SOCM Archives

Peter Broadley on Effective Community Programs

February 4, 2019 By Jim Storer

Conversations with Community Managers – Peter Broadley

Welcome to the latest episode in our community management podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.”

Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about their community journey. They ask the community questions you want to know the answers to, including:

What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
How to start a running club wherever you go!

Episode #52 features Peter Broadley, Manager, Community Development and Engagement at CSA Group.

Podcast: Conversations with Community Managers – Peter Broadley

Listen in as we chat about how Peter uses in-person events to drive online participation, how joining a working group has impacted his community and the innate ability of community managers to create meaningful interactions wherever they go. Oh, and if you’re in the Toronto area drop Peter a line and join his co-working group!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Be Heard! The 2019 State of Community Management Research is now open.

January 29, 2019 By Rachel Happe

There are A LOT of changes going on in the community industry right now. From some amazing data in last year’s research to some exciting trends to strategic interest from new verticals like government, education, and NGOs.

Industry research like the State of Community Management matters more than ever.

But this research does not collect itself.

We need to hear from you!

You know what to do:

Schedule 30-60 minutes this week to take the survey
Share the link to the survey with your networks http://the.cr/SOCM2019survey
Feel great about being part of an exciting change to the way organizations operate and the way we all related to each other!

Our hope is that while we are asking for a big commitment of your time – it pays you back immediately by giving you perspective and insight. We are also adding some bonuses to choose from at the end, like the opportunity to donate to Playworks, a $5 Amazon gift card, or discounts on our online training classes.

Thanks in advance – we can’t wait to share our 2019 research report with you in May!

Community Management is Becoming Everyone’s Job

September 10, 2018 By Kelly Schott

Communities have an immense cross-functional impact, but the State of Community Management 2018 also showed us how far that impact goes. Not only are community professionals responsible for the community and engagement, but individuals across organizations are increasingly responsible as well. What does that mean for community programs?

Community Responsibilities are Dispersed

According to this year’s data, 52% of respondents say that individuals outside of the community team have community engagement as a performance goal. That means that more than half of the community professionals who took the survey have individuals from their organizations that are required to be fully invested in the community program.

Additionally, 43% of respondents say that there are individuals outside of the community team who have community management responsibilities directly in their job descriptions. Not only are individuals from other functional groups responsible for community engagement as an internal goal, many are being told from the start that they are responsible for community management.

This is a sea change from a few short years ago when very few people in organizations were even aware of communities, never mind responsible for their success.

Community Responsibilities are Gaining Importance

If we look back at last year’s report, this year’s data, 52% and 43%, are far higher than the 20% of respondents who reported that community management was a part of their own performance reviews. That difference is significant.

That difference also shows how community responsibilities, and consequently, community programs, have gained visibility and importance in organizations – becoming integrated into core work processes rather than sitting adjacent to them.

We reported on how community positively affects strategic objectives across organizations, with a variety of functional groups seeing anywhere from 20% to 80% increases in such objectives as communications efficiency, case deflection, and revenue growth. While community teams have seen community’s positive influence for some time, functional groups across organizations are now more deeply involved and, in turn, also seeing that value. With this increase in visibility, community teams are showing their organizations how important the community program is to the success of the entire enterprise.

Community Programs Deserve Recognition and Resources

This visibility is all well and good, but if nothing comes from it, then what is the point? While understanding and the reach of community is growing, community team resources are relatively stagnant, even while they take on new responsibilities to support, coordinate, and train these emerging community members and leaders across their organizations.

We know that community teams are taking on “hidden” work and that they are burnt out, so how do we get them the recognition and resources that they need? As community management becomes everyone’s job, what are the strategies that can help those that support the discipline secure needed resources and support?

To read more about how we suggest community teams pair this community success and reach with gaining resources and recognition, download the State of Community Management 2018.

The Hidden Work of Community Teams

June 25, 2018 By Rachel Happe

Community management work is evolving along with roles – and evolving rapidly. As all communications become networked, community engagement and management is a discipline that everyone needs to cultivate to be successful.

I’ve long said that community management is the future of all management – and community leadership is the future of all leadership.

That’s happening and people are turning to community professionals for support; help with strategy, coaching, training, and more. All of those requests are straining the already stretched resources of community teams and making them de facto Centers of Excellence without formal acknowledgment of that role. Even more critically they do not have the resources or skill sets they need to provide that support effectively while still shouldering much of the responsibility for day-to-day engagement. 47% of community teams are consulting on project work, 43% are responding to training requests, and 32% are accommodating coaching needs while only 8% of community teams report that they are Centers of Excellence.

Add to that, 52% of community programs include engagement as a professional development goal for employees outside of the community team and 43% of programs include community management responsibilities for employees outside of the community team. That requires a lot of coordination and reporting, never mind training and coaching. And yet, the average community team still only includes 4.4 full-time staff members.

This shift from primarily focusing on building engagement and community value to helping others build and facilitate communities is a tough transition. The skills required to do one are not necessarily the skills required to do the other. As teams do more indirect support they need better business, strategy, and technical skills – all of which are secondary skill sets when the primary responsibility is direct engagement and value creation.

Do you provide indirect support for others as they develop their community management skills? If so, is it acknowledged and resourced by your stakeholders? If not, do you report its frequency and time requirements to stakeholders so they can more accurately see the breadth of work you are doing?

Want more insights? Download The State of Community Management 2018 report now!

The Cross-Functional Impact of Communities

June 11, 2018 By Sonali Varma

Executives are struggling with how to rapidly transform their organizations. There is so much that needs to be addressed and so quickly, that it’s challenging to know where to start.Communities point to a possible approach.

Community impact is broad and deep

Communities are reaching the breadth and depth of organizations and functions.

Community programs seem poised to take off as the new area for developing a competitive edge. While the ability of communities to affect ‘a’ function or ‘a’ department is relatively well acknowledged …the extent to which they have cross-functional reach within organizations, was a revelation. This is a huge opportunity for organizations if they are willing to invest in communities.

Organizations can learn from the evolution and success of another function; Human Resources

The State of Community Management 2018 findings regarding communities remind me of what another function was facing nearly two decades ago…the human resources function.

Human Resources was always perceived as a stand-alone department serving primarily payroll/vacation processing needs. The realization that (1) HR had the ability to reach across the organization to wherever there were employees, (2) that this reach provided a unique opportunity to increase engagement and loyalty through HR policies and (3) engaged employees were profitable and core to organizational success, was key to HR becoming a vital function with strategic implications.

This enabled organizations to gain a competitive advantage by leveraging their workforce. Southwest comes to mind as an early adopter of this view of HR. They combined logistics and employee engagement to achieve early and continued success.

Communities can provide engagement at deeper levels

Communities are even more powerful in my view since not only can they engage employees across the organization, they can engage customers, vendors, experts, leaders, and anyone external to the organization.

The nature of community can adapt to fit a specialized group of practitioners sharing knowledge and experience, an alumni network providing value to their educational institution, departments working to get new team members up to speed, dedicated customers contributing ideas and suggestions for new product lines…the possibilities are endless. An organization could even have communities within employee groups that share expertise and troubleshoot issues collaboratively. They can be formed across functions and thus serve multiple functions simultaneously.

From a business perspective, this is an incredibly exciting finding

We found 15 different functions that communities are active in. The overall list is much more. Customer service was the most popular at 59% followed by Knowledge Management at 48% and Marketing at 47%. There were communities for PR (37%), Strategy (26%) and Product Engineering (35%). Many communities though formally defined as single communities were supporting multiple functions.

These community programs are bringing multiple benefits to processes they affect. Read more in SOCM 2018

Communities Empower Individuals

June 4, 2018 By Rachel Happe

Communities enable human potential

I believe in the power of communities to enable human potential.

To thrive, we all need support and challenge. We often receive those messages best from our peers.

What does it mean to thrive?

To me, that means we continuously learn and apply what we are learning to our life and work – constantly improving our welfare and opportunities.

Those organizations that can help individuals thrive will build loyalty, retention, and trust. In the process, they will also increase their productivity and financial metrics.

Humans are a big organizational constraint

The issue?

Traditional organizations are hierarchical, rigid, and transactional – not exactly built to help individuals thrive. People serve the transactional needs of the organizations instead of the organization serving the needs of people – whether they are employees or customers. This is OK financially when people are not an organization’s most expensive asset. However, technology has commoditized to the point where people are very expensive relative to many of the other tools used to create value.

People are increasingly the constraint in the system; if we can improve the performance of individuals, we can improve the performance of organizations.

Healthy communities improve people’s performance exceptionally well. Communities provide a social environment where individuals are more likely to be recognized and rewarded for their strengths and more likely to be seen and supported when they struggle. This type of support and challenge is impossible to offer as a transaction delivered by an organization – it needs to be offered freely by peers to feel authentic.

Communities provide support and challenge, enabling human potential

While communities generate a multitude of value, this power to support and challenge individuals so they can learn and grow in emotionally safe spaces is the key reason to invest in strong communities.

In this year’s research, we asked community program owners how their communities empowered individuals.

What we found was gratifying.

One of the biggest issues in large organizations is individuals often don’t feel seen or heard. Communities help at least 50% of their members feel like they matter. This is the first step in helping people feel more connected to the organization. I think feeling acknowledged and seen is even more profound than empowering people to provide answers, which while immensely valuable, that behavior is often part of people’s direct job responsibilities.

29% of community program owners reported that communities empower members to take leadership initiative, which is a key component of increasing productivity and innovation levels within an organizational ecosystem. I expect to see this figure grow as more organization figure out how to facilitate healthy, successful communities.

All of these findings suggest that well-managed communities are fulfilling their desired role – helping individuals feel validated, connected, and valued for their contributions.

What is better than that?

Read more in the 2018 State of Community Management report.

Communities are Change Agents

May 29, 2018 By Jim Storer

Resiliency and the ability to change quickly are becoming key competencies for all organizations as new technologies create rapidly changing market conditions. Organizations need to acquire and apply new knowledge faster, and the more traditional learning and professional support mechanisms cannot keep up.

Online communities and engagement ecosystems support rapid learning by capturing tacit knowledge as it develops, transitioning that knowledge into more explicit practices, and flattening access to it. The ability to adapt efficiently and effectively is at the core of organizational success in the digital era. For any organization to be successful, it needs new practices to gain widespread acceptance and enthusiastic adoption. Mechanisms that prompt and inspire organizations to change successfully are change agents. While the potential for online communities to support learning and change has been discussed for many years, it has only been recently that we can start to see the multifaceted impact that communities have across organizations and their markets, as well as on individual behavior. Our 2018 analysis concludes that communities have evolved into powerful agents of change.

COMMUNITY APPROACHES PROLIFERATE

Communities are impacting organizations broadly and deeply, changing functional approaches, stakeholder categories, and workflows. Community programs, which once were only applied to narrow functional goals with single-purpose use cases, are now often large, complex, and multifunctional entities that influence organizations in a wide variety of ways.

Nearly 70% of community teams collaborate with other departments to integrate various workflows into communities. This “hidden” work is in addition to executing the direct day-to-day community engagement and management work community professionals do. Almost 47% of community teams provide consulting assistance to other departments, effectively acting as centers of excellence that build community management skills and capacity across organizations. Only 8% of community programs are explicitly tasked with the center of excellence role and resourced for it.

Community programs contribute across many functions (like marketing, customer support, knowledge management, and learning and development) simultaneously, regardless of where the community program resides in the organization. Community programs that fall within the customer service department, for example, provide benefits not only for marketing (91% of the time) and knowledge management (59% of the time), but also for the learning and development function (35% of the time). This dynamic is true for both internal and external communities and illustrates why communities are such powerful change agents.

Community management responsibilities are now also dispersed throughout the organization, suggesting that community management is fast becoming a key discipline of all management. Community engagement is part of individual performance metrics in departments outside of the community team 43% of the time, and explicit community management responsibilities are allocated to individuals in other departments 53% of the time. The ability for communities to reach deep into and across organizations is expected to grow rapidly, as 50% of community teams expect either additional workflows to be implemented or a greater adoption of current workflows in the next year.

These trends suggest that community teams are shifting from a predominant focus on direct community engagement and management to one of supporting and enabling the discipline across the organization, where the community team acts as internal consultants and subject matter experts. While this is an exciting shift, it requires more resources and additional skill sets to be successful.

Learn more about Communities as Change Agents in the State of Community Management 2018 report.

The State of Community Management 2018 Report: Communities Accelerate Organizational Transformation

May 22, 2018 By Rachel Happe

The State of Community Management 2018 is here and we could not be happier to share it with you. This ninth State of Community Management report includes data from 383 companies that represent a variety of industries as well as both internal and external communities.

This year’s research documents the success community programs are having and identifies a critical disconnect between that success and securing needed resources to realize the potential of community approaches.

Communities are key mechanisms that accelerate organizational transformation.

The impact of communities is broad and deep, addressing strategic, functional, and individual performance by making knowledge transparent and easy to access. Our research confirmed things we have seen anecdotally but have never been able to measure, namely:

Communities are change agents: Community programs impact multiple business objectives, functions, and individuals in organizations. They have immense potential to be agents of change by efficiently dispersing knowledge and information across organizations and their markets.
Communities create transformational value: Community programs show an average ROI that exceeds 2,000%. They enable behavior changes that directly impact profitability and revenue generation, while also having an overwhelmingly positive impact on brand and cultural sentiment.
Community teams are underfunded: Community professionals are burned out due to increasing success and responsibilities without the accompanying increase in resources and support. This has created strategic risk and limits the potential impact of communities.

Download the full report here.

Save the Date: The State of Community Management 2018 is Coming in May

April 23, 2018 By Kelly Schott

Update: The SOCM 2018 is now availble for download

Next month we will publish our ninth edition of the State of Community Management (SOCM).

When we released the first SOCM in 2010 community management was largely an undocumented niche role to a strategic professio

n and a recognized discipline of leadership in a digitally connected world. We’ve had a front row seat to watch the profession “grow up” and become recognized as a critical emerging field.

We have always prioritized the advancement of the industry, as we believe it critical to both the long-term success of management as a whole, and the success and happiness of the amazing practitioners driving community forward. The State of Community Management research has evolved with the industry, moving from qualitative to quantitative.

Initially, the research focused on the practices and tactics of community management (from 2011-2013). In 2014 we started quantifying those practices and then by 2015 we could benchmark the operational approaches needed to do community management well – and critically, calculate community ROI. Because if that work, what community management is and how it is effectively executed have now largely been documented. This key milestone helped grow the discipline of community management and help it get recognition from senior executives. As those operational metrics have matured, we felt the time was right to reimagine the SOCM research yet again to keep up with the rapid changes we see in how organizations are applying community approaches.

The SOCM 2018 has been reimagined for an executive audience.

Unlike years past, the SOCM 2018 focuses more on strategy and how communities are impacting organizations today and less on tactics and operational benchmarks, making the 2018 report an excellent resource to share with your stakeholders, executives, and wider organizational decision-makers.

The key themes we explored in 2018 include:

Do community programs have the potential to be change agents?
Can community programs create transformational value for an organization?
How is the role of community professionals evolving?

Communities are impacting every facet of organizational life, from empowering individuals to generating strategic value, and the SOCM 2018 backs up the widely accepted ‘theory of communities’ with proof that communities are the way that organizations are making learning, adaptation, and influence into core competencies and the means to integrating these competencies into core workflows.

Want Insights? The State of Community Management 2018 Survey is Open!

January 30, 2018 By Rachel Happe

Update: The SOCM 2018 survey is now closed, and the report is available for download.

This year, our research working group had some big questions on their minds as we developed The State of Community Management 2018 survey, including:

Community programs seem to be getting more influence in their organizations – how can I replicate that in mine?
How can I prove that more investment and resources would lead to better results?
I have a business case but how can I get the right people to pay attention?
I love my community management job, but what’s next?

It’s time: the SOCM survey is open!

The great news? We no longer need to define what community management is. While everyone may not understand it yet, the past eight years of SOCM research provides plenty of data to describe and justify the discipline. What’s more interesting now is how much visibility, support, and influence communities have.

That’s huge progress in a few short years and it means we’ve restructured our SOCM research to reflect those needs – and in the process simplified the survey, making it easier and faster to take. (Hooray!)

This year, we are exploring three key themes:

Communities Get Down to Business
Communities as Change Agents
Community Roles Evolve

We think there is more potential than ever for community approaches – and more attention – but also some significant challenges as the vendor environment evolves and the scope of community programs increase. This year we are targeting our research to explore those opportunities and challenges – but we need your help to do so!

So what? What’s in it for you?

Well, you could participate because it helps the entire industry mature…but let’s be honest, you have a lot of other things to do today. You should participate in the SOCM 2018 research because it provides insightful prompts to help you reflect on your priorities, how you spend your time, and what really matters to your community program. That reflection helps you improve your work, your insights, and your value. THAT is ROI you can take to the bank.

It takes 25 minutes to make a difference.

This years’ survey is easier and quicker to take – with less data to collect. And, to thank you for your for your time, we want to buy you a coffee – one of those fancy ones, even – with a $5 Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts gift card. Or, you can also donate your $5 to No Kid Hungry and make a difference in another way. When the survey is complete we’ll also pick one participant to with an AMEX gift card worth $1 for every completed survey we receive! Not bad for a few minutes work.

We take your privacy, and your data, seriously.

There’s a lot of important data in this survey, that’s why each year we reiterate our pledge. We will not sell, use or otherwise share your individual survey response with anyone. Period. We won’t report on groups that are too small to guarantee anonymity. The only time you’ll hear from us is if there is a question about your data, or to let you know the research report is available. Our business is built on the strength of and trust in our research.