🙌5 Ways to Level Up as a Community Manager

As a developer community manager, your role extends beyond facilitation; it's about fostering a thriving ecosystem where collaboration flourishes. Elevating your management skills can transform a community into a vibrant space. Here are five key strategies to elevate your role and build an active community!

1. Cultivate a Sense of Belonging:

• Community Culture: Create an inclusive and positive space where each member feels safe to participate and connect freely. To start, it's important to highlight values of inclusivity and diversity as key values, and ensure that everyone is aware of community guidelines and etiquette.

• Get to Know Your Members: Each member has a host of different experiences and you can engage them in different ways too. You may want to send them a private message to introduce yourself, find out their hobbies, passions or any quirky habits they have! We recommend creating a post to introduce your new members and their fun facts, as long as they're open to it too. It might take time and seem trivial, but these little things can go a long way in making someone feel seen.

2. Cultivate Collaboration and Leadership Opportunities:

• Member Collaboration: A vibrant community calls for engagement, and as community managers, it is important to provide these opportunities once you've gotten to know your new members initially. Try creating monthly group challenges where members can work together to solve a problem and contribute to community projects, or host meetups to facilitate small group discussions among members. Remember to encourage a mix of group members to foster inclusion!

• Leadership Roles: Maintain your community engagement by offering leadership roles within the community - this gives active members a sense of responsibility and ownership. Plus, you'll be able to delegate roles, further expand your efforts for outreach and keep yourself from burning out! A key tip is to build your core team around people who have the same values and goals for the community as you do, and the same passion to help your members grow.

3. Leverage User Feedback:

• Get Feedback: There are a plethora of ways to get your members to contribute - you could do an anonymous #AskMeAnything, a feedback form, a group feedback session, or even a quick and easy group poll. Explore ways to get feedback and the different platforms you can use to do so, tailored to your community's needs.

• Implement Suggestions: The worst thing to do would be to ask for feedback and not do anything about it! Although you can't cater to every request, remember that no matter how much you disagree, you should still address it and approach it with a solution-oriented mindset. This demonstrates that you value their input, which is what anyone would want!

4. Measure and Adjust:

• Analytics and Insights: Don't underestimate the power of engagement metrics and tracking tools. They help you understand what works best, and how you can adjust your strategies to optimise engagement efforts. Try tracking your attendance records to get a sense of active members, event turnout rates (or dropout rates) and more. Analytics doesn't have to be expensive or hard!

5. Celebrate Milestones:

• Member Recognition: Acknowledge and celebrate member milestones, whether it's their time within the community, contributions, or achievements. We recommend creating a post each month to highlight such achievements, paired with a simple rewards system for different milestones.

In embracing these strategies, you're not just managing a community; you're curating an interactive space full of connections and possibilities. Remember, community management is an art with no fixed formula—experiment, adapt, and most importantly, have fun fostering your vibrant community! Cheers to building an engaging and lively community where every member thrives.