state of community management Archives

Four AI Prompts for Community Managers

July 11, 2023 By Jim Storer

We firmly believe that AI is NOT coming for the community manager jobs. In fact, the potential for AI to help community professionals extend their impact is huge. But for a lot of us, it’s unclear how to even start with AI. So, we decided to bring in some experts.

Hans Scharler is a MathWorks Community Strategy Leader and Chen Lin is a MathWorks Product Manager for MATLAB Central (and a member of TheCR Network.) They contributed a straight-forward look at Why Community Matters (More Now) in The Era of AI in the 2023 State of Community Management Report (get your copy here) and shared four easy prompts for how you can start to use AI like ChatGPT in your community program.

Once you get comfortable with the basics of AI prompting, try some prompt engineering to help you as a community manager. (Not comfortable with ChatPGT/the basics of prompting? Check out the pull-out AI guide in the on pages 59-60 for the 2023 report!)

Four AI Prompts for Community Managers

Use ChatGPT with the these four AI prompts for community managers below and customize for your particular needs. You will be surprised what you are now capable of doing with Generative AI.

Define a high-level editorial calendar template for content and themes to support an online community for a SaaS startup. Include ideas for each month. Output as a table.
Help me create a rotating support model for managing an online community. Define the problem statement, possible solutions, include a table of the pros and cons for each approach.
Act like a new community member who just joined an online community for a professional community network. You were recently hired by a tech company to be a community manager. You have a technical background and are interested in working with people. What resources do you need to be successful in your new role?
Help me justify an increased investment to our company’s community strategy. Write three talking points that a CMO would find compelling.

If you are just starting out, reset your expectations. ChatGPT is not designed to do your work, but to accelerate your work. You still need the ideas, you just need to learn how to express them as prompts. Another thing to remember is that it is a living conversation. The first response might not be quite right, so try again, ask ChatGPT for variations, provide more details or context, and ask for different formats like a bullet list, an email template, a table, or even a LinkedIn post with hashtags and emojis. You will learn a lot through trial and error vs. question and answer so keep trying!

Community Teams are Growing

September 12, 2022 By Jim Storer

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:

Foundations Of Community Success

January 11, 2022 By Jim Storer

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.

Building Effective Content Programs for Your Online Community

September 22, 2021 By Jim Storer

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.

What will community management look like in 2021? 8 community leaders share their ideas.

December 14, 2020 By Jim Storer

2020 was an unpredictable year, so while we’re loathe to make “predictions” for 2021, we did want to hear what some community thought leaders were thinking about in terms of where the industry is going.

Below eight community leaders share their perspective on what 2021 holds for the online community industry.

“Progressive organizations will lean into the power that community brings to their employees’ sense of employee engagement. The business value of community will extend beyond conversations about solely work-related topics and will embrace employees’ desire and need to bring their whole selves to work.” Steve Nguyen, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“With the spotlight on virtual communication, connecting, and collaboration, there is a widening opportunity for skilled community practitioners. I think we’ll see more professionals looking to skill up in community management and more roles for experienced community professionals. There is a growing need for more strategic community management around events for external facing use cases and collaboration for internal use cases.” Hillary Boucher, Ultimate Kronos Group

“With so many staff now working from home, 2021 will see more digitally dependent Communities than ever before. Whether in Yammer, Teams, or Workplace, internal communities are set for massive growth next year. SWOOPs benchmarking of nearly 9,000 Yammer Communities showed us this trend and we expect it to continue in 2021. Dr. Laurence Lock Lee – Chief Data Scientist – SWOOP Analytics.

“I think we’ll continue to see the creation of key community roles within organizations. What this translates to is leaning less on the technology that holds the community and focusing more on the community’s purpose (why), people (who) and programs/content that help it grow (how).” Marjorie Andersen, Manager, Digital Communities, PMI

“After so many years of community professionals trying to justify the need or impact of a community, 2020 put a spotlight on what we’ve been trying to say all along. I expect to see a significant uptick in new communities and existing community with new purposes.” Jillian Betjlich, Lead Community Strategist, BAE Systems

2021 will bring tremendous opportunity for the community management industry to reinforce the business value of an innovative online community use case and strategy to drive ROI.

“COVID-19 has completely and in some cases digitally transformed the way organizations approach employee and customer engagement. 2021 will bring tremendous opportunity for the community management industry to reinforce the business value of an innovative online community use case and strategy to drive ROI. The necessity of an integrated approach to organizational digital culture change is now clearer than ever.” Ashleigh Brookshaw, Founder & CINO of C2M Digital, LLC.

“With the ‘work from anywhere’ reality, an enormous emphasis will be focused on creating digital workplace culture, human interaction, and guarding against isolation. Community Managers face new challenges balancing business and social elements to keep people interested and engaged, requiring greater sensitivity to analytic trends, and innovation in engagement strategies.” Brian McIlravey, VP Customer Experience

“By the end of 2021, Communities, Web Self-Service, Knowledge Management, and Intelligent Virtual Assistants will ALL be delivered by a single platform, from a single vendor, to empower customers and the employees that serve them. Humans and AI machine learning will work together to improve the community and service experience.” Jon Allen, VP & GM, Communities & Web Self-Service, Verint Intelligent Self-Service

Have a prediction for 2021 that you’d like to share? Add it in the comments below or send us a reply on Twitter.

The State of Community Management 2020 Webinar Archive

June 15, 2020 By Jim Storer

The State of Community Management 2020 is the 11th edition of The State of Community Management research, the longest-running, and most comprehensive industry report for online community professionals. This webinar will explore top trends and key findings from the 2020 report.This year, online communities and digital engagement are taking on dramatic new relevance. We have made considerable progress in translating the generative business model of communities into financial benchmarks, which are critical for organizations as they consider using community approaches to transform their organizations. We can now communicate the generative creation of value in financial terms.This year’s three key findings:

Advanced Communities Create Generative Value
External Communities Elevate the Customer Experience
Internal Communities Reveal Untapped Potential

This year we have added more comparison segments, which have revealed new insights and allow us to report how external, customer community programs are differentiating themselves and maturing more quickly than internal, employee community programs.

Note: Members of TheCR Network can watch the archive here.

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What is the State of Community Management?

January 9, 2018 By Jim Storer

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 and 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. The 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 milestone. 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.

Want community engagement? Make your organization care about it.

June 13, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

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

Convincing skeptics about the value of community is a part of the job for all too many community managers. When faced with adversity, there’s almost a “fight or flight” choice. The “fight” choice in this case is to strive to win converts and create a better vibe for the community. The “flight” response is to turn inward, recognize the difficulty of engaging the larger organization and focus on creating the best possible community.

While focusing inward may have short-term advantages, the research suggests that in the long run, working to improve the perception and understanding of community in the organization pays off.

There are two elements of this graphic I want to highlight. The first is that organizations whose culture encourages or enhances community approaches get significantly higher engagement in the community itself. It’s not a surprise. If the organization values community, then the people in the organization can more readily see evidence of that value even before they get involved. It effectively pre-qualifies members for the community, and then once they are in, the community culture itself takes over.

But the second piece to me is just as interesting – maybe more interesting. It’s that there’s basically no difference between organizations that are neutral to communities and those whose cultures are perceived as constraining community. The enemy of community approaches, it seems, is not opposition to community, it’s not caring about community.

“If we build it, they will come around,” may not be the best approach, after all.

What does this mean for community managers? It may mean that connecting community to the organization needs to happen early on, even though that external effort may take up time that you’d rather use making the community stronger. Setting up the community, establishing your core group of advocates and setting behavioral norms don’t necessarily need buy-in from the larger organization, but once your community efforts are ready for prime time, having the organization on board becomes critical for the long-term success of the community program.

Bottom line: Healthy communities thrive in supportive environments.

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Member feedback creates engagement opportunity

June 3, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

June is wedding season, but engagement happens year-round. At least that’s what community managers hope.

For The State of Community Management 2016, we wanted to get a better sense of some of the cultural elements that drive higher engagement in communities – and it turns out one of the best ways to get members involved in your community is to ask them for their opinions of it.

Communities that had formal systems to get member feedback about the community had on average 43% higher active engagement than communities without those systems. (We define active engagement as contributing to, creating or collaborating on content in the community.) More than a third of members in communities with formal feedback systems were actively engaged, versus a quarter of those in “feedback free” communities.

Not every community has the available resources for formal surveys and systems – but even informal systems to encourage feedback correlated with higher engagement. If you think about it, it’s not that surprising. Feedback systems effectively encourage engagement by making the community operations a two-way street and giving members a shared interest in the community’s success.

Of course, collecting feedback is only part of the process. Soliciting input and then ignoring it can undermine your efforts by telling potential advocates – those with the interest level to provide feedback – that their thoughts are not valued. Make sure you combine your efforts to create a feedback system with the follow-up to act upon that feedback. That means thinking about the process you might undertake, and getting the stakeholder support to respond to member needs.

Ask for feedback. Act on it. A commonsense approach to building connections with your members. We’d love your feedback on the post, and the report – leave us a comment!

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Community Management Case Study: The Evolution of a Community Advocacy Program

February 3, 2015 By Jim Storer

One of the perks of being a member of TheCR Network is access to fresh community management programming every week. Our community manager, Hillary Boucher, does an amazing job of tracking down interesting and engaging case studies from every stage of the community journey.

This past year Hillary and members of TheCR Network sat down with Erica Kuhl and Matt Brown from Salesforce to discuss a case study of Salesforce’s MVP program. While I can’t share the whole Roundtable call with you here, there are three key best practices I wanted to share for building out a community advocacy or leadership program.

Note: Matt is also one of the case study participants in the Community Manager Handbook, which was released February 4.

If you don’t current have any formal community advocacy or leadership programs, they are something to consider for your to-do list: community advocacy and leadership programs correlate to overall community maturity, the number of full-time community managers, the ability to measure value, higher levels of executive participation, higher levels of product team and subject matter participation, more user-generated content, higher levels of conversation vs. content sharing and more robust community tools

1. When building a community advocacy or leadership program, avoid over-governing the program with too many policies at the beginning. In this case, Salesforce wanted to grow the program with their MVPs. As they started to grow and enlist new MVPs, they added policies, guidelines and expectations in tandem with the growth.

2. Understand from the onset of the program the plan to leverage your advocates. This is critical in order to guard against the advocates feeling used or abused. It also contributes to a successful transition from an informal to a formalized program.

3. Ensure the organization elicits the feedback of the top advocates in the creation of the program. If this group likes the program and has an opportunity to refine it, it will be accepted by the greater population of advocates.

Do you have a formal community advocacy or leadership program in your community? What tips would you add for someone starting on the ground floor with a new program?

We recently had a great discussion over at #ESNchat about how to make the most of community champion programs. You can check out the Storify from the chat here, or review the mini-deck for highlights from the five questions we discussed, which included:

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Looking for more case studies like this? Members of TheCR Network have access to weekly community management programming and our complete archive of over 200 expert-led sessions. Learn more about being a member in TheCR Network.