Background

In 2016, we took on two projects aimed at documenting the diversity of STEM community manager positions: a series of interviews with community managers and a landscape survey on the state of scientific community management. These projects started to give us a more detailed view of this new career path and set the stage for the 2017 inaugural Community Engagement Fellows Program (CEFP).

Fast-forward to 2021, and we were observing an ever-increasing number of STEM community manager roles and almost 400 STEM community managers in the CSCCE community of practice. We’d begun describing the range of scientific communities via our community profiles project, and realized it was also time to revive our work to describe the range of community manager positions, too. Linking all these pieces will allow us to describe a spectrum of community roles across the STEM ecosystem.

Goals of the project

Scientific communities are increasingly recognizing the importance of having community managers, but identifying and defining these roles isn’t as straightforward as you might expect. Community managers work under a variety of job titles and they often perform other tasks (e.g., external communications or project management). Sometimes their duties are spread across a team. 

In our case studies, we wanted to capture the diversity of work performed by community managers in order to:

• Highlight the vital contributions of community managers
• Enable aspiring community managers and funders to better understand these positions
• Enable ourselves and others to advocate for the importance of these roles
• Reveal trends that will allow us to provide relevant support for community managers

As we create and release community manager case studies, we’re also building a database of job descriptions and collecting more granular information on the skills community managers use in their roles. The result will be a rich set of interlinked resources, which also includes the CSCCE skills wheel released in 2021, describing the role of the community manager in STEM. 

How the project was carried out

This project was conceived and led by CSCCE’s Director Lou Woodley in 2016 and reimagined together with Communications Director Katie Pratt in 2021 who led the design of the case study template. It was implemented with the additional input of Communications Assistant Saima Sidik who assisted with data collection and presentation.

We started planning the current iteration of case studies in 2021, began work in earnest at the beginning of 2022, and the first case study was released on 9 March 2022. We are gradually inviting members of our community of practice to fill in the case study survey (which is almost identical to the one deployed in 2016), along with a worksheet that quantifies time spent using the 45 skills described in the CSCCE skills wheel. This information is then curated into the final case studies and released as PDFs for free download under a CC BY-NC-ND license. 

If you would like to work with us to create your own case study, please fill out this short form or email info@cscce.org with any other questions.

Further information

• Overview of the project
• The CSCCE Community Profiles
• The CSCCE Skills Wheel
• CSCCE working group on community manager roles
• Additional materials describing the ecosystem of these roles and organizations that host them coming soon!

CSCCE Community Manager Case Studies

STEM Community Manager case studies are currently listed alphabetically by surname of the community manager.

Where there is a corresponding CSCCE Community Profile for the community that the community manager works with, that is noted in the case study description.

B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, O, S, V, Z

B

C

D

F

G

H

J

K

L

M

N

O

S

V

Z

Community calls

On our August 2022 community call, Lou shared an overview of findings from analyzing all 25 case studies in this collection, including a set of draft recommendations to address some of the common challenges STEM community managers face:

Participants in the project, Connie Clare and Nathaniel Gore, also shared their reflections on being a community manager in STEM: