@TheCR Archives

Graduation, or Three Things I Learned as a TheCR Fellow

November 8, 2017 By Hillary Boucher

Note from Hillary: I’m thrilled to share this guest blog post from one of our current community management fellows who is wrapping up her training time as a TheCR Fellow and looking for a new community management role.

Rachael Silvano, TheCR Fellow 2017

On my first day as a TheCR Fellow, the team asked me to take a quiz to determine my Holy Grail character (King Arthur for those interested). This quickly led to nine months of learning, training, and exploring every nook of community management, with some fantastic thought leaders at the helm. For those of you unfamiliar with TheCR Fellowship program, it’s a one-year contract designed to intertwine real-world experience with a training environment. For me, that meant working on dashboards, reading the last four years of The State of Community Management Research, and making connections in TheCR Network where I helped manage the day-to-day workings of the community.

With my year coming to a close, I’m walking away with a profound sense of gratitude for the opportunities I’ve had at TheCR, as well as excitement over what my next role could be. I’d love to continue honing the skills I’ve established in building dashboards, collecting and analyzing community metrics, and training (if you have a position that fits those descriptions, feel free to drop me a line!).

Below are just a handful of some of the most important takeaways I’ve learned from all the teachers I’ve had at The Community Roundtable:

1.) Community (and Community Management) Is Not Linear

Working in community means being agile, flexible, and comfortable with the unknown. Maybe you start building out an engagement program and end up reviewing your governance in the process. Or perhaps you begin exploring a metric and you wind up waist-deep in your analytics dashboard finding new reports you didn’t know existed. By approaching your work with a loose grip, you can be ready to take on rewarding (if unexpected) challenges.

2.) More Data Does Not Equal Better Data

Much of my work with TheCR was focused on wrangling TheCR Network data. As such, “more =/= better” quickly became my golden rule. Putting your community maturity narrative first, and then telling that story with data is a valuable lesson for community newbies and veteran pros alike. Saying that your “likes” have gone up 120% doesn’t speak to the dynamic complexity of your community’s journey – detailing who is liking, why, and in what context gives a better (and more important) picture.

3.) Always Be You

There is something to be said about the virtues of being cookie cutter, but the biggest I took away from my time at TheCR is that the things that make you unique are not only important but vital. I’ve learned to not only be authentic but to craft my authenticity with intention. Chances are if you read an email from me, it had something about video games, robots, or my cat, Walter- which is all thanks to TheCR letting me be me.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from amazing community practitioners and I’m excited to move onto my next career adventure. You can connect with me on Linkedin.

Quantify value, not vanity: The SOCM 2017 is out!

May 23, 2017 By Ted McEnroe

Eight years ago, when Jim Storer and Rachel Happe founded The Community Roundtable, it was the beginning of understanding that the “art” of community management had a lot of science in it – repeatable best practices that can separate the best communities from the rest.

Each year since then, we have built The State of Community Management on a virtuous cycle. The report inspires discussions that raise new questions that shape the next report that inspires new discussions, and so on.

That brings us to today.

Today, we are pleased and excited to release The State of Community Management 2017 – the eighth annual report on the strategies, operations, artifacts and best practices of communities across organizations and use cases. Once again, we built upon the best of past surveys to surface new insights and information you can use as you think about your community. More than 300 community professionals shared their data with us – and we hope you’ll find the insights as interesting as compiling them was for us.

The report is chock full of insights across the eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model, so rather than try to replicate them here, I just wanted to share two overarching trends and the key findings of this year’s research.

We’ll start with a great trend.

Trend: Optimistic perceptions foreshadow emerging success for community.

By a margin of nearly 10-to-1, respondents said their communities were delivering greater value than they were a year ago. Community professionals who took the survey also said by wide margins that more questions were being asked and answered, and that overall activity was higher. Those are the kind of insights that can spark greater investment, and respondents were three times as likely to say their budgets and staffing had grown than that they had shrunk during the course of the year.

The flip side, though, is that translating these optimistic feelings into measured results remains challenging.

Trend: Communities can demonstrate ROI – if they have the data.

Positive developments around community have piqued executive interest. But while some communities have captured measures of their value, too many aren’t getting at the right data to prove ROI. Just 9% of communities in the survey said they could calculate their own ROI – and a wide majority couldn’t get at critical community data such as answered questions or successful searches to get at their community ROI.

There are multiple reasons behind this shortcoming, not the least of which is a failure of platform vendors to make the metrics that capture community value easy to access and utilize. But community professionals can make a big move in the right direction by shifting their attention more to defining value and critical behaviors, and then translating those behaviors into more financial terms.

We’ll talk more about that in the coming weeks – but in short, good feelings have executives paying attention, but that attention will wane without real results, and soon.

Digging into the data further, we developed three key findings this year – in strategy, operations and tactics.

Strategy: Quality of engagement matters more than quantity as communities mature.

Our first key finding comes out of a surprising piece of data. This year, for the first time the engagement levels of our best-in-class communities was virtually the same as for our overall sample. In other words, in terms of quantity, best-in-class communities look just like their peers for engagement. We sliced and diced the communities by use case, size, etc., and found it was pretty consistent across all variables.

This is a trend we have seen over the past few years, and we see it as a fundamental shift in how more mature communities view success. Best-in-class communities are more likely to focus on metrics other than general engagement to gauge success – they pursue value metrics vs. vanity metrics. We’ve talked for years about how total activity is not a strong measure of success, any more than the loudest concert or most cacophonous discussion is the best one. You need to build engagement to a point, but after that point, it’s the quality of the connections that matters for community. Best-in-class communities outshine their peers on elements like executive engagement, advocate involvement and use of behavioral metrics such as answered questions. They also are more likely to say their communities were delivering answering more questions and delivering greater value than they were a year ago.

Your takeaway: Understand the elements that give communities real value – they’re the elements you want to focus on as your community matures.

Operations: Lasting behavior change requires more than transactional investments.

Our operations finding looks at what happens to communities in the middle of the maturity curve. Each year, we find a bottleneck of communities in trying to move from Stage 2 to Stage 3 in the Community Maturity Model. About 60 percent of communities in the survey for the past three years have scored in Stage 2, versus about 25 percent in Stage 3 or higher.

Why is this? It’s the nature of what leverages community maturity. Moving from a traditional hierarchical structure to an emerging community one is largely a function of investment. Organizations name a community manager, buy a platform, create content and maybe even write a strategy, and they can get to Stage 2.

Getting to the next stage requires something that can’t be done with a paid invoice, a hire or a planning group. It requires continuing efforts to enable community on an ongoing basis – by creating advocacy programs, developing and implementing roadmaps, securing budgets and delivering the shared value that the community brings to the organization and to community members. These are far more fundamental shifts in the day-to-day operations of the organization.

If you are a community manager looking to advance your community, it’s worth going through this list of elements that differentiate Stage 2 and Stage 3 communities and make them a core part of your long-term roadmap moving forward.

Your takeaway: Advocates, measurable shared value and a focus on desired behaviors will deliver real results for those who focus on the work needed to develop them.

Tactics: Connecting content and programs to strategy accelerates community success.

Lastly, we look at community tactics – and the two-headed monster of content and programs. We’ve talked about the importance of strong content and program elements in communities in past SOCMs, and that data holds true in 2017, too. But this year, we noticed something else interesting. Best-in-class communities didn’t produce more content or run more programs than their peers. However, best-in-class communities were far more likely to align their content and programming with their community and organizational strategies than their peers.

Once again – strategy trumps volume.

Your takeaway: Content and programs do drive engagement by giving members reasons to visit and opportunities to connect – but the communities that work best ensure that they are thoughtfully connecting those elements to community goals.

Taken together, these key findings suggest we are at an end of one chapter and beginning of the next in community management. Communities have generated engagement, created executive interest and become an accepted part of a lot of organizations. Now we must translate that engagement, interest, and acceptance into behavior change, understanding, and value and ROI.

We hope the State of Community Management 2017 report gets your wheels turning – and if you didn’t get a chance to take the SOCM survey and want to get your scores, you can do that, too!

We look forward to working with you to turn the engagement you have built into real, quantifiable value.

Do you have an award-worthy community program?

April 25, 2017 By Hillary Boucher

Seeing the work of hundreds of innovative and creative community professionals is one of the biggest perks of my job here at TheCR. Not a day goes by when I don’t say, “Wow – that’s awesome!” in response to something a member tells me.

Last year we launched a recognition program to acknowledge and reward the outstanding community work we see every day. I was delighted to present nine members of TheCR Network with awards that recognized their unique strengths and contributions to community management.

This year TheCR Connect awards are evolving into a more formal recognition process. Since there is no way we can stay on top of all the amazing work that our members do, we’re opening up the process and encouraging members to submit award-worthy community work in four categories: Best Design Element, Winning Welcome Wagon, Best Reward and Recognition Program and Outstanding Community ROI. An additional award – The Community MVP will be awarded by nominations from community peers.

You can learn more about each award – and more about the recognition process here. Submissions and nominations are being accepted from April 25, 201717 until June 30th, 2017 at midnight PT.

I can’t wait to see what innovative community work our members submit – and to see the peer nominations for Community MVP!

Join TheCR Team: Community Management Fellow Wanted

November 21, 2016 By Jim Storer

Are you interested in the emerging field of community management?

Maybe you studied psychology, politics, sociology, journalism or communications and are wondering how social media and social networking technologies are changing how organizations communicate and collaborate. Maybe you’ve had a role in social media management but are looking to make a pivot into are area of deeper engagement and value. Maybe you started your career in a different field and have discovered that your true passion lies in connecting and supporting people so they can be their best, most productive selves.

About Us

TheCR Team celebrating a great 2013 at our end of the year meeting.

The Community Roundtable (TheCR) was founded in 2009 to help organizations navigate and take advantage of this new networked world we live in. We publish ground breaking research and work with over 150 organizations who are transforming the way they work and interact with their customers, including CA, Steelcase, Merck, AAAS, EY, H&R Block, PMI and more. We are a small but mighty group of professionals that love to work hard – but also understand that to be our best selves, we need to balance work and rich personal lives.

As a community management fellow at TheCR, you will spend time learning both community management and building relationships with our clients, giving you a deep understanding of both the community manager role and the context in which community professionals work.

Are you ready to join TheCR team and become a skilled community manager? We are thrilled to announce that we are hiring a Community Management Fellow for 2017.

Why a Fellow?

Fellowship positions at TheCR are an opportunity to learn and work simultaneously – they are a training role with a stipend. The Community Roundtable has hired a number of fellows over the years because it is a unique opportunity for both an individual, TheCR and TheCR’s ecosystem to benefit. Our fellowships are intended to last 12 months and give individuals a strong background and network with which to find a permanent community manager position at its conclusion.

What you will learn:

Engagement Tactics: The role is steeped in the day-to-day activities of facilitating our online community – TheCR Network. This includes a lot of admin, content curation & creation, and member outreach.
Community Operations: You’ll learn how keep our online community running smoothly and engaged, through management and reporting activities. Our systems and approaches are fluid, giving you the opportunity to help us iterate and improve.
Community Strategy & Theory: Not only do we run an online community of community professionals, but we also publish community management research and training. You will have access to our training and research and our team will act as mentors to help unpack what it means for the industry, for organizations, and for individual community practitioners like yourself.
How to work collaboratively: At TheCR, we try to work the way we coach our clients to work – iteratively, collaboratively, respectfully and with constant feedback. We don’t micro-manage and we expect everyone to be an adult, giving and taking feedback from everyone on the team so that we can each be as good as the entire team. This work style is a big part of our culture and benefits those who work best when they are constantly learning.

We are a lean, fast-paced, transparent and collaborative team that has a bias for action and as little overhead as possible.

What that means for you:

Fun fact: our current Director of Networks, Hillary Boucher, started as a Fellow.

We expect you to be self-sufficient. While you will work alongside our network team and be given specific challenges, we expect all team members to be responsible and accountable for their own progress and proactive about seeking solutions. We don’t micro-manage.
You will work virtually. We meet in person as a team quarterly, but otherwise all of our communication is done online using collaboration tools, video conferencing and the phone. If you are not comfortable learning new technologies this is not the role for you.
You need to be available during the traditional work week. There is some flexibility, but in general the team stays in touch M-F during business hours.
You’ll need your own computer that is in good working order and is up-to-date, as well as a strong, reliable internet connection.
You will get out of of this fellowship what you put into it. We are looking for a team member who not only is interested in the role as we’ve described it, but someone who brings their own passion, skills and curiosity to the team.
There is a lot of opportunity if you choose to seize it. As a small team, we all pinch hit for each other and there are always opportunities to get involved in the work of the organization, if you are interested.

You might be our next community management fellow if you:

Have excellent written communications skills.
Have experience using social networking and social media tools and are active online.
Have experience with content creation. Bonus points if you have any of the following skills or interests: data analysis, video or audio editing, graphic design or multi-media content creation.
Understand the basics of the social sciences.
Are organized, self-sufficient and have good project management skills.
Care about your work and the people with whom you work.
Bring your best effort to every project and can leave your ego at the door.
Enjoy the flexibility – and responsibility – of working virtually.
Want to learn more about community management – you will work closely with our Community Manager and must love the internet, people and building community.

Do you have what it takes? Are you excited by what we could do together? Please tell us more about you! While not a requirement for the right candidate, preference will be given to people within commuting distance from Boston or Ithaca, NY.

We are no longer accepting applications for our 2017 fellow. Thank you to everyone who took the time to apply.

You can sign up here to be notified of new roles at TheCR.

Jerry Canaday on Applying Community Management Principles to Non-Traditional Community Roles

June 16, 2015 By Jim Storer

Our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers” is back!

Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about their community journey. They ask the community questions you want to know the answers to, including:

What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
How would you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

We pick up where we left off with episode #27, featuring Jerry Canaday, Solution Architect – Internal Systems at MasterCard. Podcast highlights include:

Applying community management principles to non-traditional community roles
The intersection of the future of the intranet and mobile, and community management.
How community management has a natural analog in professional sports

Download this podcast.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

Know someone we should have a conversation with? Let us know!

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

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2014: A Year of Community Advancement

December 16, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

It’s hard to believe we’re coming up on 2015 – the past year flew by, and we wanted to take a minute to pause and reflect on the past 12 months before we dive into planning the next 12! We kicked 2014 off by launching several new initiatives aimed at connecting community managers with each other, and showcasing just how different the average profile of community practitioners can be. Our Faces of Community Management profile series shared a glimpse into the background of a wide array of community managers, and our monthly Community Manager Spotlight webinar series provided an in-depth look at what leading community professional are working on and best practices for furthering your career in community.

We shared our annual State of Community Management 2014 research in April and released an accompanying infographic”Drive Success with Basic Executive Coaching” and eBook “Building a Community Roadmap” later in the year. You can check out all the related report materials including exclusive insights, expert advice and informative blog posts here.

In October we released a brand new research platform – The Community Manager Salary Survey which aims to bring more awareness to the emerging career path in community management; detailing what community professionals can expect from different roles and what hiring managers should know to grow effective community programs. In addition to the full report, which you can download here, we also released an informative infographic “Careers in Community Management” that profiled three main community roles and provided exclusive job role, responsibility and salary information for each.

The Fall also saw us assume the stewardship of Jeff Ross’s extremely popular “#ESNchat” a weekly twitter chat where enterprise social network focused community professionals gather weekly to discuss hot ESN topics and share advice and best practices for creating thriving ESNs. The upcoming topic schedule, as well as archives of past chat can be found here.

Finally, we shared some news from inside the TheCR Network – the introduction of our first formal Champion program.This program serves to deepen conversations among special interest groups who share a common use case or characteristic, enhance our content and programming by having community leaders, who have deep expertise in their domain, lead conversations and connect our members more closely with similar peers and industry experts.

We are proud to have shared so much new research and content with you over the past twelve months. 2014 was a year of growth and expansion at TheCR – both in terms of new programming and research initiatives, but also in terms of our team, TheCR Network, and our connections with community professionals around the world. We hope you also enjoyed a fruitful and fulfilling 2014, we can’t wait to connect with you in 2015 and help advance the community work you do.

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Looking to take your career in community management to the next level in 2015? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals in the new year and beyond.

#thankitforward – Present, past and forever

December 11, 2014 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable.

New jobs bring with them some adjustments – to new roles, new responsibilities and new cultures. One of the many parts of the culture at The Community Roundtable I value greatly is the understanding that people are the heart and soul of everything we do. So when it came time for me to consider taking a part in a new (for me) tradition – thanking it forward (#thankitforward), I didn’t hesitate. Well, except for the part where I had to narrow it down to three people. I went with three groups, instead.

Thanks, friends.

Current colleagues: Thanks to my new colleagues – I’m fortunate to be married to one of them (more on her later) but for the rest of the team – Jillian, Shannon, Hillary, Maggie and Jim, I am a newbie, a rookie, and they have welcomed me with open arms and support. Thanks for your patience, your guidance, and for being a stunningly smart group of coworkers.

And thanks to the members of TheCR – whom I have always known from an outside perspective but now have gotten to engage on a more direct level. Rachel likes to talk about superpowers, and you each have them and in greater quantities than you realize. I’ve been working on a project for release at CMAD – and have already learned so much by listening that the biggest fear I have is that I can’t capture those learnings in the time and space allotted.

Past colleagues: I came to TheCR this fall from a different type of community environment – the staff of the Boston Foundation, one of the nation’s oldest and largest community foundations. To them, thanks for all the hard work you do on a daily basis to support groups across the city and region who are working to create a better Boston. If you don’t know your local community foundation – you should. They are remarkable, complex entities with the overarching purpose of supporting good causes. There is a lot business communities could learn from nonprofit communities – and vice versa.

Forever colleagues: As some things come and go, there are those that stay – I hinted at thanking Rachel Happe above, but my appreciation for her reaches far beyond TheCR. People ask how we could possibly work together, and the answer is because we know going in that no matter how contentious or challenging the work can be, we both know it’s an important but ultimately small part of our world. And if we forget – there is a 4-year-old with a head full of curls, a heart made of gold and a body full of attitude to remind us.

It feels good to say thanks – and it feels good to be thanked. That’s not just in your head – a Harvard study showed as much. Take a little time to #thankitforward. There are few phrases as powerful in any relationship – or community – as a simple “Thank you.”

Community Manager Spotlight Recap: AMA with Becky Scott, iTalent

December 10, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Last week we hosted our third community manager AMA to great success! In case you missed it we’ve archived the entire Community Manager Spotlight AMA webinar here – and it’s definitely a don’t miss listen for community professionals. Becky Scott, Senior Community Engagement Manager at iTalent.

This content has moved inside The Network.

About Becky:

Becky could be called a social media addict since she lives and breathes social media and community.In reality she’s quite passionate about bringing brands and their customers together —whether it’s on sites like Facebook and Twitter or company-owned properties like blogs or forums. Becky has a varied background that includes technical project management, marketing, editing, and writing. She also fancies herself a photographer at times, busily filling her hard drive with photos. She doesn’t really like piña coladas or getting caught in the rain, but does sing a mean karaoke song.

Becky has managed online communities for 15 years and social properties since Live Journal was a “thing” and Facebook required university emails. She honed her writing and editing skills on sites like AOL’s Aisle Dash, Ask Patty, Tree.com, and ucsd.edu. Two of her previous brand communities have won awards from Forrester, ComBlu, and Lithium Technologies.

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Want to access a global network of community professionals? Learn how membership in TheCR Network can provide 24/7 365 networking, training, professional development, and education.

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#thankitforward – On community, collaboration and creativity.

December 8, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Maggie Tunning, Learning and Culture Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Thank you to Shannon for highlighting the #thankitforward series again this year! My three picks:

TheCR Network members. Their experience and insight improves our research and programs. This year I especially enjoyed watching the leaders of our community maturity assessment working group apply the Community Maturity Model to create a roadmap and for internal consulting. They later contributed to a pilot training program for new members learning to apply the model, and not only shared their experiences but helped others working on new ideas for applications.
Co-working spaces that encourage creativity and community. Two of my favorite spots to camp out for a morning or afternoon are the Kaneko Library and the Pilgrimer. The Kaneko Library is a speciality library dedicated to creativity, and in addition to shelves of journals and books in fields that thrive on creative input – science, engineering, advertising, business, design, architecture, the humanities and the arts – they have other resources to fuel creative minds like coffee, Scrabble and Legos. The Pilgrimer is a gathering space supporting local entrepreneurs, makers, artists and non-profit organizations that hosts a retail store for handmade goods and serves amazing pour over coffee.
TheCR team. I feel lucky to collaborate with smart and supportive colleagues every day. One of our traditions that I appreciate this time of year is a Secret Santa gift exchange – the gift of giving and surprising another team member is as much fun as being surprised and receiving gifts, too.

Who are you thankful for this year? We’d love to hear who made a difference in your work and life – just tag it #thankitforward!

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: November 2014 Wrap Up

November 26, 2014 By Hillary Boucher

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

November was packed with quality programming inside TheCR Network and I found myself joking with members who were attending two (or more) Roundtable calls a week. “Nice to see you again!” I was happy to hear one member respond with, “There’s just so much good stuff happening at TheCR this week.” I love hearing feedback like this! Want a sneak peek of what kinds of programs and discussions were happening inside TheCR Network this month? Take a look:

Beyond Engagement: Moving Business & Creating Movements (Roundtable): TheCR member Maria Ogneva originally presented this at JiveWorld in October and I invited her back for a few reasons. Maria had done an call “Building Community from Scratch: Zero to Pilot” last spring and I knew it would be good to get an update and I also knew giving members the opportunity to dig into Maria’s experience and expertise is a valuable opportunity. One of the things we discussed on this call was how to approach ridiculous job postings and negotiate a role that is appropriate for you and the organization. A hot topic with our current Community Manager Salary Research report where we discovered the misalignment of expectations, experience and compensation in the space.

Data Visualization Skill Builder (Roundtable): We were grateful to have Tableau’s community manager, Tracy Fitzgerald, in to to share how she uses data to tell her community’s story. And while it was pretty cool to get an insider’s peek at Tableau as a tool, we discussed general best practices for using data to tell the story of your community internally. It was a great call that married some of our traditional storytelling resources together with data collection.

Salesforce Dot Com Community (Practitioner Demo): We had a member who recently launched a new community using Salesforce. He offered a demo and while I expected a handful of participants this one really pulled members out of lurkdom. Turns out practitioners really value having the opportunity to receive a tool demo from a fellow practitioner versus a vendor. Glad we can make that happen! We’ll definitely be making these types of vendor test-drives part of our on-going programming.

This is just a small sampling of what we offered members in November. We hosted a Community Maturity Model training, we brought in an expert to teach members about Appreciative Inquiry and how community managers can use this powerful tool, and we dug into the CMSS research. If you are interested in learning more about what it’s like to be a member of TheCR Network check out this extensive overview which shares our general programming opportunities and resources made available to members.

Want to access our fall programming for the benefit of your community work? Reach out and ask us about membership.