Our friends and colleagues at The Community Roundtable in the US have released their excellent annual State of Community Report, analysing how community programs are working across various North American organisations, and how we can reliably define the blueprint for success.

The 2023 edition is the 14th edition of the survey. and covers community strategy, engagement, measurement, technology, and career development.

Download The Community Roundtable 2023 Report

The 2023 report shows communities continue to deliver results for their organisations, despite a challenging and volatile landscape.

A key contribution of The CR Report is the establishment of Best-in-Class (BIC) criteria that helps community managers, builders and advocates specifically point to a blueprint for community success - from strategy, to operations, governance and more. The CR continues to refine this criteria.

For 2023, best-in-class communities have all of the following:

• An approved community strategy

• An approved community roadmap

• A formal community leadership program exists

• Most community roles are defined

• Policies and guidelines both exist

The report found that 12% of communities surveyed met Best-in-Class criteria. The majority were externally-facing use cases (93%) and were had been in place across a longer time (57% at least 10 years or older).

The data also pointed to BIC communities out-performing others across key metrics, and being better able to withstand the precarity of economic and social turbulence.

Read the results from the 2022 ACM National State of Community Management Report, covering Australia and New Zealand.