Community Management

At this stage, you are exploring various platforms with a new interest in communities. You understand the basic features of major platforms such as Discord, Slack, and forums, observe active communities to identify their operational structures, and learn participation etiquette by reading community guidelines.

• Can join 3 or more different community platforms (e.g., Discord, Slack, forums) and use their basic features
• Can observe 1 active community for at least 2 weeks and document its operational structure (channels, rules, roles)
• Can read a community's guidelines and explain 5 key rules
• Can perform basic participation activities in a community, such as asking questions, answering, and reacting
• Can observe and record 3 differences between a thriving community and an inactive one

At this stage, you create and run a small community of 10 to 50 members. You select a platform suited to your community's purpose, write community rules, and design an onboarding flow that helps new members participate naturally. You regularly curate content and facilitate conversations.

• Can define the community's purpose and target audience in a single sentence
• Can compare and select a platform suited to the purpose and design a channel structure
• Can write 5 or more community rules (Code of Conduct)
• Can create a welcome message and onboarding guide for new members
• Can post engagement-driving content (questions, polls, discussion topics) at least once a week
• Can track basic activity metrics such as member count and message count on a weekly basis

This stage corresponds to the Established stage of the Community Maturity Model (The Community Roundtable). You independently run a community of 50 to 500 members, analyze member engagement patterns to develop retention strategies, mediate conflicts, and collect member feedback to improve operations.

• Can define and track key metrics including monthly active users (MAU), engagement rate, and retention rate
• Can plan and execute regular engagement events (AMAs, challenges, etc.) at least twice a month
• Can identify inactive members and craft re-engagement messages to bring them back
• Can listen to both sides during a member conflict and produce a mediation outcome
• Can consistently apply graduated enforcement actions (warnings, mutes, bans) for rule violations
• Can conduct a member survey at least once per quarter and apply results to operational improvements
• Can explain the 4 stages of the Commitment Curve and identify the proportion of members at each stage

This stage corresponds to the Managed stage of the Community Maturity Model. You run a community of 500 to 5,000 members alongside a moderator team, codify community culture, and respond systematically to crisis situations. You build data dashboards and use them as the basis for operational decisions.

• Can recruit 3 or more moderators and document and assign their roles and permissions
• Can create a moderator training guide and hold regular meetings at least once a month
• Can build a community data dashboard to monitor key metrics in real time
• Can write a crisis response manual covering disputes, spam attacks, and privacy breaches
• Can issue an official statement and execute follow-up actions within 24 hours of a crisis
• Can define the community's mission, vision, and core values in a document and share it with members
• Can produce quarterly operations reports analyzing growth trends and areas for improvement

You measure the community's business contribution through the lens of the SPACES Model (Spinks, 2021), covering Support, Product, Acquisition, Contribution, Engagement, and Success. You design revenue models such as paid memberships, sponsorships, or partnerships, codify your own operational methodology, and mentor other community managers.

• Can quantitatively measure the community's contribution in 3 or more of the 6 SPACES Model business outcome areas
• Can design and operate at least 1 revenue model from paid memberships, sponsorships, or partnerships
• Can prepare a community operations budget, analyze ROI, and report findings
• Can write a methodology document systematizing your community management experience
• Can mentor 2 or more new community managers and grow them to independent operational capability
• Can present a community management case study at a conference or meetup
• Can distinguish between community health metrics (engagement depth, core contributor ratio, conversation quality) and vanity metrics (total member count, total messages), and design dashboards centered on health metrics

This stage corresponds to the Networked stage of the Community Maturity Model. You design ecosystems connecting multiple communities and establish governance structures that enable each community to operate autonomously. You run leader development programs and propose community management standards within the industry.

• Can design and operate an ecosystem architecture connecting 3 or more communities
• Can establish governance structures (decision-making processes, leader selection, rule amendments) for each community
• Can design a community leader development program and produce 5 or more leaders per year
• Can plan joint events across different communities and create cross-community synergies
• Can develop and apply a custom framework for evaluating community management maturity
• Can present or publish a paper proposing community management standards at an industry conference
• Can detect early burnout signals in core contributors and design sustainable participation structures through role distribution and recognition systems

At this stage, your community defines the standards, culture, and behavioral norms of an entire industry or field. Just as Product Hunt transformed startup launch culture or Stack Overflow became the standard for developer knowledge sharing, your community has become essential infrastructure in its industry ecosystem. You create frameworks that future community managers reference and build upon.

• Can demonstrate that your community is recognized as a key hub with 10,000 or more participants in its field
• Can point to at least 1 case where standards or practices formed in your community have been adopted as industry norms
• Can show that a community management framework you developed is in use at 3 or more organizations
• Can demonstrate publishing a book, educational program, or accredited course on community management to develop next-generation leaders
• Can show measurable influence on industry policy, trends, or discourse through your community
• Can structurally diagnose power concentration risks in community governance and design checks-and-balances mechanisms that ensure fairness in decision-making participation