Your Role as a Community Manager

One of the biggest frustrations I hear from community professionals is that their organization has unrealistic expectations because their role is not understood internally.Have you ever been asked to load documents into one of your chapter’s communities when there is a staff person assigned to manage the chapter? Have you been asked to add members to a community by a committee staff liaison? As soon as the community comes up in internal communication you get copied?Here are some realistic expectations of what you should be doing as a community manager. I greatly enjoyed Richard Millington’s webinar hosted by CMX Pro where he outlined five different elements of a community managers job description. I would like to add more concrete examples for those of us in the association space. Don’t feel overwhelmed. He explained that based on your title or paygrade you should have different expectations of how you are performing in each of these areas. I will list them from what I perceive to be the lowest to highest.As a community manager of one in the title of “Senior Coordinator, Online Community,” I understand that the business strategy may not be my strong suit (or even expected of me now). I lean on my supervisor to help with this element as she informally mentors me. My goal is to be more proficient to better serve my community and my organization. I hope you will join me in this challenge as we continue to advance “community” as a profession.Content I urge you to look at community discussions as user generated content. It is not engagement for engagement sake. Every post and thread should add value to your members, especially if they are receiving digest subscriptions.A group of “Champions” or “Ambassadors” (we call ours Topic Moderators) is critical in creating, facilitating, and moderating content. We have a group of 16 moderators that meets via Skype every other week to talk about discussion ideas. It is important that your members drive the content ideas – it is content for them to consume. They know it best.One of my favorite content creation strategies is looking at the top content in LinkedIn. If I see something interesting, I generally send it to one of our Topic Moderators to see if they think it would be a good discussion idea.Another aspect of content is webinars. I’m part of communities who do regular webinars. I love the idea of having members present to other members as a “virtual lunch and learn.” We do something along these lines quarterly with our mentoring program.You should not be creating content. You should be working with community members to create content. This encourages accountability and involvement with the community. Which brings me to the next element.Engagement Most community professionals believe engagement is their main job function. You want to nurture the community and manage your community lifecycle. I make a point to try to personal engage with members who participate (through posting or recommending content) in the community for the first time. I would encourage you to take it a step further. Build relationships with your members. Connect with them on social channels. Send personal check ins. Ask about milestones they have had in their lives. Not only will you receive more satisfaction in your work, they will receive more satisfaction from the community.I encourage you to go a step further. Be the “corner bartender.” Connect members with other members so they can engage with each other. You only have so much bandwidth. You can help them engage with each other to cut down on some of your time nurturing the community.TechnicalThis is the scariest aspect for most community professionals. I personally have a liberal arts background. I’m not technically savy. But I understand I should be able to configure the widgets in our platform and make functionality simpler as we notice deterrents in the platform (this includes some basic JavaScript and HTML too). I encourage you to get involved with your vendor. They probably have a wealth of resources and possibly even a support community. Subscribe and monitor discussions. It’s great to see if someone notices a bug or issue so you can prevent the problem in your platform before it is noticed.I also encourage you to understand how your data is managed in your AMS or CRM. If your community is integrated talk with your IT department about the configurations and what needs to be monitored. I generally check our syncing queue a few times a week to make sure data is flowing correctly. You will notice issues arise occasionally as updates happen. Don’t be blind sighted.Strategy The next two elements are what separates good community professionals from great ones. It is easy to get bogged down with the daily engagement and content creation. You need to be looking at your overall community strategy/roadmap. What roles does the community play in your organization? How does it advance your strategic plan?One concrete example is our organization was having very high unsubscribe rates across our email communications. Knowing this we choose to switch subscriptions to consolidated daily digests for committees and weekly consolidated digests for forums. This is not a popular concept in Higher Logic circles. But we felt it was necessary. This is a strategy I’m monitoring closely.We are also in the process of examining what community content is behind our membership wall. Monitoring the data and adjusting to see what serves our organizations purpose is high on my priority list right now.I’m a huge advocate of communities being part of an organization’s overall communications strategy. We have major initiatives we try to promote within our community through the help of our topic moderators.Business Unless you are at a senior level you are probably not engaging this aspect of your job often. But you can. Talk with your senior leadership about your community. Find the organization’s needs and see how the community can meet those needs. Involve as many stakeholders as possible. We did a six-month survey of our mentoring program. We compiled the survey and data to present an evaluation of the program to stakeholders. My goal was improving the program, but they were impressed with what had been accomplished and excited to use their resources and departments to advance the program.Share your analytics and your member stories show your senior and executive team the value of the community. Focus on being an internal advocate for your community.Conclusion These are all very different buckets and it may seem overwhelming. Please join me in identifying one action item in one bucket where you can improve as a community professional.