The Community Roundtable

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

Leverage external sources for low-lift community programs

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The Content & Programs competency of the Community Maturity Model™  examines the resources and interactions a community offers its members, and is the lifeblood of a successful community program. Content gives people a reason to visit (and return to) a community, while programs create opportunities for members to connect, creating tighter bonds. Content & programs must reflect the shared value of the community and its members, while a program plan tied to the larger community strategy can lead to valuable engagement behaviors.

Savvy community teams leverage external sources to create content and facilitate programs for their members — whether SMEs, executives, or strategic partners.

Leverage external sources for low-lift community programs

Using external sources is a “work smarter, not harder” way to scale your community team. Two notable examples of external community contributors that jumped in 2022:

  • Peers from other areas of the organization (50% vs. 43% in 2021)
  • Vendors/partners (20% vs. 15% in 2021)

Member participation in content & programs dropped year over year, likely due to fatigue and burnout associated with COVID-19. While this would normally be seen as a negative, it’s actually a balanced approach to content & program development, and member participation remains at a healthy level.

Reminder: You won’t successfully attract (and retain) outside voices to your content & programs without a formal plan. This is the year to formalize a content & program plan.

The community budget for content & programs has more than doubled in the last three years (3% in 2020 vs. 7% in 2022). This is a win for a critical piece of the community-building puzzle. As your content & programs budget grows, ensure you’re moving toward a formal plan aligned with your community strategy – which might include paid programs for external contributors. This will allow you to show your content & program efforts are growing engagement and meeting (or exceeding!) your community’s goals.

Content Pro Tip from Kelly Munro, Lead Community Advisor, Xero, and member of TheCR Network

If you’re at an organization with an existing marketing team you might have a goldmine of content at your disposal.

"Don’t forget about all of the content support that you’ve got within your business. If you have a great content team already, they may already have a good structured understanding of user behavior. Make sure you aren’t creating conflicting content or programs, so just make sure that everything works harmoniously."

“Don’t forget about all of the content support that you’ve got within your business. If you have a great content team already, they may already have a good structured understanding of user behavior. Make sure you aren’t creating conflicting content or programs, so just make sure that everything works harmoniously.”

Get more community ideas and advice in 13th annual 2022 State of Community Management report:

Community Teams are Growing

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The Community Management competency of the Community Maturity Model™ involves everything that ensures communities are productive. While community managers come from all walks of life and approach their role differently, they have the same goal: Build healthy, engaged communities where members learn from one another and collaborate on ideas, issues, or challenges.

After seeing a dip in the size of community management teams in 2021, they’re growing dramatically in 2022! This can likely be attributed to organizations in 2021 dealing with the uncertainty of COVID-19 and increased mobility. 2022’s increase is an effort to rebalance. There will likely be a modest rise in the coming year as community teams continue to grow with their programs.

With this growth, defining community roles is critical.

Linking community programs to operations should top every community team’s to-do list. While defining community roles and responsibilities — and getting them approved by human resources — is critical when developing community programs, 65% of respondents indicated they don’t have defined and HR-approved community roles. This is a huge gap to be addressed as an industry and individually by community teams.

In 2014, we documented the skills necessary for community building, which resulted in the Community Skills Framework™. Built around five skill “families” — each with ten unique skills — and providing a comprehensive look at the role, the Community Skills Framework™ is perfect for anyone who works in the community space and wants to understand the depth and breadth of skills needed on their team.

Recommendation: Definitions are your friend.

Develop defined roles and responsibilities for your community team and review with HR for alignment. Use the Community, Careers, and Compensation research to jump-start this effort.

Get more community ideas and advice in our 2022 State of Community Management report:

Anne Larsen on Community Culture

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Anne Larsen on Community Culture

Community Conversations is a long-running podcast highlighting community success stories from a wide variety of online community management professionals.

Episode #83 of Community Conversations features Anne Larsen, Applications Consultant at Grundfos.

On this special State of Community Management 2022 episode, Anne Larsen and host Anne Mbugua discuss the importance of culture in online communities. Anne shares her experiences with the effect of culture on organizations and their online community, best practices for thoughtful consideration of global cultures, and explores the most surprising findings from the 2022 report.

Anne Larsen on Community Culture

Listen to Anne Larsen on Community Culture

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About Grundfos

Pumps are our business. Every day, our energy efficient pumps provide comfort, deliver drinking water, remove wastewater, or help farmers water their crops all over the world. Just to mention some of our expertise. We set the standard within our work areas and keep raising the bar when it comes to energy efficiency and protecting the environment. Since 1945 we’ve honed our skills in order to produce the perfect pumps. Pumps which can move liquid to where it should be – using as little energy as possible, making a real difference for the people and the world we live in.

About The State of Community Management

Now in its 13th year, our annual State of Community Management report provides strategic ideas and tactical benchmarks for global community management professionals.

The State of Community Management 2022 explores the state of the community management industry through the lens of the eight competencies in the Community Maturity Model.

Each section includes data, ideas, and expert practitioner perspectives to give you new insight into the community management industry. Download your free copy of the State of Community Management 2022.

Get Subject Matter Experts Involved

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The Community Maturity Model™’s  Leadership competency includes executive sponsorship, participation in a community program, emergent community leadership, and ties into broader organizational ecosystems.

Leadership programs (a.k.a., advocacy, MVP, and superuser programs) are key to successful communities — they directly correlate with higher engagement, greater ability to measure value, and robust executive participation.

Where are your SMEs?

Our 2022 State of Community Management research shows that while most community leadership programs include customers (73% in 2022), not enough use internal subject matter experts (SMEs): Only 45%. This is a missed opportunity; you have SMEs in your organization, you should leverage their expertise and talents.

subject matter experts

Involving SMEs in the community allows them to meaningfully contribute, showcase their knowledge, and create connections. Creating connections was the top goal of community leadership programs per this year’s survey, with 77% of participants citing this as a goal. SMEs also contribute to the other community leadership program goals, including advocacy (71%) and moderation support and capacity (54%).

Start a community leadership program!

If you don’t have a superuser program that leverages subject matter experts in place, get started. Our research shows when a member of a community shifts from a passive recipient of information to an active participant, their activity increases by more than 10x. Their ROI — the return they get for the time invested — increases by over 200%.

Quick Subject Matter Expert Wins

The easiest way to get subject matter experts involved in your community program is to highlight content they have already created. Leveraging existing content and sharing it with a wider audience is the lightest lift – and quick path to approval.

Did someone lead a webinar? Post the recording in full and then edit it into clips that you can feature as standalone videos, blog post content, and in newsletters or on social. Turn a podcast episode into a tactical how-to blog post or infographic. Even re-printing relevant articles or case studies from subject matter experts provides a mutual benefit for your community members, and the expert themself.

The final step is to tie the subject matter expert back to their content. Ask them to share their perspective in the comments, to provide an additional benefit for members.

Get more community ideas and advice in our 2022 State of Community Management report:

Community Strategy Must Balance Business and Member Needs

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The Community Maturity Model™’s Strategy competency tracks how business and community goals align to achieve results for both the community program and the organization as a whole.

Community strategy balances the business’ need to drive revenue or cost savings with the needs of community members. This ensures that your community program is contributing meaningfully to your organization while providing significant value for members. If you don’t have a community strategy, use our community strategy worksheet to get started.

Our State of Community Management 2022 research shows that community programs with an approved strategy continue to grow. 71% of this year’s total have an approved strategy compared to just 58% pre-pandemic (2020) and 66% last year.

Despite this positive trend, there were still respondents who reported “no approved strategy.” While this has dropped (43% total in 2020 to 29% in 2022), it’s still troubling. A community program with no approved strategy can’t correlate positive outcomes back to business goals. Everything from ROI to long-term member engagement stems from having an approved community strategy.

An approved community strategy is a critical step to develop a fully integrated community program.

Note: Approved and operational community strategies were relatively flat when compared with the prior year (54% in 2022 vs. 56% in 2021), but well ahead of pre-pandemic response (44% in 2020).

If you don’t have a community strategy in place, now is the time to start.

As an organization, we tend to err towards a simple strategy that can adapt and be responsive as the community matures. It can be daunting to get pen to paper and start drafting your strategy but we have two easy ways to get started.

First, complete our (free) Community Score assessment. This will take about 20 minutes. When you complete the Community Score you’ll receive your results via email, detailing where your community strengths and opportunities lie.

community strategy worksheet

Next use the Community Strategy worksheet, found on page 15 of the 2022 State of Community Management report, to start your strategy outline. The worksheet helps you identify organizational and member goals for your community program. Then a short exercise helps you define the types of behavior change that are necessary for your community to meet those goals.

Community: The New Normal

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Is this the new normal? Well, there’s no such thing as “normal,” but there is a new way of thinking.

Over the last few years we’ve learned that “normal” might be what people were used to, but it only truly benefited a privileged few.

As companies navigate what the future of work looks like, they’re forced to look beyond the bottom line. Are employees happy? Do they feel connected to their work and the organization’s culture? Are customers being heard? More so, are companies listening?

Our world has been divided into three: BC (before COVID-19), pandemic, and now (the “new normal”) — and BC feels a lot longer than two years ago. Our research provides a data-driven look at organizations’ approach to the shifting landscape of the last few years.

In 2020, our research period closed before COVID-19 was widespread. Community programs were growing and changing in predictable ways, and the 2020 data was unsurprising. While there will always be new communities at the top of the funnel, mature communities were behaving as expected.

2021’s research reflected the first year of COVID-19’s impact on organizations. Globally, companies battened down their proverbial hatches, preparing for the storm COVID-19 brought. Budgets and hiring froze; understanding and urgency were up.

Few community programs had the financial resources to go beyond the status quo — even with increasing demand.

Online communities are experiencing a resurgence in 2022. After two uncertain years, where the target was in constant motion, community initiatives have proven their impact in both qualitative and quantitative ways, and are starting to reap the rewards and resources they deserve.

Does Community: The New Normal resonate with what you see in your organization? Read more in the 2022 edition of the State of Community Management.

Community: The New Normal

Foundations Of Community Success

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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

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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.

The Evolutions of Customer Communities
The Evolutions of Customer Communities
The Evolutions of Customer Communities

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

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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.

Executive Interest In Community Programs Grows Significantly

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Executive interest in community approaches has varied since 2009, with internal and external communities gaining or losing interest as the technology, economic, and the social environment has changed. While interest has grown, it has been slow, inconsistent, and not always sustained. It has been frustrating to see many successful community programs disappear when executives change or companies evolve under new leadership or ownership. It has been exciting to see new applications of community approaches succeed. Interest has ebbed and flowed, slowly growing in appeal but not hitting an inflection point, which relegated communities to a nice-to-have approach in spite of the overwhelming evidence of their value.

Until recently, in terms of community maturity, we had not reached the tipping point and community programs remained vulnerable.

Over the last two years, the place of community in organizations has shifted, with community becoming a more commonly required investment, particularly in the start-up space. The COVID-19 pandemic tipped communities from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Suddenly, it was obvious why organizations wanted to connect employees and customers to each other and the organization via a transparent and accessible digital network.

Since 2020:

  • 71% of communities saw their visibility increase
  • 67% of them with an added increase in urgency
  • 74% of community programs report an increased recognition of their value
  • 62% of communities experienced an increase in engagement with 17% of those seeing a significant increase.

The pandemic propelled online communities into the spotlight in a world where it was no longer possible to connect and build relationships at events, in retail environments, at off-site meetings, or in the office.

Download the 2021 Report here.

The visceral new understanding of how online communities can connect employees and customers while expanding access, has galvanized interest, commitment, and involvement from executives. This rapid increase in interest, combined with a maturing community management profession, enabled strategic planning – backed by data, methodologies, success stories, and standardizing roles – and the professional development required to support a broad expansion of community programs and roles. This year’s research uncovers a considerable jump in strategic maturity and funded roadmaps, suggesting that the industry was ready for this pivot and inflection.

Learn more about the impact of executive interest on online community programs in the State of Community Management 2021. Download your copy.