SOCM 2021 Archives

Foundations Of Community Success

January 11, 2022 By Jim Storer

Over the last two years, the place of community in organizations shifted, with community programs becoming a commonly required investment at all types of companies. The COVID-19 pandemic tipped communities from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Suddenly, the value of connecting employees and customers via an equitable and widely accessible digital network was obvious.

Well, obviously to community professionals. It’s not always easy to get organizational leaders on board with the resources and support needed to build comprehensive online community programs.

In this new look at data from the State of Community Management 2021 research, Foundations for Community Success explores:

Checking your community health: How do you decide what defines a healthy community for your use case?
Contributing to organizational success: With community becoming visible across the organization, it’s more important than ever to make sure your community directly contributes to defining organizational outcomes. How can you ensure that your community is aligned with business goals?
Building for long-term success: Community hasn’t ever been a ‘build it and they will come’ proposition. How can you use meaningful content and programs to lay the foundation for long-term engagement and success?

Based on the 2021 State of Community Management research, Foundations of Community Success was produced by The Community Roundtable and made possible with support from Higher Logic.

Download the ebook here.

The Evolution of Customer Communities

November 11, 2021 By Jim Storer

In 2021, online communities are table stakes for brands that want to connect and engage with their audience.

Community professionals are now handed the task of not just connecting with a brand’s audience, but deciding what kind of engagement is needed, and how to build a long-term strategy to foster and maintain that activity.

Today, customer communities typically fall into one or more of three core categories: support communities, brand marketing communities, and innovation communities.

We partnered with Khoros to explore these three community types, and to look at how community professionals can make their customer communities more valuable to their brands.

This ebook takes new, unpublished data from the State of Community Management 2021 and looks at how online customer communities contribute to both audience engagement and satisfaction (like higher CSAT scores) and how they make a meaningful impact on the organizations broader goals.

In addition to this new, externally-focused data, we profile three innovative online communities, that are using their customer interactions to drive advocacy, empowerment, and innovation.

Download your copy of this State of Community Management eBook for free.

Building Effective Content Programs for Your Online Community

September 22, 2021 By Jim Storer

Content and programs are the lifeblood of a successful online community program. They are often seen as one collective entity, but they serve two different roles for communities. Content gives people a reason to visit (and return to) an online community, while programs create opportunities for members to connect with one another.

In previous editions of our State of Community Management research, we’ve noted that aligning your content and programs with your online community strategy is critical to becoming a best-in-class online community. Content and programs need to reflect the shared value of community, and a program plan tied more closely to your online community strategy can generate the most valuable member engagement behaviors.

Here are three ways you can use content and programs to improve your online community:

Integrate content and programs into your strategic online community plan

Despite the importance of consistent content and programs in a community strategy, a staggering 60% of respondents report at best they have “an informal schedule” for content and programs in their community. In the four years since we last asked this question the needle has barely moved in this area when 59% of respondents reported the same level of content and program planning. While responsiveness to short-term member needs is important, we recommend being intentional about your content and program plan and connecting it to your community strategy and annual roadmap.

Don’t go it alone – deputize your members, advocates, and peers!

One of the most consistent responses in the State of Community Management 2021 is that community managers need more resources. While we don’t doubt that this is the case in general, we’re enthused by their response to the challenge. They’re enlisting others, both in and outside the organization, to help with their community programs. While we’d love to see this happening more broadly, leaning on members, advocates, and peers in your organization to assist in producing or facilitating community programs is a best practice that needs to become more widespread. The fact that nearly 25% of respondents report no activity in this area suggests we still have a long way to go before this is a standard approach for community practitioners.

The beginning is a very good place to start

For the last few years, we’ve talked about the importance of new member onboarding programs and it sounds like you’ve listened. Respondents report that this is their top community program, with nearly 60% including them in the mix. Newsletters, virtual discussions, and virtual workshops and training (not surprising based on the pandemic) are also relatively common in this year’s sample. It’s interesting to look back to the last time we asked this question (2017) and compare the results.

We see no real increase in the prevalence of these programs in the collected responses, which shouldn’t be surprising given content and program planning clearly isn’t a priority for the majority of respondents (see above). But it is surprising given community programs are the single best way to introduce members to one another, develop trust, and participate in high-value engagement behaviors. We recommend you review this list of common community programs and consider adding them to your plan if they’re aligned with your overall strategy.

Need more ideas on how to improve your online community using content and programs? Check out this webinar with community leader Kelly Schott.

Want more strategies for global community building? Download the State of Community Management 2021.

Community Centers of Excellence Enable Distributed Leadership

July 26, 2021 By Jim Storer

What is a Center of Excellence?

Centers of Excellence are groups that are charged with enabling their organizations with a specific practice or expertise and often have other names, whether that is an Enablement Group, Adoption Team, or Internal Consulting. Historically, this has not been the role of community program teams, who were generally tasked with managing one community.

Community Centers of Excellence Enable Distributed Leadership

However, as communities have become more integrated into organizations and as they address more objectives across the employee and customer experience, more people are involved in their management and leadership. The result is growing demand for community management expertise that falls on the community team to deliver. We see this evolution accelerate as communities mature. Only 11% of early communities are explicitly resourced to be centers of excellence – transitioning to a majority of community teams for the most mature community programs. This dynamic is also seen in the growth of groups outside of the community team producing programs in the community. At Stage 4, a majority of communities have cross-functional peers, community leaders, and community members leading programs – all of whom need guidance or training on how to do so effectively.

What kind of enablement services do community teams deliver?

Early on, community teams universally focus on technical support, training, and to a slightly lesser degree, coaching and templates. As community programs mature, they tackle metrics and reporting, consulting, and for some, enterprise governance. Community budgets reflect this transition. In Stage 1, community management resources are only 19% of the total community budget. By Stage 4, 43% of community program budgets go toward talent acquisition and training.

These services correlate with increased reporting responsibilities and increased expectations for engagement for cross-functional peers. More people and groups are involved in both managing aspects of communities, interested in their performance, and measured on their engagement. No longer are community programs isolated and discrete. Instead, they are expanding to align organizational groups in order to address myriad employee and customer experience objectives.