SOCM 2019 Fast Fact Archives

Profiles of Emerging Community Leaders

August 19, 2019 By Jim Storer

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.

Burn-Out Risk is High for Online Community Managers

August 12, 2019 By Jim Storer

Or 10th annual State of Community Management survey revealed that online community professionals are both incredibly optimistic and incredibly burnt out. A full 50% of community professionals experienced a high degree of burnout over the past 12 months. At the same time, 69% see a future for themselves as a community professional and 80% are optimistic or very optimistic about the future for community at their organization. The fact that community leaders are more optimistic for the future of the communities they facilitate than for themselves is troubling and needs to be addressed.

While many community professionals are still on teams of one, the average community team is now six individuals, four of whom are full-time. Surprisingly, the size of the team currently does not show a consistent correlation to use case, the number of members in a community, the ROI of the community, or the sophistication of community strategy. This indicates there is little rationale in staffing to fit the needs or value of the community and suggests that staffing still relies on ad hoc support, that may just be one enlightened executive who believes in the promise of building community.

This disconnect further reinforces that community roles are not well rationalized – and justifying new headcount relies more on persuasion or vision than on responsibilities and results. This implication is further reinforced by looking at the disconnect between growth in value and the resulting increase in staffing and resources. 67% of community programs saw an increase in value and 70% of professionals report that the perception of their credibility and value has increased, yet only 34% of community programs saw any increase in staffing. Additionally, only 49% of community professionals have been promoted, despite that increase in value and credibility. Not surprising then, when asked about their biggest frustration, community leaders identified lack of resources. Community value is growing significantly, but resources and compensation is lagging behind and often never materializes. This incongruity needs to be addressed by organizational leaders.

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.

Online Communities Generate Huge ROI

August 5, 2019 By Jim Storer

Communities are complex and ever- changing. In the real world, they are challenging to see in aggregate and, therefore, almost impossible to measure. Online, however, we can see how communities form, change, fragment, divide, and dissipate. That allows us to communicate community dynamics, value, and impact.

Some community value is still easier to see because it is direct. Getting support, advice, and answers offsets more cumbersome and resource-intensive methods because communities are quite efficient at matching and exchanging value between those who need it and those who have excess capacity. That value is what we can measure most easily and translate into financial results because it has a direct impact on the cycle time of a workflow. While other community outcomes, like the value of having empowered employees, cannot be translated into financial terms, we must recognize that it exists and contributes to overall organizational performance.

An example of direct value comes from a global manufacturing company where 70% of the staff – mostly sales and support professionals that are on-site with customers – work remotely. Because of their isolation, it can take years to develop an efficient internal network that they can use to resolve the issues they see on a daily basis. by providing an internal community focused on products or solution areas, they no longer need to know who to ask – or spend hours getting introductions from those they do know. The community has a direct and significant financial impact for the organization and its clients, who can quickly get issues resolved and continue their work.

The Community roundtable’s Community ROI Calculator focuses on this direct value, and looks specifically at answers because they are the most valuable engagement output we can easily measure. This model yields a highly credible view of a community’s value.

Community programs generate the kind of value you might expect for the high levels of engagement they engender, in the process demonstrating how the transference of trust supports engagement at scale. While internal community programs show a lower ROI, they are on average smaller in size and their business objectives are typically more indirect, making a bigger percentage of their overall impact harder to measure in financial terms.

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

Trends in Community Management Staffing

July 29, 2019 By Jim Storer

34% of community professionals surveyed in the State of Community Management 2019 are still on teams of one, with the average community team now at six individuals, four of whom are full-time.

Surprisingly, the size of a team currently does not show consistent correlation to use case, the number of members in a community, the ROI of the community, or the sophistication of community strategy. This indicates there is little rationale in staffing to fit the needs or value of the community and suggests that staffing still relies on ad hoc support, that may just be one enlightened executive who believes in the promise of building community.

Additionally, only 49% of community professionals have been promoted, despite that increase in value and credibility. Not surprising then, when asked about their biggest frustration, community leaders identified lack of resources. Community value is growing significantly, but resources and compensation is lagging behind and often never materializes. This incongruity needs to be addressed by organizational leaders.

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

Positive Community Impact Powers a Circle of Success

July 22, 2019 By Jim Storer

The famous Alexandre Dumas quote “Nothing succeeds like success” illustrates a critical aspect of successful communities. In particular, because individuals do not always know what to expect from communities, success shows people what is possible and, in turn, tends to change their expectations and mindsets.

This is true of any initiative, but especially true with communities where success is transparent. This is a critical approach in efficiently building communities. If you start as you mean to continue, showing success as you go, communities build momentum as they grow and avoid some of the biggest community pitfalls, including toxic cultures and abusive behaviors.

Looking at the rates of growth across a number of success factors, communities with advanced strategies saw more significant increases across every category. Impressively, the rate of significant increase in value was twice as high as average communities, suggesting faster acceleration for communities with advanced strategies.

Success also shows up in a community’s impact on culture and brand sentiment. All communities have a net positive impact on culture or brand sentiment. Communities with advanced strategies have no negative or neutral impact on culture and brand sentiment. This demonstrates that active, ongoing community management can mitigate all negative engagement risks.

Active, ongoing community management can mitigate ALL negative engagement risks.

That positive impact is also seen in increased interest, support, and activity. 66% of community professionals report that interest from around their organizations has increased or increased significantly over the past year.

For 70% of them, their credibility has also increased and they believe the biggest factor for this increase is that communities are more integrated into their organization. This also translates to support from a majority of all executives. 63% of all executives are supportive of community approaches, although many don’t yet understand exactly what is required for success and how they can better support community programs. That lack of understanding is reflected in how executive support is expressed. 75%
of the time that is verbal support, but only 54% of the time is it reflected in budget.

For community programs with advanced strategies – those that are measurable – the difference is significant. While they get only slightly more verbal support (77% of the time), they get support reflected as budget 62% of the time.

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

July 15, 2019 By Jim Storer

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.

Communities Enable Thriving and Adaptive Ecosystems

July 8, 2019 By Jim Storer

Communities are often mistaken as approaches for a single use case – and they can be successful that way. For decades, online communities used in a business context were often focused on customer support case deflection and 74% of external community programs still identify this as
a functional process they support. Those community programs deliver tremendous value to organizations, but are often sub- optimized when their focus remains narrow. They are also symbolic of a legacy mindset where functions are treated discretely. This mindset is quickly becoming outdated
as organizations work to streamline the customer or employee experience, requiring collaboration and integration across functions.

The immense power, and great challenge, of community approaches is that they break down silos and barriers, making organizations more integrated, porous, and adaptive. In fact, for 36% of community programs there are individuals in other functional areas that have community- related performance goals. The functional areas outside of the community team to most likely have community performance goals are marketing, customer support, product/engineering, and learning & development.

Successful communities generate benefits for and require contribution from many functional budgets. That complexity is currently hard to manage successfully because most organizations operate with budgets and metrics that are rigid and discrete. However, there is growing recognition that customer and employee experiences span many functional processes and the next leap in organizational performance requires cross-functional solutions. Communities are the best and most sustainable method to integrating knowledge, innovation, and culture across silos. They deliver solutions that customers and employees are demanding, but need formal changes to organizational budgeting to be sustainable because too often community teams have to beg or borrow informally to secure the resources that they need to be successful.

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

Advanced Online Community Strategies Enable Success

July 1, 2019 By Jim Storer

Successful communities are generative, with success and impact leading to more success and impact. Community returns, by their nature, benefit more than one participant, thanks in part to the trust and transparency that they enable. This typically results in consolidated and transparent information, win-win scenarios, and high ROI.

The question for organizations embarking on community approaches or who are currently operating underperforming communities, is this – how can my community get there?

Across the data from the 2019 State of Community Management research, the factor that correlates to the most other success factors is having an advanced community strategy – one that is approved, operational, and measurable. Within the 24% of community programs with advanced strategies, we see a group that is able to achieve self-generating, emergent growth, resulting in compounding value. Advanced strategies can be measured but they also are more comprehensive generally,
and are much more likely to include roadmaps, shared purpose and shared value statements, ROI projections, and, most critically, budget requirements.

AN ADVANCED COMMUNITY STRATGY IS ONE THAT IS:

APPROVED
OPERATIONAL
MEASURABLE

Interestingly, average communities and those with advanced strategies do not look very different in terms of engagement rates, suggesting that the quality of engagement matters as much as or more than the quantity. In many other ways, they are quite different. despite having almost twice as many members, communities with advanced strategies are far less fragmented by sub-groups, more of their engagement is consolidated on the primary platform, and less of that engagement is hidden in private sub-groups. All of these aspects make the information more transparent
and accessible, causing the communities themselves to be more valuable to everyone.

Download the 2019 State of Community Management Report for more community insights, including a list of common elements of community strategies.

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

Online Communities Empower Individuals

June 24, 2019 By Jim Storer

Behaviors are the repeating patterns, or fractals, that makeup culture. Ultimately, culture determines what is possible economically. by looking at language and the engagement behavior it prompts, culture can be seen and measured. does no one respond after an executive speaks? That may suggest a closed, anxious culture. do they respond, but with defensiveness, blame, or anger? You may have a toxic culture on your hands. do people ask a lot of questions? That suggests a supportive culture. do people debate openly? That suggests a high trust culture, with room to challenge each other.

Organizations that understand behavior and how to influence it have a significant competitive advantage over those that don’t. Organizations that understand behavior, know how to impact it, AND are trusted have even more of an advantage. Building that foundation of trust starts with empowering individuals.

63% of communities empower members frequently or all of the time. That empowerment comes in a range of forms – feeling seen, being heard, providing solutions, and taking leadership initiative. It’s easy to see these numbers, nod, and move on, but empowering people to feel seen and heard is no small achievement.

It is the access point for individuals to feel like they matter, are accepted for who they are, and feel like what they have to offer is meaningful. That empowerment directly impacts whether and how often they share their expertise and is the foundation for innovation because it impacts motivation, engagement, productivity, and creativity.

When individuals are inspired, engaged, and empowered they fuel a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. Success breeds success because people see engagement rewarded, increasing their comfort in engaging themselves. People live up or down to the expectations set by those around them – and their imaginations and ambitions are limited or expanded based on what they can see in their communities. The culture of a community has the power to limit or empower its members. Our research shows that, in intentionally-managed communities, members feel a high rate of empowerment – and engage at equally high rates.

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.