. While the majority of questions are easy responses about things you have in place or don’t, there are a few pieces of data you may want to gather ahead of time:

  • Your engagement profile: Inactive, lurker, contributor, creator and collaborators. (Total should equal 100%)
  • Your community budget breakdown: Community management resources; Content and online programming/events; In-person events; consulting, advisory or research; Outsourced moderation and community management; Platform and technology. (Total should equal 100%)
  • Your annual ROI percentage, if you calculate it
  • Community SLA
  • Breakdown of community management time: Engagement; Content and program development; Strategic and planning responsibilities; Technical work; Analytics. Total should equal 100%

New this year, you will receive scores for each competency immediately.

Curious how well you will do?  Take the survey here.