Community Managers: What They Do and Why You Need One

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As a community manager, membership renewals are undoubtedly never far from your thoughts.

For your community to grow and thrive, you want as many members as possible to stick around for the long haul—especially after all the time and effort you have spent recruiting, onboarding, and engaging them!

Calculating Your Membership Renewal Rate

Before we dive into tactics on boosting membership renewals, let’s have a look at how you can calculate your membership renewal rate.

Tracking renewal rates over time makes it easy for you to spot trends and potential pitfalls early—an increasing renewal rate means happy members. In contrast, a decreasing renewal rate could be a sign of an issue with your community.

Your membership renewal rate is relatively straightforward to calculate: divide the number of customers who renew at the end of the specified period by the total number of customers who were up for renewal, then multiply by 100 to convert that number to a percentage.

The role is often not fully understood internally. In fact, there are a lot of myths about community management in general – read more about that here. This can lead to unrealistic expectations and frustration.

So what exactly does a community manager do? The role can vary from community to community. However, the majority of positions include the following:

Content creation and curation

The community manager creates and shares targeted content to delight members. They also connect users with resources to get them involved in the community.

Engagement

This is all about nurturing the members throughout their lifecycle and building a relationship with them. The community manager starts discussions, encourages interactions, and answers questions!

Strategy

The community manager has a clear view of the community roadmap and understands the role the community plays in the wider organization. Based on this, they can analyze the results of their community efforts and adapt their strategy as necessary. They also look for ways to improve the member experience by gathering community feedback and keeping an eye out for trends and challenges in the community — information that can be super useful to the organization!

Technical

The community manager must be able to effectively use all features of the community management platform, from configuring widgets to employing personalization.

Community managers are also responsible for spotting and flagging bugs or errors and the platform. They also understand how the data is managed and keep an eye on any integrations to ensure data is flowing correctly!

Why Do You Need a Community Manager?

Your community has the potential to bring tremendous value to your organization!

DEWALT, the power tool company, saved $6 million in research costs by launching their community. And the University of Michigan found that customers spent 19% more after becoming a member of a brand’s online community.

If you believe that a community will bring value to your organization, it is worth taking the time to ensure that it is run properly. By hiring the right community manager(s) to support and grow your community, you can increase your organization’s bottom line.

What Makes a Good Community Manager?

Bear in mind that one person may be able to run the community at the beginning. However, as your community grows, you will need to recruit others!

But how can you spot a good community manager?

Community managers need powerful soft skills. They must be good communicators as they need to articulate messages and ideas in creative ways for multiple mediums.

Community managers must be flexible. They wear many hats, including marketer, PR person, and support agent!

Empathy is crucial. Community managers deal with a bunch of different personalities. If they’re not able to put themselves in those people’s shoes, they won’t effectively communicate with them. Passion is also crucial — you don’t want someone who is just going through the motions! You need someone excited about your community’s mission and dedicated to its success!

Analytical skills are also a must. As the saying goes, what can’t be measured, can’t be managed. Your community manager needs to measure engagement metrics to see what is working and what is not to keep the community strategy on track!