Community ownership models

Community Building Enterprise
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I’ve been thinking about community ownership and operating models and I’m interested to learn more about where community sits within your organisation.

There used to be clear but disparate schools of thought—one side stating that a Community Team should be its own autonomous, self-governing unit, with the other side suggesting it makes more sense to report to another department.

I have an opinion but I’ve never worked as a CM from within a large enterprise. I’m curious to hear from those of you that do (or have).

I think my current position is that in smaller organisations or those in which the community is only serving one department, reporting to that department makes sense.

For example:

Community goal Reports to
Support deflection Support
Acquisition, advocacy or events Marketing
Product feedback, testing, ideation Product

Whereas enterprise-scale communities serving lots of departments are probably better served with autonomous leadership. Provided the department doesn’t become a silo and there is strong cross-functional governance, it seems like the most effective way to avoid too many competing stakeholder priorities.

This data from the Community Roundtable seems to conclude that the independent approach is growing across their respondents, of which approx 30% are from orgs of 1000+ personnel.

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What benefits or challenges do you face as a direct result of your community ownership and governance model?

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I guess I’ll kick start with the first reply :zany_face:

In my current role, the community team sits within marketing, and I think there are real benefits to that. It gives us a strong connection to positioning, launches, content, advocacy and the wider story the company is trying to tell.

But, I’ve always felt that community is not traditional marketing. There’s obviously overlap, but the operating logic behind them is different. For example, what works in an acquisition funnel does not necessarily work within the community itself. Sometimes the right decision is not the one that creates the most immediate engagement or campaign value. Sometimes it is listening, slowing down, and creating space for feedback, or protecting trust even when that is harder to measure.

For me, the biggest challenge of sitting within marketing is making sure that community does not get reduced to “another channel”. Because community isn’t just another audience to broadcast to.

I think this model works best when the community team has the autonomy to make member-first decisions, while still being closely connected to the teams it serves.

All in all, I’m not sure the answer is “community should sit in X department”. I think the more important question is whether the organisation gives the community team the mandate, access and trust to operate across departments. That said, I’ve only worked in an enterprise scale community, but I can see that for smaller communities reporting into the department that the community primarily serves makes sense. But once community is serving marketing, product, support, success and education at the same time, I can see why more independent community leadership becomes valuable.

Otherwise the risk is that community becomes shaped by whichever department owns it, rather than by what the community actually needs.

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I agree. At the most basic level, communities function as a top-of-the-funnel acquisition channel but there is a more complicated trust relationship to navigate once they are there.

Agreed, this is where the model can break.

I think you are saying that you have a fully autonomous community team which functionally reports to marketing. If that is the case, how do you set boundaries or resolve conflicts of interest if the marketing team want to do something you don’t consider member-first?

And if your community is designed to serve marketing goals, do you have challenges around handling demands from stakeholders in different departments?

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Your assumption is largely right, with a slight caveat.

We do sit within Marketing, so I wouldn’t describe us as fully autonomous in the “independent business unit sense”. But functionally, we do have a good amount of autonomy in how we operate the community day to day, protect the tone of the space, and decide what does or doesn’t feel right for members.

The boundary is that community can support business goals, but it can’t just become a delivery mechanism for them.

When requests come in, (whether that be a marketing campaign, research conversations etc.) it’s not usually an immediate yes or no. It’s more: what’s the member value here? Is this the right space for it? Does the framing fit the relationship we have with the community? Often, the answers are “yes, but not in that format”, “yes, but we need to approach it differently", "not in that channel”, or “not until we’ve done the groundwork”.

When requests aren’t “member first”, it’s usually because the framing isn’t right.

Lots of our teams see value in the community, which is a good thing, but every team’s “small ask” can quickly become a noisy or extractive experience if it isn’t managed carefully.

In the same way we trust our other teams to know their areas of expertise, they also understand we know ours - if we need to find creative ways to support something, we will.

But the health of the community has to remain the thing that gives it value.