Online communities hold incredible potential; they increase collaboration, they connect far-reaching individuals, and they power meaningful behavior change. Specifically, professional communities provide new opportunities to deepen relevance with members, provide significant ROI back to organizations, and power positive sentiment while building brand advocates.

This eBook, Professional Communities Unleash Potential, is based on the 2020 State of Community Management research and is sponsored by and made possible with support from Higher Logic. 

This eBook, Customer Communities Elevate the Customer Experience, is derived from the 2020 State of Community Management research, produced by The Community Roundtable. It is a collaboration between The Community Roundtable and Vanilla Forums and compares the results of two data segments:

1.  Average External Communities
2.  Advanced External Communities; those with measurable strategies

This eBook considers the influence of customer communities in three areas:

• Generative value of communities
•  Impact of operational investments
• Brand value of empowered customers

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A State of Community Management eBook

You know community is important, but have you considered the actual impact of a mature, well-resourced community program? This eBook looked at three ways mature online communities have a meaningful and measurable impact on the customer experience.

Three case studies explore how: 

• Strategic maturity enables efficiency
• Thoughtful governance enhances strategy
• Engagement generates shared value

Download the ebook. This eBook is sponsored by Khoros.

Organizations around the world are realizing what we already all knew – there is immense power in online communities. How can you use Communities Powering Change to help your organization?

Communities programs have the unique ability to empower online collaboration, eliminate operational bottlenecks, and increase efficiency across the organization – all at the same time.

In this eBook you will explore three ways community provides unique value to organizations:

• Communities Empower Individuals
• Communities Advance Complex Objectives
• Communities Enable Thriving and Adaptive Ecosystems

This eBook is sponsored by Higher Logic.
Learn more.

Communities Powering Change features three community case studies from Imperva, Genesys, and the Educational Theatre Association and tactical ideas for creating  value with community, using community to enable a thriving cross-functional organizational ecosystem, and empower your global members.

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The value of community is most easily seen in the way communities help achieve many business goals more efficiently than traditional transactional approaches.

• ​ By crowdsourcing experience within a bounded and vetted community, organizations can:
• Extend marketing impact through advocacy
• More effectively support customers through peer sharing
• Quickly ramp up new employees by giving them access to tacit expertise of peers
• Improve innovation cycles by better connecting market needs and internal expertise
• Reduce duplication by encouraging and enabling employees to easily share their expertise
• More effectively recognize and reward the expertise of customers, employees, and partners
• React more quickly and effectively to crisis

​ All of these use cases can have enormous benefits to organizations, although not all use cases are easy to measure in return on investment calculations because often the value received from advocacy, collaboration and innovation is value that money could never buy – the value of a freely shared testimonial from a happy customer or the value of an employee going above and beyond to solve a customer issue.

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The Value of Community: Behavior Change to ROI eBook highlights the ability of a community approach to help organizations develop sustainable behavior changes that lead to improved ROI.

Crowdsourcing Innovation White Paper

The value of crowdsourcing innovation generated three types of benefits across multiple dimensions:

• Amplification of Member Voice
  • 100% of respondents agreed that creating opportunities for customer and employees to have a voice that is heard and responded to was critically important. “Say goodbye to the black hole suggestion box” and hello to ongoing engagement, the open exchange of ideas, and co-creation of solutions. Crowdsourcing innovation expands the diversity and quality of ideas and solutions. It also deepens customer and employee relationships.
• Creation of an Innovation Culture
  • Crowdsourcing innovation programs weave innovation into a corporation’s culture. Some respondents noticed that two different cultures may exist. For example, in one company: corporate culture – siloed/hierarchical; crowdsourcing program – entrepreneurial and dynamic. The culture of the innovation program is the desired future state for the corporate culture. The program serves as a catalyst for change. This enables the company to bring about change from the inside (from the program), out (to the corporation).
  • In addition, to further instill a culture of innovation, we found that the crowdsourcing process itself adds value and builds a knowledge base for the future when some ideas might be better suited or applicable.
• Generation of Business Value
  • This benefit is the most important and has the greatest impact on the long-term success of the organization. Crowdsourcing creates a strategic asset for the corporation. In order to realize this opportunity, the program must align the hard and soft values of the crowdsourcing program with corporate business goals.

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The State of Community Management research shows that the best–in-class communities are more likely to be able to translate an approved strategy into realistic planning. As a result, 85 percent of them can measure their value, however building a roadmap can be a daunting task for any community manager.

This free eBook answers the questions:

1. Why are community roadmaps important? First, we take a look at what a community roadmap is and its place in your community program. We’ll review how a community roadmap sets your community up for success, along with actionable advice about aligning priorities, communicating value and organizing planning in your community programs.
2. What is the Community Maturity Model?
   Next, we’ll review the Community Maturity Model as a framework for productive communities. We also consider the elements of a productive community in order to help you start, build and grow a productive online community
3. How do I build a roadmap using the Community Maturity Model?
   Lastly, we’ll give you some examples, templates and instructions for building a roadmap for your community. You’ll be able to use these provided resources to get started on drafting your community’s roadmap today.

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The eBook, sponsored by Jive, uses our research to target one of the pain points we most often hear from community professionals – the lack of clear role definitions in community management. This is a problem for human resources professionals and hiring managers – because standards for what defines a community manager role, versus a community strategist or director of community can be difficult to ascertain, and as a result, providing proper compensation, support and professional development opportunities is difficult.

Of course, the problem is a more personal one for community professionals, who seek career paths but are often stymied by the unclear lines between roles, or get overwhelmed and burn out because their job is far more demanding than their defined role (and compensation) reflect. The problem is not a surprise – community management is evolving, and as such roles change – but if we fail to shape it, we stymie its growth as a profession.

The Community Manager Salary Survey and this eBook are among the beginning steps to bring clarity to community management roles. The eBook distills our CMSS research into a practical guide to understand and hire for three community management roles: Community Manager,Community Strategist and Director of Community. We give you more context about each role, the relevant high level data related to each role, a profile of someone who exemplifies the role and a baseline job description for each role.

Download the ebook.