Community management best practices

Having a variety of different groups, stakeholders, departments & functions on one platform can be challenging since different needs & wants need to be met. In order to cater to these demands, it is beneficial to establish a certain level of community management. On top, managing the community from the very beginning will allow the project team to steer the network into the desired direction around the established use case(s).

Community Guidelines

A great starting point would be to define community guidelines. These guidelines can include all sorts of information such as the appropriate behavior on the platform, what kind of content can be shared, best practices, references to company policies and so on.

An example can be found here. (insert document)

Categories

Categories keep content in a network organized and help users find the information they need faster. Categories can be created, edited or deleted at any time. We strongly suggest adding categories to your network.

There are three main ways users can interact with categories:

• Assigning a category to a question before posting
• Filtering search results by category
• Subscribing to categories to be notified when questions with that category are added

Read how to add and create categories in your network here.

Moderators

Managing a large community with thousands of users can be a challenging task. Therefore, it is recommended for the project team to split this responsibility and incorporate so-called ‘’moderators.’’ Ideally, a moderator is responsible for one or more category/ies. The job of a moderator is to observe the user-generated content on the platform and perform some of the following tasks:

• Manually allocate unanswered questions to the right experts
• Intervene if false or not suitable content is shared
• Orchestrate with the project team or other stakeholders in order to upload new content
• Occasionally comment on questions & answer to provide additional context
• Analyze the content and deprive relevant insights which can be shared with business leaders & the project team

The following admin roles are perfectly suited for a moderator: Content & Communication Admin

Communication

Occasionally it might be required to issue some form of communication to the entire community. The announcement feature allows communication with the entire user group in a simple manner. This feature is ideally suited for:

• Accompany a communication campaign in the company as part of the communication strategy
• Inform about upcoming events or contests (e.g. gamification / webinars / festivities)
• Announce new user groups joining the platform
• Inform about upcoming platform changes
• Inform about current topics on the platform (e.g. Covid-19)
• Share tips & tricks
  More information about this topic can be found here