Insights from Community Management Research

While every online community is different, there are specific trends and characteristics that separate the best from the rest. To help us better understand “How Real-World Community Managers Build Successful and Thriving Online Communities,” DNN turned to Rachel Happe (@rhappe), co-founder of the Community Roundtable (@TheCR), which supports business leaders developing their community and social business strategies.

In an hour-long webinar, Happe provided a closer look at the State of Community Management in 2014. The fifth edition of the Community Roundtable’s annual research surveyed 164 communities across industry, use case, size and age. Happe helped us understand how communities perform, the standards and strength of online communities today, and the opportunities that community managers should focus on to grow their programs.

Let’s have a look at the topics covered during the webinar.

How Communities Perform

More organizations are applying more processes to their community management and are seeing results! Of those with the most mature processes, 85% of the best-in-class (the top 20%) can measure the value of their processes, compared to 48% of the average community.

Community Managers Matter

Best-in-class communities have more than twice the number of community managers as average. In fact, having a dedicated community manager correlated to higher community maturity. In other words, the older your community is, the more likely you are to have a community manager dedicated to overseeing it. Additionally, communities with dedicated community managers are almost twice as likely to be able to measure value.

Internal and External Communities are Similar, But Different

While behavior changes may be more complex for internal communities than external communities, external communities have a bigger gap between ambition (strategy) and execution (roadmap). Still both types of communities are almost equally able to measure value. Engagement rates in internal communities are higher than in external communities, but not as much as expected.

Standards and Strengths

Executive participation is necessary to enable the success of most company engagement, so it’s not surprising that it is also strongly linked to community engagement. This validates the need for both sponsorship and behavior modeling on the part of executives.

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Strategy, Policy and Governance Remain Strong

When it comes to community maturity, a majority of communities have approved strategies and policies in place. While executives have helped to facilitate community vision, many struggle to invest fully in them. As a result, the gap between approved community strategies and funded roadmaps is significant.

Within best-in-class communities, 58% include CEO participation (vs. 36% in average community) and have demonstrated an ability to measure value; in addition, best-in-class communities have a fully-funded roadmap and advanced community leadership programs.

Community Programming Is Improving

Community programming standards are emerging and becoming increasingly integrated within communities. Best-in-class communities are more than twice as likely to have integrated editorial calendars. Additionally, communities that regularly employ content programming, as opposed to those that occasionally use it, are more likely to perform better.

Mary Cauwels, DNN’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, shared a case study of SchoolDude, a market leader in education enterprise asset management. SchoolDude deployed an online community on their website using DNN’s Evoq Social.

Cauwels described how the user-generated content in SchoolDude’s online community created relevant and keyword-rich content that’s indexed by search engines within hours. For Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Cauwels noted this this content is “the gift that keeps on giving.”

Read DNN's SchoolDude case study:

Opportunities for Growth

Community managers are stretched thin, taking on responsibilities that include curating and sharing content, measuring and reporting, and promoting productive behaviors. In order to be most effective, community managers need to understand community value so they can show how their communities are making an impact.

Establish a Baseline of Metrics

Almost 60% of community managers report on community metrics on a monthly basis, while tracking basic activities such as the number of active members and the volume of new content. However, best-in-class communities are more likely to track specific outcomes, including volume of comments, questions answered and new member activity.

Cauwels suggested that community managers use analytics to garner “internal bragging metrics” to share with peers and executives. In addition, Cauwels highlighted the analytics capabilities in DNN’s online community solution, Evoq Social.

Advocacy Programs Increase Engagement

Community advocacy and leadership programs require a strong investment in community management resources to scale from informal programs to structured programs to multi-tiered initiatives. Best-in-class communities have significantly more engagement and have high levels of formal and multi-tiered leadership programs that deliver some of the best community engagement rates. Of course, with higher engagement rates comes a need for more community managers.

Recommendations

Individually, these insights serve to illustrate what successful communities do and how they do it. Taken together, however, they effectively identify key trends highlighted in the State of Community Management 2014:

1. Community management maturity delivers business value
2. Executive participation impacts success
3. Advocacy programs increase engagement

As a result, investing in community maturity, developing advocacy programs and encouraging executive participation are key elements in building a successful and thriving online community. Happe encourages comparing your own performance against those featured in the report, as well as seeking resources outside your organization that can help you reach the next stage in the community development process.

Ultimately, what helps build better online communities is learning from others. By analyzing the characteristics and behaviors of other communities, community managers can identify the attributes and characteristics that can help them better understand their community’s value.

Webinar Slides

Feel free to view the slides from DNN's community management webinar.