TL:DR – We’re probably in the middle of a community recession – this presents unique challenges and opportunities
There’s A Big Correction Taking Place In Community Right Now
Getting data on the community industry (and community management) is hard.
The job title is pervasive and can mean so many things (e.g. residential property manager) that we struggle to build a good picture of the industry.
So, I researched respondents to a survey we undertook three years ago. If LinkedIn profiles are up to date, then around 50% of those folks are now either out of work or no longer working in the industry. And the vast majority of these layoffs occurred within the past 18 months.
That’s not a good sign.
Even anecdotally, I can’t remember when this many senior community professionals were out of work. And these aren’t short spells of worklessness.
Several acquaintances are now on to their 2nd and 3rd year(!) of looking for industry jobs. The abundance of senior community jobs which existed a few years ago aren’t around anymore.
Are We In A Community Recession?
Every week, we hear about new layoffs – often with the organisation simply cutting the entire community team and shuttering the community. I looked at the speakers of a significant industry event two years ago; 70% are out of work today – and these were the speakers!
There also doesn’t appear to be as many new communities launching as there used to be. A few years ago, most of our work was helping new brands launch communities. Today, it’s transforming and improving communities. Vendors don’t seem to announce the launch of new communities as often as they used to.
Builtwith data suggests that most of the major platform vendors have fewer clients than they used to.
It’s thus no coincidence that there are fewer industry events and attendance at those events seems to be way down from its peak.
Getting people through doors has become more challenging than ever. This is probably because a) Travel budgets have been cut, and b) There are simply fewer working community pros who can get through those doors.
This paints a picture of an industry if not in decline, then at least being buffeted by waves of change.
And yet…it’s not like people are engaging with each other less (the fuel for our work). The desire of people to ask questions, get help, and learn from one another is still as strong as possible.
We’re still engaging with each other as much as ever. This suggests a misalignment between what community is today and what it needs to be in the future.
What Caused The Community Recession?
The lack of good data makes it easy to speculate (and there’s no shortage of speculation).
I’d point the finger at three suspects.
Suspect 1: A shift to profitability.
Communities are a lot like conferences in some ways.
The people behind them have data that correlates strongly with value. Yet when times are tough, conferences are often the first cut. It isn’t connected to a clear business function, so often becomes the easiest thing to cut. It’s seen as a luxury rather than a necessity.
A large chunk of the community industry has grown to support the needs of support-centric communities favoured primarily by tech companies looking to scale. This makes the community industry precariously vulnerable to the whims of this sector.
Over the past few years, as the era of free money ended, the mindset amongst many tech companies shifted from growth to profitability (or sustainability). This often required cuts, and ‘community’ bears the brunt of those cuts because it’s among the more challenging programs to understand and directly connect to value (more on later).
The tech layoffs over the past few years (we might still be in a correction phase) included community professionals as much as others. Yet, today, we’re seeing layoffs more uniquely concentrated amongst community professionals (and often distinct from broader restructuring or layoffs).
Suspect 2: Engagement Is Shifting Away From Forums.
It’s also clear that member behaviours have shifted distinctly away from the kind of communities a lot of community professionals build. We’re in the Community Everywhere era now. Fewer people want to participate in forum-centric experiences (and we have the research to back this up).
Too often, our approach to building community is platform-centric vs. audience-centric. It’s like selling mainframes in the era of cloud computing – overbuilt, rigid, and out of step with how people increasingly want to interact today.
In organisations, a community is often defined as a platform, which is the responsibility of a community team. What happens before and after members get to and leave the platform often isn’t the community team’s responsibility. As behaviours shift away from forums, the community team is managing a declining percentage of interactions.
We can argue to the cows come home about control and owning your data etc…but none of that matters if your audience increasingly searches for “[problem] + Reddit” to find their solutions (or your results don’t show up highly in search anymore). And we haven’t gotten started on the rising number of people who search for solutions on YouTube, TikTok, StackOverflow, and AI bots.
There are plenty of nuances and exceptions here, but in short, community practices are increasingly out of date with modern realities.
Suspect 3: Expectations of an AI-propelled future
I’m less sure on this point, but there is certainly a possibility that in a world of LLMs, organisations increasingly suspect communities are redundant. Why would people ask a community when they can ask a bot and get a quicker answer?
Is it worth renewing your community vendor contract for three years if you think a community will be redundant in two?
The difference in answer quality between bots and humans often isn’t huge. And can’t customer support reps pick up the questions bots can’t answer?
Are there still enough in-between questions to justify a community when costly vendor contracts come up for renewal?
I doubt this is a major contributor for now, but it’s probably an argument we need data to refute – and there really isn’t good data at the moment.
How Do We Survive The Community Recession?
Step One: Rebrand Community To Align With The Business Function It Supports
I’d suggest a small tweak to rebrand ‘community’ to better align the outcome we produce. Instead of ‘community’, let’s add the function it supports. For example:
- Community Marketing. Driving growth by fostering and engaging with existing communities.
- Community Support. Improving the support experience by sourcing answers from the community.
- Community-Driven Innovation. Creating better products through community collaboration.
This at least helps the most hard-nosed CFO understand that this isn’t a nice thing an organisation is doing ‘for the community’, but a specific program to achieve measurable outcomes.
Step Two: Shift resources to reflect realities
Let’s recognise that a forum represents just one part of the community mix. It’s often great for Q&A discussions but not as popular as it used to be for sustaining long-term engagements and ongoing conversations.
The share of budget (and resources) should match where members go to satisfy their needs for support, belonging, influence, and learning.
If and when the audience begins shifting away from discussion forums, so must our programs to stay relevant. At the moment, this isn’t happening. We need to break free of the platform centric approach to building a community.
Step Three: Pursue Different Platforms
If you’re looking for work, consider roles outside of enterprise communities.
‘Community’ has always been a broad umbrella term for roles that can be very distinct. While enterprise communities consume the majority of attention (and resources), they’re not the only type of community you could help build.
Worse yet, while enterprise community building entails some rather big pros (higher salaries/bigger budgets), it also entails increasingly heavy cons (low job security).
If finding a role in this sector is challenging, it might be worth considering one of the other options depicted below.
This won’t help much if you’re looking for a comparable salary to the last role. But given how many people seem to cycle between periods of highly-paid work and non-work, it might average out better to accept a lower salary for better job security.
It’s also worth considering that many highly paid, senior community roles probably aren’t returning – at least not anytime soon. The community sector is transitioning, and we’re unlikely to see the boon times returning, at least not in their past form.
Where Is This All Leading?
There won’t be any titanic changes anytime soon. Most shifts are slow and imperceptible without access to good data. But over time, I’d suspect:
- A slow shift in community work from platform-centric to audience-centric (Community Everywhere approach). This will very much change the nature of our work over time.
- A slow shift from community support to community marketing for many community professionals.
- A decline in the number of active community professionals – and a sharp decline in the number of experienced community professionals active in the industry.
- ‘Community’ becoming a program run by a department rather than a department itself.
It’s easy to look at the above and feel pessimistic. It’s a far cry from the ‘chief of community’ days and the ‘community is the future of business’ days. Many of us miss the days of glitzy vendor conferences in lavish hotels in fancy cities (with incredible afterparties).
Now the hype has faded, it’s clearer what the picture of community looks like, and the idealists have left the stage.
This current period of change (or correction) also presents much-needed opportunities to stabilise, grow, and get pragmatic about the real work of the community to support and grow organisations.
Let’s get going.
