The Community Roundtable

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

Three truths of successful communities – the SOCM2014 in review

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By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training, The Community Roundtable

TheCRLibrary_SOCM2014_ThumbnailThe State of Community Management 2014 marked a major step in the evolution of the quantitative ways we were able to assess what worked in community management – and in successful communities. The prior year, the State of Community Management 2013 gave us a quantitative understanding of what community management looked like – but by 2014, we were ready to measure the indicators of what made a community mature.

It was the culmination of something we had already begun to do with our members in TheCR Network – use the Community Maturity Model as a framework with which to benchmark community maturity. Our ability to understand and identify the artifacts of community maturity led to the introduction of something new – our “best-in-class” segment. We were able to highlight the 20 percent of communities who scored the highest overall in the survey, and highlight those elements that really made them stand out relative to the overall survey population.

successful communities
The findings from SOCM2014 included several research-backed findings that hold up just as well today as they did then. Among them:

Community maturity delivers business value. Our “best-in-class” communities were much more likely to be able to measure their value to the business.

Advocacy programs increase engagement. Community leadership and advocacy programs correlated with higher engagement, the ability to measure value and executive engagement, suggesting empowering informal community leaders were a powerful tool for strengthening community

Executive participation impacts success. Getting formal leaders – executives – to take part helped communities secure resources, improve engagement and take a more strategic approach to community, including resourced roadmaps for community development.

For the first time, too, we were able to see measurable evidence of something that until then was known but unproven. Communities that scored well in one competency usually scored well in other areas. For example – communities with well-developed strategies didn’t just score well in strategy. These successful communities usually engaged leaders more effectively, empowered and supported community managers and developed the policies and governance structures to help communities succeed, too. If they didn’t, it was a sign of untapped opportunities to grow – and a clearer direction to pursue.

By 2015 – we were able to take the next step.

SOCM2016_GetStarted_Badgetake the survey buttonThis post is part of a series summarizing The Community Roundtable’s annual State of Community Management reports. The full reports are available on our website, and you can take the State of Community Management 2016 survey through March 18 at https://the.cr/socm2016survey

How Do I Convince our Executives to Invest in Community?

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By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

executive investmentThis is a short and sweet (as in “Sweet! Best practices I can use!) post on one of the most common questions we get at TheCR:  “How do I convince our executives to invest in community programs? Help!”  Through the State of Community Management 2014 we identified three best practices for getting executives on-board with your community initiatives.

1. Define what success looks like.

The best way to help people see your vision is to define what success looks like. Use the State of Community Management 2014 research and the Community Maturity Model to help define which initiatives you think your community program will need to be successful. The Community Maturity Model provides the eight core maturity competencies that provide a framework to assess your strengths and weaknesses in your community program. Defining these success metrics against standard competencies helps you plan a comprehensive roadmap – and manage the expectations of your team.

2. Audit your community management capabilities.

​We found through the SOCM 2014 research that overall community maturity has been evolving rapidly especially in the area of community strategy, confirming that some of the basics about what a community is and what it can do for an organization are more wiCMM_SOCM_2014dely understood and accepted. There are still wide gaps in organizations’ ability to execute on community strategies with the biggest opportunities in developing content and programming approaches and in developing measurement techniques.

You can use the SOCM 2014 research to compare your community management capabilities against the market average and best-in-class data to demonstrate to executives where your program strengths are, where opportunities lie and why those opportunities will impact performance. (For more info download the free report and use the chart of p 67 as a starting point for plotting your current community state.)

3. Build a roadmap.

​Once you’ve completed an audit or community performance benchmark you can use it to build out a community roadmap that links specific activities and initiatives to the opportunities you have identified. Use this roadmap as a discussion tool during budget and planning sessions. This can help move the conversation of ‘why should we invest’ to ‘what should we invest in’, which is a powerful change that enables you to make progress.

Do you have a best practice that has helped you secure executive investment? What challenges have you faced in getting executive buy-in?

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