Our mission at The Community Roundtable is to listen, synthesize and distill the practice of community management in a way that is easy to understand and communicate. We do this through our models and research.
The Community Skills Framework™ includes five skill families with ten skills in each family, prioritized based on what we learned from our 2014 research.
How Does this Help you?
First, when your Aunt Betty asks you what community management is you can say, “It’s a mix of engagement, content, technical, business and strategy responsibilities.” This may or may not mean anything to her but it adds enough detail about your job without being verbose – and in plain language.
Second, and more importantly, it frames the conversation with your stakeholders about the scope of your role, its priorities, what is reasonable for one person to do and where your strengths and weaknesses are… incredibly helpful as you look to navigate your career and where you want to head next.
At The Community Roundtable, we use the Community Skills Framework to:
- Scope our research and report on what skills are priorities for different community roles (moderation, specialist, manager, strategist and director roles).
- Identify and report on those skills seen as consistent blind spots – areas where community professionals need the most training and resources.
- Prioritize programming in TheCR Network, identify where training would be valuable and determine areas to dig deeper on with our research.
If you’re a community professional, we hope the framework sparks ideas and gives you a better understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses.
