The Community Roundtable

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

What is the State of Community Management?

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The State of Community Management is our annual research platform that tracksthe performance of communities and community management across the eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model.

The SOCM first launched in 2010 and we have published an updated report based on new research. Each year is focused around a key theme that emerges from the research and offers insights and best practices that are still relevant today.

A Look Back at the Evolution of the SOCM

SOCM 2010: From Recognition to Exploration – In 2010 the report compiled and documented what TheCR Network members were learning together.

SOCM 2011: From Exploration to Execution –  In 2011 the report consolidated managing networked environmentsand organized even more common practices, creating a reference guide for community managers to pull from.

SOCM 2012: From Exploration to Evolution –  The 2012 report took a complementary approach, defining how organizations could advance their community approach across the four stages of the Community Maturity Model, and the strategic, operational and tactical changes that could advance community maturity. We still often refer clients and customers to these reports as a handy reference for new ideas and approaches – while community management continues to evolve, many of the best practices are timeless.

SOCM 2013: The Value of Community Management – By 2013, we were ready to take a more quantitative approach to the science of community. While we had been tracking the demographics of communities as part of the research, the 2013 report was the first to quantify how community professionals were implementing community best practices and the artifacts of community success. value of community managementThe 2013 report, for example, provided quantified evidence that the traditional 90-9-1 model of social media engagement does not apply to successful communities.

SOCM 2014: In 2014, we expanded the quantitative survey to more than 160 respondents, tracking dozens of artifacts of successful communities and scoring communities for the first time on the Community Maturity Model. By identifying Best-in-Class communities, we could for the first time compare the practices of the most successful and highly engaged communities to the overall sample, and we began to be able to see the connections between community elements that correlated to success.

SOCM 2015: Harvesting the Rewards of Community – 2015 marked a major SOCM 2015milestone. For the first time, we were able to couple the survey with a scoring mechanism that gave respondents their own scorecard of community maturity. The goal is to give community professionals a rough benchmark that can be used to more effectively compare their own communities with average and best-in-class communities. Benchmarking plays a critical role in helping community professionals understand the current status of their community relative to strategic and organizational goals, and serves as an important element in TheCR’s research and advisory practice.

SOCM 2016: Quantifying the Value of Community – In 2016 we further refined the scoring for the Community Maturity Scorecards, bolstering the research around organizational culture and measuring strategy. In addition, we launched an experimental section on defining and measuring ROI that could become a larger, more formal part of future reports. Our data set has continued to grow as well, giving us the ability to explore more industries, use cases and community types as their own sets.

SOCM 2017: Leveraging Investment to Create Strategic Value – Our 2017 report features data from more than 330 communities and includes trends, best practices and new insights into how communities manage content, programming, staffing, budgets, strategy, metrics and much more.

How Do People Use the SOCM Research?

The Community Roundtable’s research aims to provide immediate value to communitypractitioners by capturing the current practices of community management. It is framed by and structured around the Community Maturity Model, which provides a common context for talking about the different aspects of community management.

You can use this research to: 

  • Validate your approach
  • Prioritize your resources
  • Inform conversations with stakeholders
  • Educate staff
  • Assess the maturity of your program
  • Identify gaps & opportunities in your program
  • Build a roadmap
  • Justify budget requests

Community program leaders have leveraged the CMM framework and related TheCR resources to build roadmaps, provide internal consulting and shape community strategy.

How can you use community guidelines to support your work?

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Community guidelines For years, community thought leaders in TheCR Network have highlighted the importance of community guidelines and policies that promote healthy community behaviors. Make your community guidelines and policies a trellis, rather than a box, and create a frame for your community to flourish.

That is still true in 2017.

Our best-in-class communities are more likely to have policies and guidelines that define encouraged behaviors, and even the overall sample is becoming more likely to create positive guidelines and policies.

But there’s a second dimension to the trellis. In order for it to effectively support community behaviors, it needs to be built on a strong footing. In the case of communities, that footing comes in the form of policies, community guidelines, and procedures that ensure community professionals know how to handle the situations that are likely to arise in the life of the community, and do so fairly, quickly and consistently.

Community guidelines

That consistent and fair approach comes from properly training community managers, moderators and others with leadership roles in the community, and from developing playbook and procedures that give them a menu of best practices for helping and supporting members. In the State of Community Management 2017 survey, best-in-class communities were far more likely to provide professional development for community managers, give training for moderators and advocates, and develop playbooks for the operation of the community.

Together, these elements give best-in-class communities a strong base for a trellis that can support a strong community.

Online community platforms: Feel the meh.

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Online community platformsThe rise of communities as a powerful tool for behavior change has brought with it no shortage of new platforms and technology.  There are large enterprise level platform providers, smaller niche offerings, community offshoots of major social and CRM platforms, and hybrid community-collaboration platforms for community professionals to choose from. (Check out how our own Rachel Happe feels about what’s going on in the vendor space in her post “A 2017 View of the Community Platform Market.“)

Yet for all the possible options, community professionals in the State of Community Management 2017 survey gave their own platforms a lukewarm rating this year. Just one-in-five respondents to the survey gave their own platform a 9 or 10 on a 10-point Likert scale question overall, and only 1-in-9 said their community’s mobile experience was a 9 or 10.

Online community platforms

The “good news” for vendors? Despite their dissatisfaction, more than 70% of respondents said they would be unlikely or very unlikely to change platforms in the next 12 months.

Far from perfect, but hard to get rid of is a brand tagline no one really wants – but it might be where we are.

Why is this? We didn’t get into the details of the scores in the SOCM 2017, but the anecdotal evidence is clear – community managers express frustration with ease-of-use, admin challenges, difficulty finding and surfacing content and activity, issues with metrics and many other areas, depending on the platform. Some of that might be expected – communities are often being bolted on or connected with a number of legacy platforms, making integrations difficult. They are often afterthoughts, an additional burden for IT staff. Community vendors are asked to measure more complex outcomes while fitting into existing tools and technology.

It’s the old Ginger Rogers joke. We want our platforms to dance like Fred Astaire, and do it backwards and in high heels.

That said, vendors would be wise to plug more into what community professionals need from their community solutions, and to focus on developing elements that CMs can use to capture, enhance and measure key community behaviors. As noted in the SOCM 2017, the fact that a number of major community platforms do not allow community managers to see search volume and/or tag best answers is entirely unacceptable.

In community, as in so many other industries – don’t let the desire to develop new features keep you from perfecting your core features.

Want to increase engagement? Welcome new community members… and then follow up!

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increasing engagementOne of the most consistent findings in our State of Community Management research is on the impact of new member programs on getting new members to engage in a community. It makes sense – having someone welcome you, give you some ground rules on behaviors, give you a tour of the community, etc., makes new members more comfortable, and you’re more likely to dip a toe in a new community if you have ideas for how to do it.

But then what?

socm 2017If you’re like many communities – you don’t follow up again to see how the settling in process has gone. But maybe you should.

Making a second contact with new members a short time into their community experience substantially increases the likelihood they will continue to contribute and correlates with still higher engagement. The difference is exceptionally notable when it comes to the number of inactive members – communities with formal follow-up programs for new members see inactivity rates that are 15-20 points lower than those communities that don’t follow up.

So what can you do?

  • Contact the new member after a certain period of time to see if they have any new questions.
  • Contact them after their first post or other significant activity and see if they were satisfied with the response or had other questions.
  • Contact them to see if there is anything you can help them find/solve.

Reaching out tells them that the community has their interests in mind at a time when maybe they are a little more settled in a new place than they were on day one. And it may just keep them involved.

Do online communities need dedicated budgets? YES!

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One of the questions we ask each year in the State of Community Management survey is whether communities have their own budget. It may not seem like a big deal – and to some community leaders, dealing with the budget process might sound unappealing.

However, we consistently see correlations between having a dedicated budget and those who are able to move their communities forward more effectively.

Communities with dedicated budgets are more likely than their peers to:

  • Have an approved community strategy (80% to 48%)
  • Have an approved roadmap (47% to 15%)
  • Have a formal advocacy program (42% to 27%)

It’s not a matter of age – communities with dedicated budgets were only slightly older on average than those without. But a dedicated budget lets a community program owner allocate resources more effectively, and makes it easier for him or her to connect allocated resources with community elements.

If you’re looking to enhance your community, it might be time to ask if you can stop sharing – your budget. It could accelerate your ability to change.

Don’t have your copy of the SOCM 2017 yet? Download it now.

Online communities have executive attention – and expectations.

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Need a sign that communities are in the spotlight? Look at where communities fit into organizations.

In the State of Community Management 2017, we asked more than 300 community professionals where their communities fit in the structures of their organization.

Communities today can be housed in almost any department in an organization, but consistently, they are being supported, connected and answering to the top levels of the organization. One way to look at this is to look at the titles and reporting levels of the people in charge of community.

We found that while the heads of community programs held a number of different titles, more than a third were Directors, Vice Presidents or higher. And those community leads reported even higher. Fifty-nine percent of them report to Vice Presidents, Senior VPs or members of the C-suite. And 92% reported to Directors or higher.

Another way? Look at where their budget is approved.

Nearly three-quarters of communities get budget approval from Vice Presidents or higher in the organization.

And then look at who is paying attention to performance – we asked the respondents the highest level of executives to receive community reports – and 80% said those reports went to a VP or higher. For best-in-class communities, that number rose to 88%, with a 58% of communities getting reports into the C-suite.

In the State of Community Management 2016 report, Rachel Happe noted that communities were gaining the executive spotlight. This data suggests that spotlight is intensifying – and if you aren’t getting your results into executive offices, you may be missing a powerful opportunity to demonstrate your impact.

Do communities spend more on people or platforms?

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Here’s an interesting piece of data from the SOCM 2017: for the first time, communities say they are spending more on people than on technology.

That’s right – by a narrow margin, organizations with dedicated community budgets said they spent slightly more on community management salaries and resources than they did on their platforms. The difference – 0.1%, is well within any margin of error, but the statement itself is remarkable. It means that a profession that not that long ago suffered from a “build first, staff it later (maybe)” mentality in some organizations is seeing that approach fade.

It doesn’t entirely vanish. Our set of communities that are under 3 years old spends more on platforms and technology than on people, but at every other age group, investments in the human side of community top those on technology.

That spending question is just one of a number of encouraging side for those of us who understand the critical importance of moderation, strategy and community management in running successful online communities.

The research also finds that 73% of communities (and 92% of our best-in-class group) had full-time community management – and 96% of communities had at least part-time community management resources.

Not only that, but organizations are investing more in training and development of their community managers. Just 4% of those communities with full-time managers say they didn’t offer professional development opportunities to them. For the other 96%, conferences, member networks, coaching and online courses help keep their community team members learning and growing.

For years, the research has indicated that community management matters. It’s great to see this year that the advice is being heeded more than ever.

Haven’t downloaded your free copy of the SOCM 2017 yet?

 

Why don’t executives take part in community?

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Executive engagement has long been considered a critical element of community growth.

But getting executives to be truly involved in communities has been a tremendous challenge for community managers.

So what’s keeping executives from jumping in, even when they think community is a critical opportunity? We asked the respondents to this year’s State of Community Management survey, and found the biggest obstacle was time.

Executives in 2017 say they just don’t have the time to get involved. 39 percent of our respondents said it was the most common excuse used by executives who weren’t taking part in community.

What can you do about it?

TheCR has found two approaches can often address the time concern. The first is for the community professional to highlight the ways that community can replace current management tasks, rather than add to them.

For example, in a culture where meetings can occupy hours of the day, showing a manager how the community could replace status meetings with updates in the community might raise an eyebrow of interest.

The second approach is to make community participation as time-efficient as possible, by starting with community approaches for which you can create templates, or can build into specific short times during the executive’s schedule.

The other regularly mentioned reason for a lack of executive engagement is a lack of knowledge about how to best utilize the community. This is where you have to start small and simple, giving the executive easy ways to start using the community as a tool for listening, finding information or gathering intelligence that gets them into the lower levels of the Community Engagement Framework.

So, if you’re trying to get an executive engaged, find out what is holding them back and target that limitation in your strategy to move them forward, by saving them time, giving them skills, and showing them the value of community.

The data show it’s worth a little extra effort.

 

Haven’t downloaded your copy of the SOCM 2017 yet? Get it now!

 

Quantify value, not vanity: The SOCM 2017 is out!

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Eight years ago, when Jim Storer and Rachel Happe founded The Community Roundtable, it was the beginning of understanding that the “art” of community management had a lot of science in it – repeatable best practices that can separate the best communities from the rest.

Each year since then, we have built The State of Community Management on a virtuous cycle. The report inspires discussions that raise new questions that shape the next report that inspires new discussions, and so on.

That brings us to today.

Today, we are pleased and excited to release The State of Community Management 2017 – the eighth annual report on the strategies, operations, artifacts and best practices of communities across organizations and use cases. Once again, we built upon the best of past surveys to surface new insights and information you can use as you think about your community. More than 300 community professionals shared their data with us – and we hope you’ll find the insights as interesting as compiling them was for us.

The report is chock full of insights across the eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model, so rather than try to replicate them here, I just wanted to share two overarching trends and the key findings of this year’s research.

We’ll start with a great trend.

Trend: Optimistic perceptions foreshadow emerging success for community.

By a margin of nearly 10-to-1, respondents said their communities were delivering greater value than they were a year ago. Community professionals who took the survey also said by wide margins that more questions were being asked and answered, and that overall activity was higher. Those are the kind of insights that can spark greater investment, and respondents were three times as likely to say their budgets and staffing had grown than that they had shrunk during the course of the year.

The flip side, though, is that translating these optimistic feelings into measured results remains challenging.

Trend: Communities can demonstrate ROI – if they have the data.

Positive developments around community have piqued executive interest. But while some communities have captured measures of their value, too many aren’t getting at the right data to prove ROI. Just 9% of communities in the survey said they could calculate their own ROI – and a wide majority couldn’t get at critical community data such as answered questions or successful searches to get at their community ROI.

There are multiple reasons behind this shortcoming, not the least of which is a failure of platform vendors to make the metrics that capture community value easy to access and utilize. But community professionals can make a big move in the right direction by shifting their attention more to defining value and critical behaviors, and then translating those behaviors into more financial terms.

We’ll talk more about that in the coming weeks – but in short, good feelings have executives paying attention, but that attention will wane without real results, and soon.

Digging into the data further, we developed three key findings this year – in strategy, operations and tactics.

Strategy: Quality of engagement matters more than quantity as communities mature.

Our first key finding comes out of a surprising piece of data. This year, for the first time the engagement levels of our best-in-class communities was virtually the same as for our overall sample. In other words, in terms of quantity, best-in-class communities look just like their peers for engagement. We sliced and diced the communities by use case, size, etc., and found it was pretty consistent across all variables.

This is a trend we have seen over the past few years, and we see it as a fundamental shift in how more mature communities view success. Best-in-class communities are more likely to focus on metrics other than general engagement to gauge success – they pursue value metrics vs. vanity metrics. We’ve talked for years about how total activity is not a strong measure of success, any more than the loudest concert or most cacophonous discussion is the best one. You need to build engagement to a point, but after that point, it’s the quality of the connections that matters for community. Best-in-class communities outshine their peers on elements like executive engagement, advocate involvement and use of behavioral metrics such as answered questions. They also are more likely to say their communities were delivering answering more questions and delivering greater value than they were a year ago.

Your takeaway: Understand the elements that give communities real value – they’re the elements you want to focus on as your community matures.

Operations: Lasting behavior change requires more than transactional investments.

Our operations finding looks at what happens to communities in the middle of the maturity curve. Each year, we find a bottleneck of communities in trying to move from Stage 2 to Stage 3 in the Community Maturity Model. About 60 percent of communities in the survey for the past three years have scored in Stage 2, versus about 25 percent in Stage 3 or higher.

Why is this? It’s the nature of what leverages community maturity. Moving from a traditional hierarchical structure to an emerging community one is largely a function of investment. Organizations name a community manager, buy a platform, create content and maybe even write a strategy, and they can get to Stage 2.

Getting to the next stage requires something that can’t be done with a paid invoice, a hire or a planning group. It requires continuing efforts to enable community on an ongoing basis – by creating advocacy programs, developing and implementing roadmaps, securing budgets and delivering the shared value that the community brings to the organization and to community members. These are far more fundamental shifts in the day-to-day operations of the organization.

If you are a community manager looking to advance your community, it’s worth going through this list of elements that differentiate Stage 2 and Stage 3 communities and make them a core part of your long-term roadmap moving forward.

Your takeaway: Advocates, measurable shared value and a focus on desired behaviors will deliver real results for those who focus on the work needed to develop them.

Tactics: Connecting content and programs to strategy accelerates community success.

Lastly, we look at community tactics – and the two-headed monster of content and programs. We’ve talked about the importance of strong content and program elements in communities in past SOCMs, and that data holds true in 2017, too. But this year, we noticed something else interesting. Best-in-class communities didn’t produce more content or run more programs than their peers. However, best-in-class communities were far more likely to align their content and programming with their community and organizational strategies than their peers.

Once again – strategy trumps volume.

Your takeaway: Content and programs do drive engagement by giving members reasons to visit and opportunities to connect – but the communities that work best ensure that they are thoughtfully connecting those elements to community goals.

Taken together, these key findings suggest we are at an end of one chapter and beginning of the next in community management. Communities have generated engagement, created executive interest and become an accepted part of a lot of organizations. Now we must translate that engagement, interest, and acceptance into behavior change, understanding, and value and ROI.

We hope the State of Community Management 2017 report gets your wheels turning – and if you didn’t get a chance to take the SOCM survey and want to get your scores, you can do that, too!

We look forward to working with you to turn the engagement you have built into real, quantifiable value.

Community Management Limericks

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I’m just going to say it: The State of Community Management 2017 survey closes this Friday. By the time you read this there will be less than 72 hours to contribute to the industry’s leading community research. If you sleep eight hours a night, that’s only 56 hours! Subtract time for eating, hitting the gym, working, tweeting, being stuck in traffic, and feeding your cat/dog/fish/iguana and there are really only a few hours left! To say ‘thank you’, our team has written these very serious community management poems for your enjoyment: