Should Community be placed under Marketing?

🎨 Community Design
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Currently designing the org. structure of Women in Web3 and would love to hear y’all’s :teapot: on where Community should be placed.

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There is no right answer. I argue endlessly it’s a company culture thing, what the end results you want to achieve are, etc.

If you don’t have a focus on support, you shouldn’t be in support.

If you aren’t product focused, don’t be in product.

If you have are going to be offering training, education, or similar things - Marketing doesn’t sound right.

If you are focused on prospects/bringing in new customers/Metrics like visits, click thru, open rates, shares, impressions - Marketing is probably the spot for you.

TLDR; More info needed to tell ya :grinning:

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I posted it on Twitter and LinkedIn for more answers :innocent:

Should Community be placed under Marketing?

— Rosieland ☁️🌈 (@RosielandHQ) September 29, 2022
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I would kind of agree that there’s not right answer. Being somewhere is better than nowhere, hah.

For me, ideally community reports to the CEO, or the equivalent, depending how big the organisation is.

However, I’ve also been thinking about the name of ‘Community Executive Officer’. To me this is the CEO who is community minded, part of me thinks this is crucial for embedding community into the the culture of the organisation — essentially every business decision needs to consider the community as a whole, and I’m not sure business really think about it to this depth.

If I look back at Ministry of Testing I was the Community Executive Officer. I founded it, I ran the company, I led community.

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I agree, in an ideal world they’d have their own organisation with representation on the board, but that’s unfortunately rare out there. As community can touch on so many different parts of a business or organisation.

I also second that it depends on what the community is for, peer to peer support community should probably be in the support org and a brand community would probably best fit in marketing. I admit to having a gut reaction of NO! to the question at hand, but that’s mainly down to experience of organisations putting community under marketing because they didn’t know where it should sit :slight_smile:

Online volunteer/campaigning organisations then the community is actually pretty much everything, so it would be central with everything else supporting it. I wonder what working examples of this kind of thing are out there, Open Source Software Projects perhaps?

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Hmmm, I guess we’re pretty close at Discourse. We used to have just 2 departments – engineering and community. The community team were the entire support structure around the product. That has changed a bit as we’ve scaled though.

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Hmm, I think it most falls under Marketing when it comes to the traditional functions of a business.

But, of course, it skirts Sales, Operations, Product… too.

I like the idea of having a top-down and integrated approach, where the CEO - like with Sales, Marketing, Operations - may have had this experience, and experience as a community manager, or is otherwise invested in the concept of community and its importance for the organisation (and the world).