Our Mission

Building a Values-Based Business

There are a number of reasons we started The Community Roundtable, but chief among them is that we care about helping people. That sentiment is directed toward our customers, but it is also directed to others – potential employees, vendors, partners and people we don’t even know. We have some unique experience and expertise in social software, social media, community management, organizational theory, and strategy. We’d like to share what we’ve learned.

We want to build something that not only sustains us, but also sustains our wider community. Money is important because it allows us to operate, provide for our families and pay vendors or employees, but it is a means – not the goal of The Community Roundtable. What’s the primary goal then?

We believe that social organizations are more humane, more fulfilling, more honest and ultimately better for all involved – and we are really excited to see this transformation starting to take place in organizations of all sizes. What do we mean by a social organization? It is one where constituents are treated as equals, listened to, heard and proactively nurtured. A social organization is one where constituents are free to bring their whole self to work and use all of their talents and interests. A social organization is ultimately one where employees and customers don’t end interactions with frustration because they are not empowered to make needed changes or pursue opportunities. Our goal at The Community Roundtable is to further the discipline of community and social media management and to help organizations make the transition to being social organizations.

We’ve seen a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t in communities – and because we’ve both worked in the social media/social software space for a while, we know a lot of the vendors, consultants, media outlets, and bloggers. We think that experience can help others. By connecting, helping, inspiring and gently pushing others in this space we hope we can help make all of our organizations more humane and fulfilling places. That’s why we started The Community Roundtable.

We also have a number of other goals for this business – we want it to:

• Be fun – for us, for customers, for employees – but hopefully not funny
• Share a portion of the profits with worthy causes – and let the community help us to decide what those are
• Feel like a safe harbor – where people do not feel like they’ve been offered up or exposed
• Be stimulating and challenging – in a good way
• Be respectful such that members both feel compelled to share their opinions but in a way that respects others who have different opinions and perspectives.
• Be transparent – we will share as much as we can about our operations while maintaining a responsibility to ourselves. We don’t quite know where the line is yet but we are committed to exploring how open we can responsibly be.

Stimulating. Fun. Respectful. Charitable. Safe. Transparent.

And let’s be honest – we’re exploring with our customers so we may stumble a bit, but we are counting on our customers to let us know, give us time to fix the problem and then forgive us – and we promise to do the same. While we may be the host and hostess of the party this community is ultimately owned by all of its members. We’ll try and provide good dance music!

Rachel & Jim