Becoming A Community Manager

Featuring @0xpolygon

This piece was created following some in-depth conversations with the Head of Community at Polygon.

If you are a community manager or looking to start your own community.

Or you’re a non technical person, looking to break into Web3 jobs.

These principles are going to be your foundation…

An Explanation

A community at its’ core is a group of people who are aligned by a set of beliefs. These beliefs could be anything from your favourite movie or (as for most of us in crypto) — crypto investments.

Communities are everywhere. The industry has a lot of focus on engineers and devs but it’s equally as important to have great community builders.

It’s less common to find a qualified community manager than a Solidity developer. So let me reiterate: if you are looking to get in to Web3 — this is a good way to break in.

Without a good community, a project will find it difficult to tap in to the network effects that come with user adoption.

The Playbook

Firstly, we need to understand that everyone that is a part of your community is not just another anonymous name. Behind that picture is a person with thoughts, emotions and feelings.

You need to treat them exactly like how you would treat a real human.

It’s obvious, but it’s an aspect we overlook when we get too caught up with our work.

1. Everyone needs a story.

A project with a boring story will fail to connect on the same level as a project with a story that excites people.

As an example, we as a crypto native community are fond of the “founder came from nothing” but had a genius idea storyline.

Although it doesn’t have to be the exact same- a good storyline always sells.

And more importantly, it gives people something to relate to.

2. Engaging a community is important.

Host your community on tried and tested platforms like Discord, Telegram and subreddit.

These platforms are a home to your audience. Import your community there from larger platforms like Twitter or Facebook.

And then comes the question — “Can you afford a community manager?”

Employing one is important but if you don’t have the resources to be able to do so, then as a founder you can and should be willing to temporarily take over this role.

So once you have someone who’s assumed this role:

It’s important to interact with everyone once in the server and answer all enquiries.

As you grow, it’s more likely spam and scammers will flood in to your server. Having a sensible team of moderators you trust can help with that. Consider even selecting moderators from valuable members in your own community.

But once people are in your community, your main purpose is to get them to stay.

Obvious, right.

A lot of it is simple human psychology - “if there is incentive for me to stay, I will stay”.

3. Start Building incentives

A great community will focus on hosting valuable discussions. Usually this happens in specific channels or in voice chats.

It’s a great way for people to bring up their concerns about the project and for them to be addressed.

A community server should also announce product developments and be keen on responding to product concerns.

Organize challenges, events and rewards to give people a reason to come back.

And when you have sufficient numbers, the main priority for you will be to manage them as efficiently as possible.

A community manager like any other person only has 24 hours in a day.

4. Community Management

Some good ways to stay ahead of the community in answering queries would be to proactively check the replies on the official Twitter account, and once in a while search your projects name on Twitter to understand the consensus or to see if anyone has a general unanswered enquiry.

But don’t restrict yourself to just Twitter — systematically check other platforms where you don’t have an official presence yet.

Community is effectively your family, you can grow it far but you need to focus on strengthening the bonds between people.

So host online discussions and in real life meet-ups.

It’s a great way for anon people to connect and make friends. And it all starts from within your community. When people look back on their friendships - they’ll look fondly on your community and it can lead “word of mouth” growth.

But growth isn’t everything.

By solely focusing on the number of followers going up, you’ll never have a great community bond.

Remember — each and every one of those members is a unique individual with a great story worth telling.

Your job is to make sure all those stories are told.

Furthermore, you need to understand that it is not going to always be smooth sailing.

People will not always agree with each other. They can disagree on changes in your project or some other thing entirely. A good community manager needs to act as a mediator. It’s their goal to fight negativity amongst their community first.

And whilst the bear market isn’t great for prices and you can end up with a lot of angry community members to deal with.

You should look favorably upon it as a community manager.

It becomes easier to identify the grifters and then to invest in the people who stay and add value.

5. No Substitution for Presence

There is no magic bullet for the success fo your community — be consistent and be available.

6. Be Transparent

Transparency is also super key, you need to make a pact to yourself to always be transparent. If you censor criticism that’s valid about your project it doesn’t work to anyones benefit.

You should in fact, get in contact with the team and make it your top priority to deliver that valid criticism to your team when you see it.

If you are a community manager, or even a moderator - people regard you as the voice of the project. Be careful with your wording, but never sugarcoat anything.

If you downplay a problem within your community and it causes damage - the blame ends up falling on you .

Accountability is important.

7. Hire Help

Hiring help isn’t a bad way to go about things.

If you’re a founder you have 100 other priorities revolving around the delivery of your project first.

Not achieving those is a recipe for disaster. S outsource the work with a percentage of your marketing budget. Although it can be difficult to find people you trust enough to leave your communities hands in, it is a necessary step in progression.

Just don’t rush the vetting process.

A community manager will need to have inherent personality traits.

A lot of the skills are unlearnable. You can’t learn to be a nice person, and it’s unlike coding where you can learn the technical skills you need in a matter of months.

But not everyone is a crypto expert. And you need to be prepared to answer the most basic questions that seem obvious to you but not to others.

As the Head of Community at Polygon put it: If you can’t find it in you to be a nice person all the time in your community, then this is not the path for you.

8. Where do you want to host a community

You want to host it on a space where most crypto natives are already familiar with the UX and UI. For crypto projects/protocols that tends to be both Telegram and Discord.

From experience, Telegram is a great channel for announcements and AMA’s.

Discord is better utilised to engage with community members individually.

In crypto, the chances are that there are some anon teams building out there - who don’t want to dox themselves for whatever reason.

And those reasons are often legitimate reasons.

It doesn’t mean that the project is bad, it’s just there is now a greater fear precedent in crypto stemming from the fact that mainly undoxxed founders have historically been associated with more hacks/scams and rug pulls.

An idea would be to apply for events like hackathons, where you don’t necessarily have to personally vet yourself to the general public but it gives the community assurance and social proof, since hackathons are weary of scammers.

9. Make friends not work colleagues

Community wellbeing is important. As a community manager you need a network to share/relate and bounce ideas off of.

And not just work colleagues, make friends who are:

- Core Team Members

- Loyal Contributors

- Other Community Managers

It also helps to have a support system in place for your darker days, e.g when price goes down and theres a lot of negativity.

And friendships lead to collaboration.

Cross collaboration is a great opportunity. We mentioned incentives earlier but to expand a little more…

The community you have will have been built up by your organic reach on platforms such as Google, Twitter and SEO mechanics.

But other projects are always looking for cool community collabs.

Never miss the opportunity to collab with other projects - if it’s worth it.

How to determine whether it is worth it or not is probably best saved for another article.

But collabs allows you to tap in to another audiences’ structure.

And growth opportunities like these serve as a reminder that other projects are aware of you and you’re doing your job well.

Both parties benefit from increased exposure, traction and hype from such a collab which allows you to organically extend your audience’s outreach.

10. Find ways to educate

Community is a place to ensure a level playing field. It should be a place where regardless of skill level - people can interact without being judged. More experienced members should teach beginners — having discussions is great too. Focus on bringing as many valuable people into the discussion as possible.

Have you seen those spammy discords with no control?

Those were communities that didn’t set standards.

You need to ensure the admins and team members are well known amongst each other. Trust and safety is important, so build guidelines.

Set the standards for safety and trust from the start. That way new joiners respect the existing rules and older community members can help to enforce them

Additionally, it helps to have a 24/7 team that can cover multiple languages and timezones.

11. Track against yourself

So now that the base established framework is set up, you need to objectively measure your performance in a quantitative manner.

That’s how you make improvements.

Don’t benchmark yourself against other protocols in terms of community growth, use relative measures.

Judge your growth in % terms against last month or last year.

Some great platforms to use to track engagement metrics are Google Analytics or Segment.

Hosting weekly AMA’s with founders is also a great way to see real time engagement and enthusiasm.

12. Report to your higher ups.

The community manager has one of the most important roles within the company.

The people you report to will always be more than willing to aid you with resources, they are expecting you to give input on how to improve the community and ensure the project goals are being communicated.

Even if your advice concerns the path of the project as a whole, its better to be brutally honest than to fake something.

13. Memes

And finally, perhaps one of the more fun aspects of the community management job:

Is the meme culture.

On a personal level, you can’t expect yourself to communicate in a serious manner all the time.

Crypto communities THRIVE on meme culture.

You can never lead an actual community and not know your stuff when it comes to memes.

As just another reminder of how far we’ve traversed from the traditional world of finance — memes have a significant impact on projects, especially in crypto.

So get yourself familiar with all the memes and high quality meme artists out there.

Chances are, one day you might even have to hire their skills.

So yes, this is your green light to go ahead and spend all day scrolling through Crypto Twitter for the memes.

Endnote

If you’re looking to build a community in some area, whether that would be in regards to Web3 and crypto or even non-native crypto communities then do reach out. We would be happy to talk to you!