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.