With a new year comes a renewed sense of purpose, at least that's what we aim to identify! Many of us found the first month of the new year a busy time, with a lot of tasks on to-do lists. To both get us ramped back up into the swing of things after the December holidays and to refocus our priorities to what we can achieve this year, we spent the month of January focusing on Community Management Fundamentals.
Over the month, we focused on topics like setting personal and professional goals, identifying areas of interest, new types of content & programming, getting organized, affirming intentions, and community insights from experts.
January in TheCR Network: Roundtable Calls
Our first call of the year was both a reminder of what we discussed in 2019 and an opportunity to set intentions, identify goals, and share priorities.
On the Roundtable Call, A New Year in the Network: Goals, Friends, & Sneak Peeks, we gathered together with members to discuss our priorities, goals, and professional development requests, while also sharing a look at how we can all collaborate in TheCR Network this year.
A variety of topics of interest arose, but we found many commonalities:
- Integrating community into the business
- Motivation for people (ex: What's In It For Me)
- HR classification of job titles and career paths
- Driving engagement back to external communities
- What type of content users interact with and how we encourage and model new ways to deliver content and knowledge
This was a great call to have right after the holidays as it helped bring together like-minded people and also brought some visibility to exactly what we'll be focusing on this year, helping to inform our later programming...
Our next call came out of the desire of our members to try something new and focused on the foundation of podcasting. On our Podcasting 101 Roundtable Call, we heard from @Dori Gray and @Shannon Abram on how they've set up podcast programs, what tools they use, and what strategies they employ to create interesting, fun, and informative podcasts.
With tips and tricks to boot, Dori and Shannon gave a great walkthrough of how someone might put together and develop a podcast program for their community, no matter if it's internal- or external-facing. In a month focusing on Community Management Fundamentals, this information was accessible and gave a great starting point to anyone considering podcasting and was a great check-in for anyone working on a podcast.
If you're curious about the call, you can find the Roundtable Recording here.
The next call of the month took a step back and looked at the one of the key aspects of community: effective and efficient communication. On the How To Create A Lean Office Roundtable Call, TheCR's @Emma Nicholas gave some great insight into how we can adapt lean manufacturing principles to create more efficient processes in our communities and organizations.
Through focusing on meetings, emails, and calendars, we learned about how we can keep meetings on task, get responses to emails, and use our time efficiently. By applying some fundamental skills and strategies (like blocking over time for recurring tasks, saving pleasantries for the end of emails, and assigning a note-taker for meetings), Emma illustrated how we can all be more efficient and effective in our communication.
If you're curious about what was discussed on this call, you can check out the Roundtable Recording here.
We couldn't think of a better way to wrap up our month of community management than to hear from an expert on what they're reflecting on and looking forward to this year. For our last Roundtable Call,
20/20 Vision: Community Lessons and Resolutions with Allison Leahy, we heard from Spotify's Allison about some of her biggest lessons learned from her time in community. Through learning a bit about where she started (Ning and FitBit to name a few places!), members learned about some of Allison's key experiences that she uses to guide her community strategy.
While focusing on resolutions, Allison shared two key points that she's aiming to work through in 2020 and encourage members to share theirs. We opened up space to have a discussion and pick the brain of our guest expert around these points of interest like content strategy, member retention, navigating tool ecosystems, and encouraging community participation in internal audiences.
This call was the perfect way to sum up our month of community management fundamentals, kick off the new year with intentions, and lead us into February, where we'll be focusing on people-first initiatives.
But more on that later...
For now, we'll be reflecting on every Allison said, suggested, and shared. If you want to do the same, you can
find the Roundtable Recording of the call here.
What Did You Think?
For the length of January, we opened up a poll that asked the question: "What competency do you want to focus on most in 2020?"
While we focused on fundamentals throughout January, a sub-theme that emerged was clearly all about intention setting. Because of this, we loved getting to see the results of this poll and understand what members are hoping to focus on this year based on the Community Maturity Model competencies.
So, what did members say? Drumroll, please...
The majority of members who responded said that they'd like to focus on strategy, with second place going to metrics & measurement. On the opposite side, 0% of members said they'd like to focus on policies & governance and the second lowest percentage of members would like to focus on tools.
Since we phrased this question as what you'd like to focus on versus what you expect to or are focusing on, it's interesting to note that members prioritize strategy and metrics over the other six competencies. And when there is opportunity to prioritize other areas, almost no members would like to spend time focusing on tools. This is an interesting finding considering conversations around tools and technology are always popular and complex, but it's clearly not an area people want to be spending their time addressing.
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
Our goal of this month was to go back to basics and explore both some areas that were new to us and areas that just needed a refresh. We aimed to reinforce these foundational elements through setting goals and intentions, and then figuring out how we're going to follow through.
What we talked about in January will inform us as we progress through 2020, as this is just the start of these conversations. Our goal was to open up a dialogue around key areas of interest and identify some of the gaps we have, which we thoroughly accomplished. We'll take these gaps and goals and translate them into each next month to see how we can continue to grow, adapt, and evolve our community programs and ourselves.
In February, we'll be looking specifically at people-first initiatives, and if January's reflection has sparked areas of interest for you, let us know! While we plan our programming calendar, we also leave space for reactive programming, spur-of-the-moment topics, and member involvement, so leave us a note or send us a message and we'll get something together to address your topics of interest.
And if you're not a member of TheCR Network, or if you know someone who isn't a member of TheCR Network, but would love to participate in these conversations, please reach out! We're happy to talk about how you or they can get involved.
#contentandprograms#communitymanagement#leadership#strategy#culture