Zach H., you rang? This is a very important question! Here’s a few tips of advice from the Desk of Kaela: High achieving community contributors are altruistic people. They love helping others and hate saying no. It’s our job as Community Managers to help them prioritize, otherwise they will take on everything.
All Community members are volunteers. Whether they are consuming your content (passive user) or contributing to it (active), they are choosing to give the community what little time they have.
My catchphrase is: “I recognize that on my best day, I will be your fifth priority. And most days, I won’t even rank.“. This translates to: We as CMs need to understand our Community members have families, jobs, and a never-ending list of responsibilities. If we are going to add to their plate, we need to be thoughtful about what we’re adding and how it tracks to what they want to do.
For this reason, I recommend having an intake process (ideally once a year) where you’re asking them what products they are using and how they want to contribute to the community.
Then as opportunities arise, you know how to prioritize them.
Guardrails: As the Community Manager, you are the keeper of the relationships. All requests should go through you and you can prioritize how and when they are brought to the Community.
Don’t give internal teams unfiltered access to your community.
If internal stakeholders are active in your Community Slack workspace, set up a private channel for them to submit their requests.
Joel P. and I both have some best practices here if you need.
Establish clear timelines & expectations with internal stakeholders.
It’s okay for you to say “hey! We already have x ask out to this group currently. Are you flexible on timeline? We are trying to be respectful on how many things we toss out at them.”
Feedback loops: As a CM, you are responsible for operationalizing cross-functional partnerships and ensuring these partnerships support all parties. Before you establish a feedback session with Product, ask them directly: What does the feedback loop look like? How will customers know if their feedback is being actioned/prioritized?” Establish a culture of accountability so your internal stakeholders are invested in building relationships with community members.
In my community, we host monthly meetings with product. However, they aren’t designed to be product feedback sessions. They are designed to be a conversation between our product managers and product users, to share best practices and see what’s coming. We set the expectations that any feedback they have is welcome (enthusiastically welcomed), but we aren’t necessarily set-up to action that feedback based on this session.
This is something I can probably rant about for another 1000 words or so. Let me know if you wanna set up time to talk more.
: This something that every Community Manager will encounter and we can all do a better job. Empower yourself to protect your community from burnout and establish clear guidelines and boundaries with internal teams. In my experience, people are pretty happy to follow a process!
