Communities of Practice in Modern Organizations: Insights on the APQC Survey Report

APQC invited me to blog about my insights on their 2025 Communities of Practice in Modern Organizations Survey Report. After reviewing the details in the report, here are my thoughts on the results. In most sections below, I have listed the survey answer choices first to provide additional context, followed by my comments.

CoP Organizational Model

Only 23% of participants in the survey reported using number 3 (Formal, enterprise level) – the best choice. The other models (functional, both informal and formal, as well as enterprise level, but informally applied) result in redundant communities and with communities that fail to span boundaries to connect people across organizations. Funding can come from functions, but governance should be at the enterprise level.

Primary CoP Goals for Organization

Develop and disseminate proven practices, guidelines, and procedures
Foster collaboration and sharing across geographies
Enhance networking and professional development
Provide a forum for day-to-day problem solving and learning
Innovate and create breakthrough ideas, knowledge, and practices
Ensure critical knowledge is reused across the organization
Identify and prioritize areas of critical knowledge
Organize, manage, and steward bodies of knowledge

These are all admirable goals, but only 55% reported number 4 (day-to-day problem solving and learning), which should be a fundamental goal for most communities. I would also expand number 2: Foster collaboration and sharing across geographies and organizational boundaries

Requirements to Launch a CoP Within Organizations

Identify potential participants
Align to a business priority
Create a charter
Secure key CoP roles
Identify an agenda and initial topics to cover

In addition to these requirements, these questions could also be answered:

Is there an existing community that covers the topic or a related one?
Is the topic defined using widely understood terminology?
Are people likely to want to join in sufficient numbers to achieve critical mass (100 or more)? They should identify with it: view themselves as specializing in it.
Is the CoP leader willing to spend the time it takes to lead a community?
Is the CoP leader willing to measure the community by the established health indicators (e.g., activity and membership)?

Then, if the answer to number 1 is “no” and the answers to numbers 2-5 are “yes,” then the new community should be approved. Otherwise, an existing community should be used.

There are five elements that communities need (SMILE):

Subject: A specialty to learn and/or collaborate about
Members: People interested in the subject
Interaction: Meetings, calls, and discussions
Leaders: People passionate about the subject who are dedicated to creating, building, and sustaining a community
Enthusiasm: Motivation to engage and spend time collaborating and/or learning about the subject

Roles in Place to Support CoP Efforts

Subject matter experts, Core group of members, Formal CoP leader(s), Moderator or facilitator, Executive sponsor, Content manager, IT support role, and Librarian. These are all good roles, and they need not be performed by separate individuals. Communities can succeed with just leaders and members. The leader can also serve as a moderator, facilitator, content manager, IT support, and librarian. The members can be subject matter experts and core members.

Skills and Abilities Most Important for a Successful CoP Leader

Passion for the topic, facilitation skills, active practitioner within the CoP, leadership ability, change management, and communication skills. Respondents indicated 43% for passion for the topic, 40% for facilitation skills, and 35% for active practitioner, which are reasonable to me and important to the success of a CoP.

Ways to Encourage/Enable People To Participate in a CoP

Promoting a culture that encourages and supports participation, communicating how it is important to their job, making participation a professional development opportunity, rewarding and recognizing participation. I would also add “setting formal performance goals for participation “and “setting promotion requirements for active participation”.

30% reported that their organization does not explicitly provide resources or processes to encourage participation, and only 22% reward and recognize participation. These are disappointing results.

Critical Success Factors Needed to Sustain a CoP Program

Member engagement, culture of the organization, organizational leadership support, alignment to business objectives, and leadership within CoPs. 57% chose “member engagement,” but that needs to be better defined. It does not mean that all members need to post to online discussions, but it should mean that all members need to pay attention to community discussions and activities. Using that definition, the number should be close to 100%.

Critical success factors for a communities program include:

A single, global, cross-functional community is available for each major specialty and role.
Everyone belongs to at least one community, including the one most relevant to their work.
All community members pay attention to the discussions and activities.
A single platform, well-suited for communities, is used for all CoPs. For example, in the Microsoft 365 environment, Engage is used instead of Teams.
There is a single communities directory listing all CoPs and linking to the sites where people can view online discussions and join.

For individual communities, they are:

Compelling topic: The members and potential members must be passionate about the subject for collaboration, and it must be relevant to their work
Critical mass of members: You usually need at least 100 members, with 200 being a better target
Committed leader: The community leader should know the subject, have energy for stimulating collaboration, have sufficient time to devote to leadership, and then regularly spend time increasing membership, lining up speakers, hosting calls and meetings, asking and answering questions, and posting information which is useful to the members
Regular events: Conference calls or in-person meetings
Active online discussions: Regular posts, multiple replies, and no unanswered questions

Number of Active CoPs in an Organization

35% reported 1-5 communities, and 24% reported more than 20. If the former are small organizations and the latter are large ones, these numbers make sense. The ideal number of communities is exactly one for each topic of importance to the organization and to its people, for which there are sufficient numbers of potential members to achieve critical mass.

For small organizations (fewer than 200 people), this could be just one community. For large enterprises, this could be 20 or more. An enterprise should have a smaller number of communities, each with a larger number of members. A single, large community for each important topic, used for collaborating across all organizations and geographies, is more effective than having lots of separate small communities for each possible subset of the topic.

CoP Subject Areas of Focus

55% reported having a KM community. It’s also good to have a community of community managers to show them how to lead a community and to facilitate sharing and learning by the members.

Here are the types of communities with examples of each (TRAIL):

Topic (e.g., Knowledge Management, Artificial Intelligence)
Role (e.g., Project Manager, Community Manager)
Audience (e.g., Recruits, Women)
Industry (e.g., Manufacturing, Telecommunications) or Client (e.g., European Union, US Federal Government)
Location (e.g., Canada, UK)

How Employees Get Involved with CoPs

73% reported their CoPs are voluntary, which is good. 56% reported invitation only, which is not. 30% reported they are required, which is good if it means people are required to join at least one community, but not forced to join a specific one. It’s problematic when people are added to communities without their consent.

Communities should be open to anyone and voluntary. It’s desirable to require participation in at least one community, but which ones to join should be up to the potential members, not mandated. No one should be required to join a specific community.

How CoP Members Connect

88% reported leveraging virtual meetings, and 47% reported having face-to-face meetings, which is excellent. But only 67% reported using an online discussion forum, which is surprising. Online discussions are essential for any community with members in multiple locations. They are also valuable for co-located members because they provide a searchable archive of interactions.

Percentage of Employees Who Actively Participate/Contribute to CoPs

In my experience, the typical breakdown of community participation is as follows: 90% Learn by paying attention but never post, 9% Post at least once, and 1% Post more than once. For empirical data to support this, see 90–9–1 Rule of Thumb: Fact or Fiction?

Use cases for leveraging AI to enable CoPs

Enhancing knowledge discovery, smarter meetings, content creation support, chatbots and virtual assistants, driving efficiency through automation, supporting learning and development, and experimentation and evaluation are all good use cases. And here are ten more:

Train: Use threaded discussion history to train GenAI chat.
Question Answering: AI can respond to queries posted in threaded discussions by searching for previous answers and looking outside the community.
Thread Summaries: AI can summarize threads to extract the key points from lengthy discussions.
Call Summaries: AI can listen to and summarize community calls for the benefit of those who attended and those who were unable to do so.
Mentoring: AI can act as a mentor to community members by advising them based on past discussions, calls, and submitted content.
Thread Tagging: AI can tag threads in a consistent manner and add tags not supplied by those posting.
Aggregation: AI can monitor activity in multiple communities and aggregate the important content so that it is not missed.
Recruitment: AI can find potential members and suggest that they join relevant communities.
Moderation: AI can monitor discussions looking for inappropriate language, inflammatory exchanges, and confidential information that should not be discussed, and act promptly to provide the desired remedy.
Discovery: AI can find and share relevant external content that members might not otherwise see.

Ways to Reward and Recognize Individuals Who Engage in CoPs

Public recognition, part of performance review, non-monetary rewards, factors into future promotional decision, and monetary rewards. These are all excellent ways. However, 50% reported that their organization does not recognize or reward for participation. If this truly means neither recognition nor reward, then it is alarmingly high. If it means only that there is no reward, then it is more understandable. 35% report public recognition, which is good. The other results are all at 18% and below, leaving much room for improvement.

Here are five additional, more detailed techniques:

Incentive points tracking (e.g., one point for posting in an online discussion)
Competitive rankings (e.g., a leaderboard)
Gamification (e.g., reaching higher levels of participation)
Digital badging (e.g., community member, community leader, top provider of answers)
Percent completion indicator (e.g., joined, subscribed via email, posted, answered a question)

Ways to Formally Assess Adoption and Participation in CoPs

Number of attendees at CoP meetings as a percentage of total members or target audience
Number of contributions, (e.g., posts, discussions, replies, content) per time period
Number of views on CoP sites per time period (i.e., consumption)
Number of unique contributions (e.g., posts, discussions, replies, content) per time period

38% reported they do not formally assess adoption/participation in CoPs. This needs to be close to zero. Here are additional ways to measure a communities program:

Participation: Percentage of the target population that is a member of at least one community
Coverage: Percentage of desired topics covered by a community
Health: Percentage of communities meeting these criteria (adapt these as necessary):
- At least one post to an online threaded discussion per week
- At least one call, webinar, or face-to-face meeting per quarter
- At least 100 members
- No questions left unanswered after 48 hours

Ways to Formally Assess the Overall Value of CoPs

CoP member satisfaction ratings/survey results per designated time period
Number of problems/issues solved per time period due to participation in CoP
Number of knowledge assets (e.g., proven practices, lessons learned) produced per CoP per time period
Number of CoP goals achieved per time period

46% reported that they do not formally assess the overall value of our CoPs. This number needs to decrease significantly. The methods listed above can help. The best way to show the value of communities is by curating anecdotes:

Testimonials by community members on the value of participation
Stories about the usefulness of the community
Posts thanking other members for their help

Resources

To hear more insights from Stan on APQC’s research, register for the August 13, 2025 APQC KM webinar Unlock the Power of Communities of Practice: Research Insights and Expert Perspectives.