Who Can be a Community Manager

The community manager’s role is typically a mix of help desk, ambassador, company spokesperson, parent, camp counselor, and police officer. In a community focused on qualitative market research, you might want researchers in this role. Otherwise, it is a role that you may be able to fill initially by training existing CRM staff in your company. The community management workload is closely related to the volume of activity in a community, so a single manager, or even a part-time manager, should be sufficient in the beginning. But be prepared to add resources as your community grows.

The amount of community management needed obviously depends on your target population and the community model that you have chosen, as well as the quality of tools at the community manager’s disposal. Later in this chapter, we will talk about how to optimize the efficiency of community management and make your community as low-maintenance as possible. As a very rough guideline, we’d say that one full-time staff person can manage a population of 50,000 for a community with a low-maintenance model and a single language.