This framework was developed to show what skills can fall under a Community Management position. It is not a list of things every CM must have or do in order to run a community. Rather, these are components that lead to the successful running of a community, regardless of where the skill is sourced from.

How do I use it?

Many community managers find themselves in situations where their job title and description do not match their actual role. This framework can help you advocate for a much needed promotion, or to accurately rewrite your role.

Relatedly, many CM's run their communities solo, and this framework can help identify areas were extra team members, contractors, or organization help are needed.

There are many other opportunities where this framework can come in handy, including in launching a community, hiring or job searching, or finding areas for self improvement. We'd love to hear how it's helped you!

The Framework in Action

• 2022 Community Manager Handbook - This handbook shows you how CM's use the skills in their practice

• Community Maturity Model - The CMM can help you benchmark your community and understand what areas might need more skilled attention.

• Hiring a Community Manager - This resource bundle is aimed at those looking to expand their team, find a replacement, or hire a new CM for their community.

SKILL BREAKDOWN

The red fifth of the skills framework is all about engagement. This includes:

• Listening and analyzing - Scanning, reviewing and compiling key community conversations and topics to inform content and programming plans.
  
• Response and escalation - Responding as appropriate to enforce community policies and guidelines, address issues in the community and identify those issues needing involvement from higher levels of community or organizational stakeholders.
  
• Moderation and conflict facilitation - Using moderation and facilitation skills to recognize and defuse conflicts,
  protect community members and maintain a constructive, respectful tone in the community.
  
• Promoting productive behaviors - Promoting productive behaviors includes modeling, recognizing and rewarding the behaviors that add the most value to a community
  
• Empathy and member support - Developing activities that make members feel heard and supported - either through direct engagement or indirectly through creating content and programming that does so.
  
• Facilitating connections - Understanding community members and their skills, expertise, and interests to create member collisions and direct introductions.
  
• New member recruitment - Communicating and promoting the value of the community in a way that entices new members to join.
  
• New member welcoming - Building connections and creating content and programming to help members feel comfortable, connected and engaged in their first interactions within the community.
  
• Member advocacy - Representing the needs expressed by the community or individual members to other stakeholders to ensure those needs are heard and addressed
  
• Behavior change and gamification - Identifying community members' motivation for participation and creating methods to leverage those motivators to help members find value in the community.
  

To learn more about these skills, check out the Engagement Resource Bundle.

The blue fifth of the skills framework is all about strategy. This includes:

• Community strategy development - Identifying shared purpose and value of the community for the organization and members, how it will be achieved at a high level, and developing the business model that will support it.
  
• Roadmap development - Developing the plan for operations and tactics that will allow the community to fulfill its strategic goals.
  
• Policy & guideline development - Collaborating with internal stakeholders and others to define formal policies and create informal guidelines that help members understand what is appropriate and inappropriate within the community, in plain language.
  
• Needs and competitive analysis - Creating and maintaining content structures, plans and calendars that match the learning journey of a specific community or community segment, including defining a taxonomy and scope
  
• Measurement, bench-marking and reporting -Assessing member needs, interests and other factors that provide opportunities for and barriers to success for the community. Needs and competitive analyses help identify gaps and risks to a strategy or plan
  
• Trend-spotting and Synthesizing - Recognizing and assessing inter-dependencies, and understanding the ramifications and implications of a strategy or plan. This skill also helps one understand the impact of current decisions on the future state of the organization, the community, and its members.
  
• Consulting - Consulting skills help a community professional identify needs and opportunities, research potential solutions or approaches, build tools and templates to support an approach, and coach others through it.
  
• Executive coaching - Executive coaching skills include the ability to understand executive context and needs, speak the language of executives and identify how to assist executives in a way they can absorb and put into action.
  
• Evaluating engagement techniques- Defining, testing and measuring the impact of engagement techniques to determine if they should be implemented, continued, changed or replaced.
  

To learn more about these skills, check out the Community Strategy Resource Bundle.

The yellow fifth of the skills framework is all about business. This includes:

• Program management - There are wide-ranging responsibilities involved in running a community or community program.These could include budget management, team management, vendor management, contractor management, reporting and P&L ownership.
  
• Business model development - Developing models for a community program that understand how investments and benefits accrue, the channels by which they accrue, and translating that into a financial model that includes multiple scenarios.
  
• Budget and financial management - Creating quarterly and annual budgets based on current and expected community needs, getting support and agreement for these budgets, tracking spending compared with these budgets throughout the budgeting cycle, and adjusting costs as needed.
  
• Team hiring and management - Team hiring and management involves collaborating with HR to define new positions, interview and hire against them as well as day-to-day team management
  
• Contractor hiring and management - Collaborating with HR to define new contract positions, interview and hire against them and the day-to-day management of contract workers
  
• Selling, influencing and evangelizing - Maintaining and increasing support for the community program by working to ensure others understand the opportunities and needs of the community, exerting influence to secure resources such as budget, investment and human resources and executive support.
  
• Community advocacy and promotion - The ability to represent the needs of the community and advocate for it in a variety of situations
  
• Training development and delivery - The ability to develop a training curriculum for community members and deliver (or oversee the delivery of) that training.
  
• Vendor management - Collaborating with stakeholders to define requirements, identify vendors, vet selections, retain services and manage vendor relationships and deliverables.
  
• Governance management - Planning, documenting, and maintaining the organizational standards and practices of your community for team and community members
  

To learn more about these skills, check out the Metrics, Hiring, and ROI Resource Bundle.

The purple fifth of the skills framework is all about content. This includes:

• Communication Planning - Developing a strategic approach and editorial calendar to ensure a community is aware of and understands priorities for the community, its content, and programming.
  
• Writing - Crafting compelling content that maintains the voice of the community, educates, inspires and encourages your community to take action.
  
• Graphics and Design - Creating graphic and design elements that illustrate and enhance community content and ideas.
  
• Multimedia production - Creating audio, video and digital assets for use in your community, either as pre-produced sharable content or in live events such as webinars and live chats.
  
• Narrative development - Developing and bringing together written, graphic and/or multimedia elements into strong, simple storylines that help people understand and put information in context.
  
• Editing - Reviewing community content and making revisions and suggestions to ensure consistent voice and tone, and to improve language, spelling and grammar, flow, and overall readability.
  
• Curation - Gathering various content (articles, posts, videos, graphics, interviews, marketing and technical papers) from internal and external sources and vetting, organizing and sharing the pieces that are valuable, timely, and relevant to your community.
  
• Programs and event planning - Planning live and virtual events and programs to support community initiatives to encourage participation and increase engagement. May include both online and in-person events of various sizes, such as small training sessions, online programming and conferences.
  
• Taxonomy or tagging management - Generating, applying and managing the electronic tags or keywords used in your community to classify and describe content, to make it more findable and discoverable.
  
• SEO and or internal search optimization - Developing and organizing content in a way that makes it easy to find via search.
  

To learn more about these skills, check out the Social Media  and Programming Resource Bundles. 

The green fifth of the skills framework is all about technology. This includes:

• System admin and configuration - Maintaining and configuring a software platform to ensure optimal benefit by the members and the organization.
  
• Data collection and analysis - The ability to define, gather, clean, process and analyze data to accurately demonstrate community growth and progress on strategically important metrics.
  
• Tool evaluation and recommendation - Identifying gaps, researching and providing recommendations for platforms, tools and services a community needs to start, grow and thrive.
  
• Technical support - Providing day to day support to members and stakeholders on the technical operations of your community. May include: password resets, troubleshooting, etc.
  
• Member database management - Managing the administrative tasks associated with community membership, including adding and removing members, updating profile information, etc.
  
• Platform architecture and integration - Designing and structuring the community platform to optimize the user experience, engagement and business value. This includes permission, group, content and integration architectures.
  
• Technology issue resolution - The ability to recognize and communicate technical issues with platforms and tools in a way technical staff can understand, and to follow up to ensure resolution
  
• Software and application programming - The ability to develop so\ware to create web pages, algorithms or applications that extend, support or sustain the community.
  
• UX and design - The ability to design web pages, so\ware applications or processes that make tasks and behaviors easy, enjoyable and intuitive for the user.
  
• Algorithm design and data manipulation - The ability to define the logical arguments needed to calculate results for data analysis and reporting, by creating formulas, writing arguments, or creating other means to produce analysis-ready results.
  

To learn more about these skills, check out the Community 101 Resource Bundle.