A community doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere. Most communities are the result of a carefully directed process. In this post I’ll take you through the thirteen steps from idea to successful community.
The summer holiday season is starting here in Europe, if you’re a community manager you might feel it’s time for a break to recharge your batteries. Especially as it’s likely you’re burning out. That’s at least according to the Community Roundtable state of Community Management report:
“A full 50% of community professionals experienced a high degree of burnout over the past 12 months.”
The community management community is fortunate that every year Rachel Happe and the Community Roundtable Team produce the state of community management report. An insight to world of community management, highlighting progress and challenges.
The main headline from the 2019 report is communities empower people, they transform organisations but unfortunately community leadership is still often disconnected from key decision making and operational stakeholders.
Are you using Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) in your organisation? How are you using them and, should you be using them for communities of practice? That’s something I’ll look at in this post. Please let me know your thoughts below.
A former colleague recently asked me about online communities at work, their value in supporting strategic activities and how to make the most of them. Kirsten Wagenaar and I discussed this and I decided to write a blog as a summary of that discussion.
The community of practice (CoP) is perhaps the most common type of (online) community. In a CoP colleagues come together to share best practices with each other. Medieval guilds, professional associations and in some instances, school classes are examples of communities of practice.
I recently joined Bind as a Community Management Consultant, but what does that mean? What is Community Management?
If communities are people who share a common focus, then Community Management is the proactive design, development, activation and ongoing cultivation of the community. It’s a professional approach, backed up by relevant data, to connect people around a common goal. It’s about building bridges and creating value.
During any kind of organizational change there will be a temptation to tackle the process with new procedures and technology. Which makes sense, since these are concrete and quantifiable elements. Attempts at sustainable change of this sort will however always fail. This is because people are the defining factor. And to win over people’s heads and hearts, these people will have to be your starting point.
No two communities are the same, but there are still a number of standard ingredients which are essential for any type of community to become a success. One of these is for instance the presence of a community manager. This article will tell you which other elements are needed.