strategy resources Archives

Interested in Growing Your Community? Become an Enabler!

January 30, 2023 By Jim Storer

Community managers are often connectors by default – it takes a certain type of person to excel at the role. People with high EQ tend to thrive.

Our research has shown that community leaders with a network of communities are more likely to provide enabling resources to their organization than those with a single community. Comparing the data from respondents who reported “one community” vs. “a network of communities” at their organization, we found a dramatic increase in CoEs once a network exists (i.e., once they’re past the initial use case).

Also interesting, 17% of respondents (8% in a network of communities) reported only ad hoc/informal governance. (Question: Who’s in charge of the communities there? If this is you, please contact us. We want to feature you in a case study.)

State of Community Management 2022 - What Resources to community teams provide? — ©2022 The Community Roundtable – *The State of Community Management 2022*

It’s interesting to note that 30% of community managers who represent a single community provide none of the resources mentioned in the survey, which likely results in a less strategic initiative. For those who want to grow beyond a single community, get out there and coach/evangelize!

Some common use cases to extend the reach and the benefit in your organization include:

General employee communities for knowledge sharing and collaboration
Customer support communities for providing fast, inexpensive, always-on access to answers to product and service questions.
Membership communities for groups like students, patients, alumni, or association audiences

Tips on Getting Started

Start a monthly “community jam” for those who want to learn more about community and how it might help them with a specific business use case.
Coach executives on how they can best support your work — try to get them to an “aha moment” on how community approaches could help another area of the business.
Document what has or hasn’t worked in your community, and begin compiling templates, and (ultimately) a community playbook for your organization.

It may feel overwhelming when you consider it, but by taking an iterative approach you’ll get where you want to be faster.

Benchmarks and actions for building better communities

January 10, 2023 By Guest User

Note: This guest post is sponsored content from Common Room. Learn more here.

In November, we published our first 360: Community-Led Growth Report from Common Room. The report offers insights and actionable next steps based on 141 communities at various stages of longevity, maturity, and growth across the product-led growth, open-source, commercial open-source, and modern SaaS industries, with community membership ranging from 50 to 100,000+ individuals distributed globally. In total, our analysis highlights trends and inflection points across a cumulative 7.5+ million community members.

We originally published the findings on our blog on November 17, and community leaders and teams found the report’s data points so useful that we’re excited to extend its reach through The Community Roundtable. As we move together into the new year, full of its planning and strategizing and scoping, it’s our hope that these insights help inform what you and your organization do next with your community to empower your members, positively impact your business, and continue building products and experiences people love.

What we learned from 7.5+ million community members

We’ve highlighted five key insights from the report below, covering common questions ranging from engagement rates and business impact to community responsiveness. To see all of the findings, read the full report for free.

1. Consumers want to engage with your company where they already spend their time. On average across the 141 communities included in this analysis, organizations engage with their communities across five surfaces. The two most common surfaces that community members engage across are Twitter (91%) and GitHub (67%).

Graph of community surfaces used by organizations

2. Community is a flywheel for education and activation. Across all surfaces, excluding GitHub, community members respond to each other more frequently (28%) than an organization’s internal teams (13%). To further extend education and activation, 30% of companies already have a champions program, and the vast majority of customers we speak with aim to build one in 2023.

Graph comparing community responsiveness (higher) to internal team responsiveness (lower)

3. Community accelerates deals and drives new business. Cohort-based analysis showed that 72% of community-led deals closed within 90 days compared to 42% of sales and marketing-led deals.

Graph showing that community-led deals close faster than marketing and sales-led deals

4. Engagement varies across surfaces and community sizes, and you should know you are likely doing just fine. The average engagement rate across all community surfaces is 2% – 12%. Smaller communities tend to have higher engagement rates. As communities scale, real-time chat applications see the biggest dropoff in engagement while social networking platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter see minimal dropoff in engagement rates even as communities grow larger.

Graph showing engagement rates across community surfaces (Averages between 2% - 12%)

5. Communities are collaborative, generative, and helpful—and community responsiveness shows it. Excluding GitHub, community response rates are significantly higher than team response rates, which underpins an important relationship between community and user success. Discourse has the highest response rate from community members and GitHub has the highest response rate from internal teams. Discord has the lowest response rate from both community members and internal teams.

Graph showing median response rates by community surface

This is the beginning

Ultimately, this initial report sets the stage for more data collection and analysis in the future. Communities, and the organizations and teams that serve them, will continue to grow, change, and shape new insights and actions.

At Common Room, we’ll continue to do everything we can to support the success of communities and the work of community teams as both evolve, and we’re excited to evolve and elevate the profession with you. If you’d like to discuss any of the report’s ideas or share strategies of your own, we’d love to see you in the Uncommon community Slack.

As you kick off this new year of community building, use this free 5-question guide to align your community and business goals early with stakeholders. Cheers to the year’s beginning!

🎉

3 Community Trends We Noticed in 2022

December 26, 2022 By Jim Storer

We won’t give you another version of Spotify wrapped, but this is the time of year where one can’t help but reflect on what occurred in yet another historic year. What we’d like to share with you today are three community trends that we most look forward to exploring more of next year.

Community trend 1: Critical characteristics for community management

Teams are shifting, as are Community professionals. This year felt like the year of the year of extremes. In some cases the pandemic has highlighted the importance of Community in an organization. With that we’ve seen more C-Suite support and growing budgets. However, we can’t ignore the large layoffs in tech earlier this year and how that has real downstream effects on Community folks. We’ve seen a lot of folks make some big pivots this year. In some cases they are suddenly becoming team builders and people managers. In others, they are having to scramble and switch to an entirely new organization. That said, Community continues to trend towards becoming its own vertical. We’ve anecdotally seen more members looking for support on building teams. Contrasted to the last decade of Community Managers working as primarily solo practitioners, we count that as progress. We noticed many of these trends in 2021. They’ve only continued in 2022. Check out the State of Community Management 2022 for more.

Looking to brush up any of your community skills? Visit TheCR Academy to see our entire course catalog. Remember, complete access to all the courses is now available to all members of TheCR Network.

Trend 2: Say goodbye to the “90-9-1” rule

Gone are the days of the 90-9-1 ruling community management and social media (a.k.a. Participation inequality: 90% of participants are unengaged/inactive, 9% engage a little, 1% make up the majority of the content creation and engagement), and we have the research to back it up: the State of Community Management 2022. Instead, we would like to introduce you to the 20-25-55 rule.

20% of your members are actively creating content
25% are validating and consuming content (you may have heard them referred to as “lurkers,” but we find the term “learners” to be much more accurate in this context)
55% are inactive

Here in the Network, we have explored a model that dives into the strengths of digital fatigue; by breaking out less formal programming, we try to get members the value that most matters to them. Many of our peers expressed similar fatigue in their Communities- members want to connect and engage but also have competing needs for their attention. Even with digital fatigue, which we associate with the pandemic, we continue to see folks adopting remote opportunities to connect with their peers.

Community trend 3: The only consistent thing is change

The headline story this year in Community was about the unpredictability in the job market, with places like Meta and Twitter having record layoffs and restructuring. We saw this same trend across tech. A very illustrative visual courtesy of TrueUp.

Community is not immune to the changing landscape nor the continued whispers of a recession. No single post can encapsulate all that we can and want to say about those changes, however, we saw a number of our members pivot from unfavorable company dynamics and into better roles.

That shift and resulting uncertainty can be a trying time in anyone’s life. We recently hosted a panel about transitioning to new roles and the insights were invaluable.

Roundtable Call – When Growing Your Career Means Leaving your Community

A few gems from the call:

Look beyond a title, and think holistically about what you want in a role.
Another was around managing burnout. The panelists expressed how important it is to be analytical. And to be critical about what you actually want next rather than being in a reactionary state of being burned out.
Focus on what you are running towards rather than what you’re running from. Where are your skills best applied?

As an offer to any reader who may be impacted by an unexpected job shift, we are currently offering our community fundamentals course for free. To take advantage of the program and possibly add to your community skills toolbox, send us a message and we’ll be happy to help you get started.

2022 was another year for the books and the Network. We appreciate all of you that have shown up, shared your thoughts, and hopefully learned alongside us at TheCR. We hope you have a restful, peaceful break and will see you in 2023.

Leverage external sources for low-lift community programs

November 28, 2022 By Jim Storer

The Content & Programs competency of the Community Maturity Model™ examines the resources and interactions a community offers its members, and is the lifeblood of a successful community program. Content gives people a reason to visit (and return to) a community, while programs create opportunities for members to connect, creating tighter bonds. Content & programs must reflect the shared value of the community and its members, while a program plan tied to the larger community strategy can lead to valuable engagement behaviors.

Savvy community teams leverage external sources to create content and facilitate programs for their members — whether SMEs, executives, or strategic partners.

Leverage external sources for low-lift community programs

Using external sources is a “work smarter, not harder” way to scale your community team. Two notable examples of external community contributors that jumped in 2022:

Peers from other areas of the organization (50% vs. 43% in 2021)
Vendors/partners (20% vs. 15% in 2021)

Member participation in content & programs dropped year over year, likely due to fatigue and burnout associated with COVID-19. While this would normally be seen as a negative, it’s actually a balanced approach to content & program development, and member participation remains at a healthy level.

Reminder: You won’t successfully attract (and retain) outside voices to your content & programs without a formal plan. This is the year to formalize a content & program plan.

The community budget for content & programs has more than doubled in the last three years (3% in 2020 vs. 7% in 2022). This is a win for a critical piece of the community-building puzzle. As your content & programs budget grows, ensure you’re moving toward a formal plan aligned with your community strategy – which might include paid programs for external contributors. This will allow you to show your content & program efforts are growing engagement and meeting (or exceeding!) your community’s goals.

Content Pro Tip from Kelly Munro, Lead Community Advisor, Xero, and member of TheCR Network

If you’re at an organization with an existing marketing team you might have a goldmine of content at your disposal.

“Don’t forget about all of the content support that you’ve got within your business. If you have a great content team already, they may already have a good structured understanding of user behavior. Make sure you aren’t creating conflicting content or programs, so just make sure that everything works harmoniously.”

Get more community ideas and advice in 13th annual 2022 State of Community Management report:

3 Elements of Community Personas

September 26, 2022 By Jim Storer

Thinking about the personas in your online community is critical – if you don’t know who you are creating content and planning programs for then you’re unlikely to create meaningful engagement.

A community persona is a group of users that displays a set of similar characteristics. Defining personas who use our communities helps us to understand how different groups interact, communicate and influence each other.

Why think about Community Personas?

Defining your audience segments is critical; the better you understand your members – how they collaborate and with whom – the better you will be at building engagement specifically for them and their needs. Personas can also help identify member gaps that lead to ineffective communities. If a community only has one type of member it can be difficult to catalyze dynamic engagement.

There are three main components to consider when defining community personas: characteristics, influencers, and workflows. By defining these three components for your persona types you can better understand who your members are, what motivates them, and how you can best help them use the community in a successful way.

3 Elements of Community Personas

Characteristics – Persona mapping isn’t a new thing just for online communities. Marketing professionals have been building audience personas for persona-based marketing campaigns for a long time. Marketing personas are typically focused on individual personal demographic characteristics, i.e. age, location, gender, etc. This is more nuanced in community persona mapping. You might want to think about what location this persona is at (in an office? which office? remote?), what team they are on, their job function, how tech-savvy they are, etc. These individual characteristics are less based on their personal attributes, and more based on their “at work” attributes.

Influencers – We don’t mean Instagram influences, or TikTok creators, for community personas we’re looking at their online social relationships as they related to the community. Who is this persona interacting with? Who do they seek approval – both intrinsically and intrinsically from. Who do they get their information from?

Workflows – The final piece is a look at their workflows. Are they already collaborating online? Are they comfortable sharing in the community? What does their daily routine look like? Are they a desk-based employee, or someone in a lab, warehouse, or out in the field? In essence, it’s about really understanding someone’s day and getting very specific so that you can understand where the greatest engagement
potential lies.

These three components are not an exhaustive list of what you should be thinking about for your community personas. As in most things community, so much depends on your community use case, the size of your organization, and of course your community goals.

As you think about your classifying your community personas, consider the segments that define your target audience and think about the behavior you want to influence with that audience. Based on that, prioritize two or three other segments that will help influence that behavior change. For a support community, you might want to include what product the member is using to best provide community interaction that makes sense for them. For an employee community, you might think about their degree of isolation or work temperament.

Once you have identified and prioritized the member segments that you want to incorporate into your community, defining those segments will help you understand how much community management is necessary to drive engagement.

5 Ways to Put Your Community Members First

September 20, 2022 By Jim Storer

Online customer communities solve many tangible business problems. They can increase case deflection, lower support costs, enable distance collaboration, and connect global audiences. Customer communities also empower their members by making them feel seen and heard.

Empowerment might not be on your radar as a community use case, but connecting with your audience can pay big dividends. When your members know you care the online relationship shifts from a transaction to an interaction. A whopping 62% of customer communities report that their members feel seen and heard through online community initiatives. How can you make sure the communication in your communities is a two-way street?

Here are five ways we’ve found to put your members first – making them feel valued and contributing to long-term engagement and member satisfaction.

1 – Integrate members into your strategy

For a lot of you this is going to be a big, “yeah, obviously” but online community members often take a back seat to corporate initiatives when it comes to strategy. Create formal member input channels for member feedback, like ideation programs, suggestion boxes, and event old-fashioned contact us forms. Also critical?

Make them easy to use. You want the barrier to contributing to be very low. You can set up a regular cadence of surveys for members, either tied to your editorial calendar (ie. surveys happen in June and December every year) or tied to member milestones like anniversaries or engagement markers.

The most important step here isn’t collecting the data, it’s truly integrating member input into your strategic conversations. Regularly review ideas and bring member feedback to relevant conversations. Don’t forget to acknowledge member contributions to help members understand where and how you are using their feedback.

2 – Give members visibility

The first rule of member feedback is: give credit! Always mention the member who originated an idea/attach their name to the feature, both internally and externally. This both provides positive reinforcement for the behaviors you want to see in your community and encourages others to share their feedback and ideas. You can also give shoutouts in the community and internally at your organization for those that might not have ideas or feedback that is used but are taking their time to contribute.

You can also create a formal recognition program (often called superusers, advocates, etc.) to tie member contributions back into the strategy of the community. This can be gamification, badges, branded swag, or awards, and doesn’t need to be physical gifts. Banners/labels on a profile or special mentions during calls or events are great rewards that don’t tax your budget. You can learn more ideas for superuser programs here.

3 – Recognize your members

Regularly spotlighting members and their work is a low-lift way to increase individual visibility in your community. Member recognition and spotlight programs do double duty as an engagement tactic, as they recognize the work of members and provide a way for members to get to know each other.

Sharing member contributions publicly may not always be an option for you, depending on your community type and organization’s standards. However, if you have a community Twitter, Facebook group, or LinkedIn you can cross-post content there. Sharing about community members publicly gives some visibility to what they’re doing behind the scenes.

4- Listen!

Make sure you’re proactively connecting with members with regularly scheduled check-ins. Don’t wait for them to come to you! Pay attention to what members are talking about, asking for, and challenged by. You can then create content and design programming that applies to these situations, even if they didn’t ask for it explicitly.

You can say you’re listening, but unless members see the result of that, are you really? Be sure to act on what you see, hear, and are asked about. Be flexible and willing to act (often easier said than done!) but your willingness to implement ideas and enact changes turns your listening into tangible action.

5 – Be transparent

Regularly share your strategy and roadmap and then listen to your customer community’s input. If online community members do have a say in your strategy/roadmap, make sure you touch base with them regularly to keep them involved. Don’t make them feel like an afterthought. If they have taken the time to influence your work, understanding how their contributions are being implemented is gratifying. If members aren’t directly involved in your strategy/roadmap, you can still update them on progress and plans to help them feel more connected to the community program.

When possible, share the reason why decisions were made. This leads to telling them why you make the decisions you do which can help them understand why your community operates as it does. Be straightforward and explain whether and why something works or fails. This transparency leads to trust, and if members trust you, you have truly built a community.

Ashleigh Brookshaw on DEIB in Community

August 25, 2022 By Jim Storer

Lessons from The NEW Community Manager Handbook is a limited-run podcast series, featuring the 21 community leaders showcased in the Handbook in conversation with Anne Mbugua.

Episode 11 features Ashleigh Brookshaw, Senior Manager – Customer Experience & Community at NICE CXone.

Ashleigh Brookshaw has spent her career building community in the insurance, association, and now software spaces, so she knows her way around the foundations of community management. Still, some things surprise her.

Listen in as Ashleigh, and host, Anne Mbugua discuss how to build an authentic focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in online community programs.

Listen to Ashleigh Brookshaw on DEIB in Community

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About Ashleigh Brookshaw

Ashleigh Brookshaw, M.A. is a detail-oriented and digital change enthusiast with expertise in online community engagement, cultural & transformative change management through DEI, and strategic digital marketing communications to drive business results.

She has worked with both internal and external audiences with a variety of organizations including nonprofits like Chicago Gateway Green, Fortune 500 companies like Allstate Insurance, professional associations like the American Society of Safety Professionals, and the SAAS industry like NICE CX One.

Ashleigh holds a B.A. in Advertising/Public Relations and minors in Marketing & Spanish from Loyola University Chicago. She also holds an M.A. in Multicultural/Organizational Communication with a concentration in Training & Development and a project management certificate from Depaul University.

About NICE CXone

At NICE we are passionate about removing the friction between companies and consumers, creating extraordinary experiences that build brand loyalty and create unbreakable bonds.

We enable organizations to address today’s consumer and employee expectations, by delivering effortless, consistent, and personalized digital-first experiences with CXone, the world’s leading cloud CX platform.

We are known for our innovation and comprehensive end-to-end CX approach, combining digital entry points, journey orchestration, smart self-service, prepared agents and complete performance suite, all embedded with our purpose-built CX Analytics, AI, and domain expertise.

About The NEW Community Manager Handbook

The NEW Community Manager Handbook features 21 profiles of community leaders sharing advice and ideas on everything from accessibility, hiring, strategy, gamification, defining the digital workplace, technology, and more. Each profile is paired with research from the State of Community Management reports and includes tactical advice for implementing what you’ve learned.

Learn from community management experts at Easterseals, Glencore, Microsoft, UKG, the World Bank Group, Analog Devices, Inc., AAMC, Zapier, Doctors Without Borders, and more.

Three Tips for Building Your Community Team

August 12, 2022 By Jim Storer

In our State of Community Management research, we found that 47% of community roles are defined by HR teams, who might not always understand what your community team needs to succeed. A clear understanding of community roles and responsibilities is critical when building your community team.

Help them help you by providing a detailed look at what common community skills are, where your current team (even if that’s just you) excels, and what gaps need to be filled for future success.

You can use our Community Skills Framework to provide your HR team with a look at industry-standard terms and skills.

Three Tips for Building Your Community Team from Lisa Tallman

Lisa Tallman builds community at Easterseals for 26 national affiliates. Starting as a team of one, she approached team building from a strategic angle.

“I always have a business case for my community programs that I update annually. And one thing I always include is headcount. ‘Here’s what my current team is doing. Here’s how much time and effort it’s taking them to do that, and here’s what’s not getting done because we don’t have the resources.’ By showing my executives what we need to fulfill the strategic plan, I can tie community goals back into organizational goals.”

Here are three tips from Lisa on building a community team:

Hire the right mindset.

Many skills can be learned, but a relationship and opportunity-seeking orientation is difficult to develop. Consider the personalities and working styles on your current team, and make diversifying beyond your skillset a priority.

Think about the future, not just the present.

Use Lisa’s tactic of considering the long-term strategic goals for your community program when hiring. This will help your team scale as programs grow, and provide growth opportunities in line with your team structure.

Community management is hot right now.

Community teams are growing faster than the availability of experienced professionals. As you consider potential hires, remember there’s no one community unicorn out there for you. Hire with the expectation that training can close gaps.

Hear more advice from Lisa on building a community team on her episode of Lessons from the NEW Community Manager Handbook or download your copy of the NEW Community Manager Handbook today.

Mary Lightfoot on Community Accessibility

August 4, 2022 By Jim Storer

Lessons from The NEW Community Manager Handbook is a limited-run podcast series, featuring the 21 community leaders showcased in the Handbook in conversation with Anne Mbugua.

Episode 8 features Mary Lightfoot, Senior Digital Learning Manager – Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center at Gallaudet University.

Mary and Anne explore how communities can approach accessibility in their programs, including ways community managers can make improvements to the accessibility options available to their members.

Listen to Mary Lightfoot on Community Accessibility

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About Mary Lightfoot

Mary has more than twenty years of interpreting experience with a current specialization in the intersection of technology and interpreting, and is interested in the application of technology to the field of interpretation as well as interpreting various facets of computer-related technology. She is experienced in areas of education, government, business, mental health, theatrical, medical, conference work, and video interpreting (both VRS and VRI).

Mary is currently the Senior Digital Learning Manager with more than ten years of using instructional design for projects and using learning technologies for developing and implementing synchronous and asynchronous learning; Project management experience with projects of both regional and national scope. She has experience working with synchronous technologies creating and managing live webinars and panel discussions; working with asynchronous distance technologies involving project instructional design, project management, and running online learning communities; and over 10 years experience using Learning Management Systems and use of SCORM to integrate eLearning files, interest in the use of xAPI for metrics within and between training elements. She also has experience in online community management, focusing on creating and managing engaging national-level external communities, using Salesforce Experience Cloud and Appinium LMS.

About Gallaudet University

Gallaudet University is a world-class institution with a rich history of transformation and impact. For more than 150 years, Gallaudet has been the political, social, and economic engine of the signing community.

Laurent Clerc and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet crossed the Atlantic from Paris, France, in 1816 to open the country’s first school for the deaf. In 1864, with the support of Congress and President Abraham Lincoln, they extended their vision with Gallaudet University.

Gallaudet became a beacon for visual learning, visual language, social justice, and full rights for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Since then, we have proceeded to become the Gallaudet University that even President Abraham Lincoln could not have imagined.

Today, Gallaudet is the go-to source on the deaf and signing community — a rich source of history, knowledge, achievement, and inspiration. But we are even more than that. Gallaudet is a global agent of change— a hub of the signing ecosystem, preparing students to flourish, and helping society value and appreciate all that deaf people have to offer.

Our Gallaudet community hails from all 50 states and nearly 100 countries. We have 23,000 alumni worldwide. We’re a university that teaches and transforms unlike anywhere else.

About The NEW Community Manager Handbook

Learn from community management experts at Easterseals, Glencore, Microsoft, UKG, the World Bank Group, Analog Devices, Inc., AAMC, Zapier, Doctors Without Borders, and more.

Community Conversations – Episode #82: Chris Catania on Community Leadership

August 1, 2022 By Jim Storer

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

Episode #82 of Community Conversations features Chris Catania, Head of Community at ESRI

On this special State of Community Management 2022 episode, Chris Catania and Anne Mbugua discuss the importance of thoughtful leadership programs in online communities. Chris shares the role community leadership programs, including executive leadership and customer champion programs, play in the ESRI community and explores the most surprising findings from the 2022 report.

Chris also shares advice for aligning your community program with other internal programs to drive revenue and boost customer satisfaction.

Listen to Chris Catania on Community Leadership

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About Chris Catania

Chris is an award-winning community and collaboration leader, who always thinks “people first, technology next.”

For more than 20 years, he has helped organizations build relationships with their audiences through strategic communication, community management, content development, and global business strategy.

He believes in the proven power of community to deepen trust, increase loyalty, lower costs and grow revenue. And that power comes when you align community with real business goals to design meaningful online experiences and deliver measurable business results.

He is driven by a passion to empower companies to leverage the power of community as a strategic asset and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

About ESRI

Esri is the global market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, location intelligence, and mapping. Since 1969, we have supported customers with geographic science and geospatial analytics, what we call The Science of Where. We take a geographic approach to problem-solving, brought to life by modern GIS technology. We are committed to using science and technology to build a sustainable world. Learn more about ESRI.

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