Get a Community Manager
Every party needs a host. Like a good host, your community manager should be your most active, high-profile member- accountable to everyone and responsible for setting the tone for the community experience. Because your community manager will have special powers and insider knowledge, you’ll need to take extra care in choosing someone to fill this role. Step one in the screening and selection process – locate qualified candidates.
Finding the community manager.
The most important leadership role in your community is the community manager. This person is ultimately responsible for keeping the community running smoothly. I would suggest recruiting a small pool of 3-5 active participants drawn from your forum or professional experience. Develop a relationship with each of these potential candidates, through email or over the phone. Get to know each so that when it comes time to selecting your manager, you feel confident that you have made the best choice.
Defining the manager’s responsibilities.
The goal isn’t for this person to control the community, but to curate it, and the work done up front will pay off later. Defining responsibilities up front will help. According to Amy Jo Kim, author of Community Building on the Web, here are some important responsibilities the community manager must take on:
- Defining key leadership positions and recruiting individuals to fill these positions
- Creating a social and legal policy
- Setting up a training program for leadership positions
- Overseeing the creation and maintenance of a leadership manual
- Defining compensation (financial or otherwise) for community leaders
- Creating feedback mechanisms for evaluating the effectiveness of other community leaders
- Training and managing a community staff
Whew! That is a lot to chew on for one person. If you are running a small community, your defined roles may be different in that you are the community manager, and it is your job to recruit and train other community leaders. In this case, you may want to transfer some of these responsibilities to the other leaders.
Training the community manager.
Once you’ve selected the community manager and defined their responsibilities, you need to teach them how to perform their new role. Setting up an online meeting space will give you a chance to present the training program and encourage the participant to ask questions through direct contact. Small communities just starting out will likely have small, informal training sessions. As the community grows, it is important to start to develop more formal training programs with written documentation to serve as a reference. The online community Well has an excellent example of a written manual they provide to all new hosts.
Support and compensation.
If you’re a larger community, and have a steady revenue stream, you may decide that financial compensation is appropriate. In this case, you should look for someone who is capable of performing most if not all of the above tasks, and be prepared to reward them for all their hard work.
For many large communities, managing can be a full-time job. However, as your community flourishes, other hosts will emerge from your member base to share the work. With the right mix of paid leaders and volunteers, you should see results in increased membership and traffic, as well as in the loyalty of your members and participation in the community.