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Calculating Community ROI: Measuring the Networked Value of Engagement

September 19, 2018 By Jim Storer

Few teams know their community ROI

Our State of Community Management research revealed that despite the high returns we calculated, only 41% of those surveyed say that they are able to calculate value in any way themselves, and only 23% have taken the next step to calculating ROI for their community program. Only 23%!

What’s the big deal about calculating ROI, anyway?

By calculating ROI you demonstrate to stakeholders that they are making a good choice about investing in the community program – and that it is worth more investment. The other, critical, thing it can do is to show how community value has grown historically and how that value is projected to grow in the future, giving them further assurance that they are making a smart financial choice.

Evaluating the investment return (ROI) of the community directly connects to increased executive interest, support and investment – which in turn has a massive impact on resource allocation for communities programs. So, why don’t more community programs calculate their ROI?

Our research suggests that there is a lack of business skills on community teams and this gap is a disservice to both the business and the community team. Overwhelmed by supporting value creation, community teams do not have the resources or the time required to measure and report their own success.

Calculating Community ROI: Measuring the Networked Value of Engagement Calculating Community ROI: Measuring the Networked Value of Engagement

Our research brief, Calculating Community ROI: Measuring the Networked Value of Engagement, explores a simple formula for capturing the ROI of a behavior at the heart of all successful communities: 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 return communities generate. Drilling in on answers highlights the way that communities surface innovations, strengthen networks, highlight best practices, and drive behavior change.

This brief includes The Community Roundtable’s Community ROI calculation as well and approaches to find or estimate the inputs required to calculate it.

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.

Access the research brief. 

CMGT 101: Community Value Statements

May 1, 2018 By Jim Storer

Note: This content appears in a slightly different form in our ebook: CMGT 101: 17 CommunityLeaders Share Their Secrets for Success.CMGT 101 is packed with engagement ideas, governance tips, career advice, and more from community leaders working at innovative organizations like CA Technologies, Aetna, Electronic Arts, SAP, Pearson, Akamai, and Atlassian. 

Download the ebook here for free. 

PattyMcEnaney_CMGT101

Patty McEnaney is the Director of Knowledge Management & Social Strategy at Envestnet. She shared her best practices for creating a standard purpose/value statement for a community management program.

The process of creating a statement of Shared Purpose/Shared Value should precede the formation of any community. It is the raison d’etre. To quote Rachel Happe, “Shared purpose is why you are coming together and shared value is what you will do together to address it.” Using a format like The Community Roundtable’s helps you identify your community’s organizational objectives and member objectives.

Do your research.

Start by doing user research with potential or current community members about what they want in a community.

Do look for examples.

Immerse yourself in the use cases of other successful communities to be able to see the possibilities for your own.

Don’t move too fast.

This is not an exercise you can do in one hour. This is a strategic process that requires research, feedback, identification of best practices and the involvement of key stakeholders who want to see the community succeed.

Don’t mistake your software for your community.

Investing in a community requires much more than an investment of software. The time invested in creating this value statement will pay off in the long term as it helps you identify all the ways your community (and you) adds value.

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.

Community Managers Matter

December 18, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

If 2014 had a theme at TheCR it might have been “Community Managers are important.” I know – it seems obvious, and if you are reading here then chances are you too think that community managers are important, but time and time again this year we’ve uncovered research, or heard a case study that once again proves the value of community management and good community managers.

​Despite progress in understanding the discipline of community management over the years, far too many communities are still without any dedicated community management resources. However, the truth is, community managers matter – they impact the engagement, ability to measure value and the maturity of the community. For anyone hoping to get business value from a community, appropriately resourcing community management staff should be a priority.

SOCM FACT #09 -  Measuring Community Value

Do you work in a community that prioritizes the importance of dedicated community management? Have you found that dedicated community managers make it easier to measure the value of your organization’s community? We’d love to hear from you!

You can review more findings related to community management in the State of Community Management 2014. This post is part of a series highlighting some of the most thought-provoking data from the SOCM 2014 – brought to you via a fun poster – perfect for sharing on Twitter, hanging at your desk, or printing out and waving around your next community strategy meeting.

Want even more community facts? Check out the full SOCM 2014 here:

The State of Community Management 2014 from The Community Roundtable

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Measuring the Value of Communities

February 25, 2014 By Jim Storer

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

It’s the last week to take the 2014 State of Community Management survey! Have you shared your community insights? If you work with an online community we would love to hear from you – you can take the survey here through this Friday, February 28th.

Last week we shared why the State of Community Management research is important to community managers. Today, we’ll give you a preview of how the data supports the importance of community managers.

value of a community manager

Preliminary results show that survey respondents who have at least one full-time community manager dedicated to their community are more likely to be able to measure that community’s value – only 6 percent of those with no dedicated full-time community manager feel they can measure the value of their community, but 51 percent of survey respondents with one or more dedicated community managers indicate that they can measure this. Dedicated staffing for communities is a sign of community maturity, and these communities with one or more community managers are more likely to have a defined strategy and cultural norms for participation.

Stay tuned for more 2014 State of Community Management results on the standards and strengths of online communities. Can’t wait for more community data? You can check out past State of Community Management results here.

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The Community Roundtable is committed to advancing the business of community. We are dedicated to the success of community and social business leaders and offer a range of information and training services. We facilitate TheCR Network – a trusted environment in which to discuss and share daily challenges and triumphs with proven leaders.  Our weekly programming, access to experts, curated content, and vibrant discussions make TheCR Network the network of the smartest social business leaders.  Join today.

Friday Roundup – Building Value for 2014

January 10, 2014 By Jim Storer

Image via SmilingTreeToys at Etsy.com

Image via SmilingTreeToys at Etsy.com

As we head into the new year we’re paying special attention to building  value in our communities in 2014. Over the last week week we looked at resources you can use when you’re building a social or community program, the value of social business and how to articulate the power of community management.  We’re already looking forward to next week when we’ll tackle the idea of building reputation in community management.

Our favorite links this week include two exciting social jobs, a lively discussion on community participation and some great advice from an industry expert. We’re also excited for some upcoming events and would love to hear where you plan on learning and networking in 2014.

As always have a safe and happy weekend. We’ll see you on Monday with some fun blog content from expert guests!

  • Percolate is hiring a Community Manager and a Client Solutions Manager in NYC.
  • Great comments on this post about getting a non-technical audience to participate in a technical support community.
  • The five elements of Working Out Loud from John Stepper.
  • Goals, Objectives, and Setting Your Social Media Radar on Success
  • A few valuable events coming in the next few months: IBM Connect, Enterprise 2.0 and J. Boye Web and Intranet.

Building Value: Articulating the Power of Community Management

January 7, 2014 By Jim Storer

Over and over we hear from members and peers that articulating the value of a thoughtful and well-executed community program is one of the hardest parts of their job. Sure – wrangling tough community members isn’t a walk in the park, and no one likes a troll, but condensing the power of community management into a few sentences is often very tough – even for experienced community practitioners. If you’re building out a community program at your company, you’ve likely faced the same challenge.

In the document below – our 2013 State of Community Management report, we focus specifically on the value of community management. Highlights include discussion around what business communities look like – and the value of this type of program, as well as an in-depth look at the role of a community manager and the value they bring. Resources like this report can really provide the concrete research and case studies that non-believers are looking for.


2013 SOCM: The Value of Community Management from The Community Roundtable

Check out all of our State of Community Management research here – including the evolution of the social business industry and analysis of organizational patterns and lessons learned from industry leaders and practitioners, and see how you can leverage the insights within to better articulate the power of the work you do. We know the value of expert community management – help the rest of your company see it, too.

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The Community Roundtable Toolkits are designed to help individuals map out the next challenges in their community journey. The Toolkits provide actionable templates, guides and resources whether you are laying the foundation for a successful program to organizing, assessing and reporting on their community efforts to truly transforming your organization into a networked business to gaining the knowledge needed to effectively coach executives in social.

Learn more.

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