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The Community Roundtable

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

Three Ways to Use Content and Programs Strategically

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Content and programs are two of the cornerstones of a thriving online community. They play a crucial role in attracting and engaging members, fostering a sense of belonging, and promoting shared interests and goals. We’ve talked at length about why the are important and the best ways to spend your budget on effective community content and programs, and even shared Bri Leever’s great framework for how she thinks about content and programs.

As you plan your editorial calendar (don’t have one? get started!) use these tips to make sure you efforts work in both an functional and strategic way.

Three Ways to Use Content and Programs Strategically

Tie it all together.

Aligning your content and program planning to your community strategy and overall organizational goals illustrates that you’re a thoughtful operator that understands how your efforts move the needle in other areas. This also ensures that your community content and programs directly support the business.

Share the load.

Don’t try to do it all on your own. While it might seem easier to keep all the programs to yourself, the more you share the ownership and execution with other community constituents, the more engaged your community will become. Identifying subject matter experts (SMEs) and soliciting their contributions both help lower the day to day lift for you in your community, but also provides your members with valuable content from these experts.

Diversify.

Look at the different community programs you’re creating on a regular basis and rotate in some new ones. Whether it’s a monthly member spotlight or a periodic working group meeting, your members will appreciate new opportunities to connect with one another. Remember – most community programs don’t take off overnight. Give any new programming opportunities to find their audience, and don’t be discouraged by a lack of initial interest. One way to help new programs succeed is to reach out to superusers or community advocates and ask them to participate to generate interest.

Related Reading:

Dianne Kibbey on Community Migrations

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Community Conversations is a long-running podcast highlighting community success stories from a wide variety of online community management professionals.

Episode #85 of Community Conversations features Dianne Kibbey, Global Head\VP of Community and Social Media, Newark Electronics.

Dianne shares a look at how they choose a new community platform, and what the timeline looks like for a major community migration. She also chats about how her community uses google translate to connect their global member community.

This episode of Community Conversations is sponsored by Verint.

Listen to Dianne Kibbey on Community Technology

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Questions we cover in Episode #85:

  • What was one of the biggest considerations when choosing a platform?
  • How do you measure the number of registered members?
  • Have you found a programming that transcends geographical differences in language?
  • What were some of the major milestones along the way and how long was the overall migration process?
  • How can you clean up the cobwebs in your online community?
  • What were some of the key aha moments in making this change?

About Dianne Kibbey

Dianne leads global social media marketing and the strategy\operations of the largest online community for electronics engineers and makers for Premier Farnell, a global B2B distributor of electronic components. Dianne has over 15 years of experience leading industry-recognized innovation and launch strategies for business, online communities (internal and external), unique content marketing programs, and social media strategies. She is a strong leader, recognized for building highly effective and diverse technical development and business teams with the ability to speak both business and tech to ensure maximum benefit. Dianne is exceptionally skilled at marketing to highly technical audiences.

About Newark Electronics

Newark is a high-service distributor of technology products, services and solutions for electronic system design, maintenance and repair.

Global access, with service that’s close to home

Newark has operations in the US, Canada and Mexico, serviced from our regional distribution hub in South Carolina. We are committed to supporting local language, currency, product and shipment needs across North America and around the world. As part of Farnell’s global operations, our access to stock and stronger relationships with suppliers, we are better able to serve your needs.

A commitment to innovation that powers change

We have a history of innovation and have developed many industry firsts that save precious time for our Design Engineer customers, such as the first online Community for engineers – element14. More recently we continue to bring the latest technologies to market, from development tools that speed up the design process to modular devices that engineers can quickly and easily build into their devices and the latest in easy-to-deploy artificial intelligence.

Building a Content Strategy in 5 Steps

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Building a Content Strategy

Content marketing sounds like a straightforward term, but a surprising number of marketers and community managers don’t get it. But no worries, because we love content marketing and are here to help in building a content strategy.

What is content marketing?

Glad you asked! Content marketing is so much more than just adding the right keywords to your copy. It’s looking at your content as a “living” (nonstatic) being, and focusing on the creation, aggregation, governance, and expiration of all your content — yes, all — and ensuring the best content is readily available when and where your audience needs it.

But how do you get started, and ensure you’re set up for success?

Step 1: Begin with buy-in

First, you need to promote content strategy — and its importance — within your org. This helps others understand what content strategy is, and why it should be funded as a part of their department. Remember: Good content strategy helps the entire organization work more efficiently, effectively, responsibly and most important, sustainably.

Sustainably?

As Erin Kissane wrote in “A Book Apart: The Elements of Content Strategy”: 

Sustainable content is content you can create — and maintain — without going broke, without lowering quality in ways that make the content suck, and without working employees into nervous breakdowns.

Don’t know about you, but tactics to help employees avoid nervous breakdowns sound like an easy win. 

After securing buy-in on the importance of creating and maintaining content strategy, it’s time to hammer out the strategy itself.

Step 2: Create your messaging architecture

Message architecture is vital to aligning communications efforts across an organization when building a content strategy. It also reflects the organization’s common vocabulary regardless of channel. 

So how do you build message architecture? 

  • Gather the key stakeholders involved in defining your communications initiatives
  • Organize the key terminology used to describe your brand
  • Think about your organization holistically
    • Who you are
    • Who you aren’t
    • How you would like to be perceived

Sounds easy enough, but let’s look at a brief example.

Moo.com case study

British company Moo.com likes to call themselves, “cheeky.” For those who don’t understand slang from our friends across the pond, it’s essentially a way of saying “naughty” but with a wink. Everyone within the organization — especially those who communicate on Moo.com’s behalf — understands what cheeky means in this instance, and how to convey that sentiment. Beyond that, Moo wants to be perceived as responsive, customer-oriented, approachable, helpful, and accessible. 

Both their cheekiness and their customer-centric approach are clear in everything they produce from their product collection to the lingo they use, their CTAs, photography, even their typeface. They take their “cheeky” image seriously — and project a fun and engaging brand identity as a result.

Additionally, Moo.com’s message architecture guides which comments to feature or respond to, the response’s tone, etc. As a result, their content and interactions remain unwaveringly on-brand and consistent with how the company wishes to be perceived.

Architecture works!

Step 3: Conduct a content audit

Before you can even begin to consider creating new content, you need to take inventory of what currently exists and assess whether it’s worth using (as-is, slightly revised, or completely overhauled) or if it’s better being archived. As you are building a content strategy ask yourself these questions:

Questions to ask about content sections

  • Who owns this portion of the site?
  • When was it last updated?
  • What is the purpose of this portion of the site?
  • What are the different types of content found there?
  • What templates are used for these content types or pages?
  • What taxonomy/tags are used in this section?
  • Is anything missing?

Questions to ask about the content

  • Is it current?
  • Is it relevant to its section?
  • Does it fit into the message architecture?
  • Is the quality worth keeping it in rotation?
  • How does it perform? (Analytics are your friend to determine if people like it!)
  • Does it need to be simplified?
  • What is the CTA?
  • Is it tagged appropriately (or at all)?

Some people consider content audits tedious, but they’re full of valuable information — especially when it comes to your overall content health. They can even be fun when you rediscover valuable content already in existence that could just use some slight updating. Hooray for easy lift wins!

Step 4: Implement a Content Curation Process

Once your audit is complete, you’ll have a better understanding of what high-quality content already exists. Now to fill in the gaps. The best way to do that is by establishing a content curation process.

Content curation processes help content marketers or community managers answer the following questions:

  • How can I engage with the audience?
  • What five things should be read first?
  • What gets me up to speed on the news?
  • What’s most important about this topic?
  • How can I improve the work I do?

Answering these questions can help you establish the tags needed for and the areas of the site in which the content actually makes the most sense.

Step 5: Own the strategy

It seems silly, but after completing the previous four steps, many organizations falter at the final step: Determining who actually owns the content strategy.

With no clearly identified owner, your content strategy becomes passive and ineffective. In short, it failed.

Like we said earlier, content strategy is a living thing — it should grow and change as your organization responds to industry influences, customer feedback, and matures. Even if your team doesn’t have a content strategist role, you need to choose your champion so your efforts aren’t wasted. 

Remember these tips when defining and conducting your organization’s content strategy, so you’re making the most of your content while communicating your brand’s message clearly and consistently. After all, a sustainable and well-defined content strategy not only steers the creation and development of new content but can strengthen your brand identity and help make connections in your community more meaningful and engaging.

Need more content strategy and content planning tips? Check out:

Building Effective Content Programs for Your Online Community
5 ways to plan effective content and programming for your online community
https://communityroundtable.com/best-practices/community-faq-how-can-i-build-effective-content-and-programs-for-my-online-community/
Archive: Five Tips for Planning Effective Content and Programming

Foundations Of Community Success

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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.

Three Quick Community Wins for January

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Check these three easy community management to-dos off your list and set yourself up for community success in the coming year.

A new year can be both an amazing blank slate, and also, a terrifying blank slate. If you’re back at your desk and feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list, here are three easy ways to take stock of where your community is right now, and ideas for prioritizing for the coming months. Bonus: these research-backed tools help you make the case for needed resources for your community program.

1. Check your community’s temperature.

Through a short, 20 minute survey you can:

  • Identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities – By assessing your community program in the context of your strategy and approach, you can determine where you have gaps that matter (some gaps may be intentional or OK for your context) or opportunities to improve.
  • Prioritize initiatives with the biggest impact – Your assessment will identify activities and initiatives that will contribute to your community’s goals and growth. These may be tactical activities, like programming or larger initiatives like governance and strategic alignment.

Start your community score.

2. Calculate your Community ROI

January is a great time to benchmark the ROI generated by your community. Not only does it communicate the value you are currently creating, it also helps you set goals for where you’d like to be in the future.

The formula is designed to be simple to use, and simple to explain to stakeholders – but like any ROI model, it is best used as a piece of strategy development and discussion, not just as an output.

Calculate your community ROI.

3. Create or Update your Editorial Calendar

One of the most common questions we get from members is,  “How do I increase the value and the volume of member engagement?” This challenge persists across all community types, sizes, and use cases. One way we’ve found to increase audience engagement, in terms of both quality and quantity, is to implement an editorial calendar for your community programming.

If you are already using an editorial calendar to plan your community programming now is a great time to review what worked from last year, and tweak your plans to increase engagement. If you aren’t using an editorial calendar now is a great time to draft one for the new year. This short webinar highlights best practices for building an editorial calendar for an online community program.

Ready, set, go!

We hope these three ideas help you kick-start your community initiatives for the new year. Have a specific question about any of the above? You can always ask a question in our private facebook group or send us a message.

Community Role Profile: Community Strategist

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Community Strategist

OVERVIEW OF ROLE

​ The community strategist role is an expert role dedicated to what the title implies – community strategy. Typically, strategists are individuals with community management experience who have particularly strong strategic skills; analysis, community architecture, business models, and the ability to understand the interdependencies between different parts of a community ecosystem.

​ RESPONSIBILITIES
​ Community strategists are most likely to work in professional service firms or as part of a centralized community program office that provides internal community consulting to business units and other groups within large organizations. They are more likely to be individual contributors, and they act as subject matter experts within their ecosystem supporting and auditing a portfolio of communities.

​ MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE COMMUNITY ​

Community Strategist

Strategists have a special knack for understanding community performance and the levers that impact it. Successful strategists work with community managers to ensure their strategies and approaches will yield successful shared value and keep the communities productive.

Community Strategist

To learn more about the Community Strategist Role, and view Community Strategist Job Descriptions download our Community Careers and Compensation report – now available for free download.

Now Enrolling: Developing a Community Roadmap Workshop

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The best way to improve the performance of your community is to ask for the investments you need that ensure it. But asking without context, data, or analysis is just a wish – one that is easily dismissed. A community roadmap is an effective way to educate, set expectations for, and secure budget from stakeholders.

The goal of this workshop is to create a gap analysis and roadmap draft, using industry frameworks to help stakeholders understand where you are, frame where you want to go, and collaborate to get there.

This six-session workshop includes:

  • Creating a defensible structure for community roadmaps
  • Assessment and discussion The Community Score results
  • Identifying gaps, required investments, and how to prioritize those investments
  • Developing a high-level roadmap designed to educate stakeholders and provide them with options
  • Guidance on securing stakeholder commitment and translating a roadmap into a budget

You will complete this workshop with these tactical deliverables: 

  • Results for The Community Score
  • Gap Analysis that identifies community opportunities
  • Draft community roadmap
Community Roadmap

COURSE FORMAT

This course is delivered in six, one-hour sessions, accompanied by homework and a shared space to learn-out-loud with other course participants. Each session includes an expert-led lesson, interactive discussion, and homework. Download the Syllabus.

SCHEDULE

December 8, 2020: 10am-11am ET and 2pm-3pm ET
December 10, 2020: 10am-11am ET and 2pm-3pm ET
December 15, 2020: 10am-11am ET and 2pm-3pm ET

Learn more and register.

Calculating Community Return on Investment (ROI)

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In this brief, we explore a universal formula for capturing the Return on Investment (ROI) of an engagement behavior at the heart of all successful communities.

The Value of an Answer.

No matter what your community use case, questions, and answers are its lifeblood. By capturing the value of this single behavior, you capture the lion’s share of the value communities generate. Drilling in on answers highlights the way that communities surface innovations, strengthen networks, highlight best practices, and drive behavior change.

The result is a straightforward, understandable formula that focuses the heat of the executive spotlight on the results that matter the most to business outcomes.

This brief includes an overview of the power of a tangible community ROI calculation, as well as:

  • Ways ROI models often fail
  • A formula for calculating Community ROI
  • Approaches to identify and refine inputs and assumptions

Learn more here.

Advanced Online Community Strategies Enable Success

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100% OF COMMUNITIES WITH ADVANCED STRATEGIES IMPACT THEIR CULTURE/ BRAND IN POSITIVE WAYS.

Successful communities are generative, with success and impact leading to more success and impact. Community returns, by their nature, benefit more than one participant, thanks in part to the trust and transparency that they enable. This typically results in consolidated and transparent information, win-win scenarios, and high ROI.

The question for organizations embarking on community approaches or who are currently operating underperforming communities, is this – how can my community get there?

Across the data from the 2019 State of Community Management research, the factor that correlates to the most other success factors is having an advanced community strategy – one that is approved, operational, and measurable. Within the 24% of community programs with advanced strategies, we see a group that is able to achieve self-generating, emergent growth, resulting in compounding value. Advanced strategies can be measured but they also are more comprehensive generally,
and are much more likely to include roadmaps, shared purpose and shared value statements, ROI projections, and, most critically, budget requirements.

AN ADVANCED COMMUNITY STRATGY IS ONE THAT IS: APPROVED OPERATIONAL MEASURABLE

Interestingly, average communities and those with advanced strategies do not look very different in terms of engagement rates, suggesting that the quality of engagement matters as much as or more than the quantity. In many other ways, they are quite different. despite having almost twice as many members, communities with advanced strategies are far less fragmented by sub-groups, more of their engagement is consolidated on the primary platform, and less of that engagement is hidden in private sub-groups. All of these aspects make the information more transparent
and accessible, causing the communities themselves to be more valuable to everyone.

Download the 2019 State of Community Management Report for more community insights, including a list of common elements of community strategies.

Note: This post contains content originally published in the State of Community Management 2019 report. Download your free copy here.

Gaps in Strategy Contribute to Community Professionals’ Burnout

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If you work in community management, chances are that you’ve felt burnt out recently – according to the State of Community Management 2018 Report, 45% of community professionals have felt that way in the past year alone. Do you ever think about why that is?burnout

To put that 45% in perspective, almost 60% of emergency medicine physicians experience burnout, according to the Medscape Lifestyle Report 2017 by the American Medical Association. That means that the most stressful physician position is feeling only slightly more burnout than community professionals; that’s astounding.

While community professionals aren’t working in emergency rooms and dealing with critical patients, they are similarly being overworked.

Strategy is at the Root of the Problem

Community professionals face internal struggles like unrealistic expectations, a lack of executive understanding, and not enough resources, but a large reason why community professionals are overwhelmingly feeling burnt out is more focused: a lack of a clear strategy. 

If you’ve worked in community management (or have read past State of Community Management reports), you know that strategy is important, so why is having a clear strategy still a problem for community teams?

  • Why do only 17% of community programs have an approved and resourced community roadmap?
  • Why do 70% of community programs lack operational and measurable strategies?
  • Why do less than half of the existing strategies include a business problem statement?

We can cite the aforementioned frustrations as causes for the above strategic problems – a lack of resources is definitely a problem when looking to fund a roadmap – but where should we focus if we’re looking to improve these numbers?

 

 burnout

What’s Causing the Burnout?

If we’re looking at funding, then we should look to executives; that’s a logical step.

But what about focusing on community professionals? It’s on them to give executives a reason to better fund their programs and, if these frustrations ultimately stem from a lack of strategy, then it is also the responsibility of community professionals to improve their strategies. That, in turn, will allow them to better prove the value of their community programs so that they can receive the funding they need. 

A Complete Community Strategy Can Address Burnout

There are many layers to the cause of this burnout and there are at least two actors involved. So how do we remedy this?

There is no easy answer, but one place to start is to make sure that your community strategy has all of the elements that you need to be able to communicate resource need to executives.

You should make sure that your community strategy includes important pieces:

  • Communicating key business needs through a problem statement
  • Identifying key behaviors and use cases
  • Recognize and measure key metrics

To find out more about what your community strategy should include, download the State of Community Management 2018 here: https://the.cr/socm2018.