The Results from CMX’s First Community Health Survey

Measuring your community’s health can be difficult, but it’s a critical step to understanding how well your community is serving the needs of its members.In March 2021, we ran the first-ever CMX Community Health Survey. Our goal was to hear from as many CMX'ers as possible about their experience, and take away some actionable next steps for the team.Curious how community members feel about the CMX Community? We’ve rounded up the highlights below!We’re committing to making CMX a helpful community of peers, an incredible resource for community builders, and an inclusive space for all. To that end, we’ve included some of the next steps we’re taking to improve the CMX Community.Want to skip straight to the data? For full results, including breakdowns by different respondent types, check out the full CMX Community Health Survey Results.Want to learn more about how to run a community health survey? Check out How We Run Community Health Surveys at CMX.Please reach out to us if you have any questions about this survey, or the CMX Community in general. You can email Beth at team@cmxhub.com.

About This Survey

We had 293 people respond to the survey. With a 95% confidence level, this meant our margin of error is about 6%. While we know that many people did not get to fill out the survey, this means we are fairly confident that this sample of responses reflects the broader community.To dive deeper into these insights, we ran crosstabs to break down our analysis further along gender, industry, location, and other self-identification categories. You can dive into more detail on the below results in the full CMX Community Health Survey Results.The data from this survey gave us a baseline that we can track over time, and we hope to see ongoing improvement the next time we run this survey.

General CMX Community Results

The Net Promoter Score for the entire CMX Community is 54. This largely means that people are enjoying their experience in CMX, and would share their experience with others.Is this good? According to Hubspot, an NPS above 50 is considered “excellent.” Learn more about NPS on Hubspot’s blog.

“I think it’s one of the best resources available for community professionals.” "It is the ONLY space for community. If there are others, they don't even compare.”

72% of respondents found it extremely or somewhat easy to find helpful resources and answers to questions. 9% said they find it extremely or somewhat difficult.Common feedback focused on Slack and Facebook not being designed for a knowledge base, and about feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of resources CMX offers. We hear you! We’ve implemented site-wide search on the CMX website, and are working to introduce content pillars to better organize content on the CMX blog.

In regards to Bevy’s impact on the CMX Community since its 2019 acquisition, 40% said Bevy had a positive impact, while just 7% said the impact has been negative. 14% have felt no impact since the acquisition.

Programming Results

One of our qualitative goals for this survey was to understand which CMX programs are most important to our members in order to better focus our time and energy. For this section, respondents were only asked questions about programming they used.

The CMX Slack and Facebook continue to be our most popular programs, making it clear that our members value an online discussion space to meet, connect, and ask advice from each other. Events, including CMX Connect, are also popular. We’re excited to continue building out these programs — don’t miss CMX Summit 2021!

88% of the community agreed that CMX HQ events provided actionable information that helped them achieve their goals.

38% of respondents read CMX’s original research. We asked them which resources they found the most valuable.Our most popular piece of original research by far is the annual Community Industry Report. The Guide to Community Platforms came in at 44%, and the Guide to Content Strategy for Community Professionals was at just 25%.A handful of folks (1%) say they weren’t aware of all of these resources! And so, we’re going to make sure they are easier to find on the website.We also asked community members which topics they would be interested in reading new original research about. Popular responses included:

• Community careers and salaries
• Diversity, equity and inclusion in the community industry
• Community events and virtual events
• Community moderation
• Community team design
• Analytics and data

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Results

This section was included to help us establish a baseline that will allow us to better serve our users, setting goals and measuring progress as we continue to form an inclusive community culture. This data will help inform programming and other initiatives, like member resource groups.

Role and Industry

The majority of the CMX Community (44%) are managers in their company. Just 8% are at the VP or executive level.

60% of the CMX Community works in the tech industry. The next most popular industry was Professional Services with just 9%. 53% work at B2B companies, while 22% are B2C. Nonprofit made up 12% of our survey pool.

We also took a geographic survey of respondents. The overwhelming majority of community members (63%) are in the United States. 6% are in the United Kingdom, and Canada, India, and Portugal accounted for 3% each.

About Our Members

64% of respondents identify as women, while 33% identify as men. Community might be one of the only fields in the tech industry that is dominated by women! 1% of respondents identify as gender variant/non-conforming.

We then asked respondents to select which option best described their racial or ethnic identity. The majority of community professionals in CMX are white. Just 3% selected Black or African descent.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

We then asked a series of questions about whether our members feel included and welcome in the CMX Community. To see a more detailed breakdown of the results in this section, check out the full CMX Community Health Survey Results.

When asked if they feel comfortable voicing opinions in the CMX Community, 31% said always, 29% said frequently, 30% said sometimes, and 9% answered rarely or never.Respondents who answered "Rarely" or "Never" were asked to explain their reasoning. Answers included:

• Those who prefer to observe rather than participate
• Those who feel like they aren’t enough of an expert to participate
• Those who feel like moderation isn’t clear enough, so they don’t know how to engage

To improve our moderation, we just launched the Communiteers, the first-ever CMX moderator program! This is designed to ensure all moderation actions are consistent and well-understood by our members. Want to join the team? Send an email to beth@cmxhub.com.

When asked “I feel CMX provides diverse programming to meet my needs,” 60% of respondents said yes, 35% said sometimes and 5% said no. When asked if CMX had an inclusive culture, 74% of respondents said yes, 23% said sometimes, and 3% said no.We're actively working to make CMX a more welcoming and inclusive community. Some of the specific initiatives we're working on include:

• Running this survey biannually to track these responses over time
• Working with DEI&B experts to audit our community
• Setting specific DEI&B goals for our events to ensure we’re hosting a diverse speaker lineup
• Overhauling our process for identifying and featuring community experts to be more transparent and accessible
• Creating a new set of community values
• Ensuring at least 20% of staff is Black by the end of 2021

Fun Results!

And of course, the fun part!

My favorite takeaway? The majority of you thought that if animals could talk, dolphins would be the most interesting (27%). But dogs were a close second (26%)! We had one respondent say “Whale, duh,” and another who said “Snails have seen some shit,” which made the CMX team start looking at snails a little differently.Thanks to everyone for participating! This isn't the last time we'll run this survey, so keep your eyes peeled for the next iteration.To learn how we put our survey together, read How We Run Community Health Surveys at CMX.