Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Community Manager

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires an experienced Community Manager to design, grow, and nurture vibrant online and offline communities that increase customer engagement, loyalty, product adoption, and brand advocacy. The Community Manager will own community strategy, moderation, content, events, analytics, and cross-functional collaboration to turn members into active contributors and advocates. Ideal candidates have hands-on experience managing platforms (Discord, Slack, Reddit, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn), running engagement and retention programs, and translating member insights into product and marketing improvements.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Community Specialist / Community Associate — early-career role handling day-to-day moderation and content.
Social Media Manager — experience creating social content and driving engagement across channels.
Customer Support / Customer Success Representative — deep knowledge of customer pain points and lifecycle.

Advancement To:

Senior Community Manager — leads larger communities, mentorship of other community staff.
Head of Community / Community Lead — owns community strategy and operations across products and regions.
Director of Community & Growth or Director of Customer Experience — cross-functional leadership with strategic responsibilities.

Lateral Moves:

Community Operations Manager — focus on tooling, automation, and processes.
Content Marketing Manager — focus on content strategy and thought leadership.
Product Manager (User Research / Growth) — leverage community insights in product roadmap.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop and execute a comprehensive community strategy and roadmap that aligns with marketing, product, and customer success objectives to drive member acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, and advocacy.
Grow active membership through targeted recruitment campaigns, onboarding flows, referral and ambassador programs, and partnerships with influencers, content creators, and local chapters.
Own the content calendar for the community: create and curate high-value discussion prompts, tutorials, how-tos, AMA sessions, newsletters, and multimedia content that increase daily and weekly active usage.
Moderate community channels (Discord, Slack, Reddit, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn, proprietary forums) to enforce community guidelines, remove harmful content, and maintain a welcoming, inclusive tone.
Recruit, onboard, train, and manage volunteer moderators, community ambassadors, and regional leaders; build clear roles, escalation paths, and recognition programs to scale moderation and engagement.
Plan, execute, and analyze online and in-person events (webinars, meetups, workshops, user conferences) including logistics, promotion, agenda setting, speaker coordination, and post-event follow-up to convert attendees to active members.
Serve as the voice of the community internally: synthesize qualitative and quantitative member feedback and present prioritized product improvements, feature requests, and usability issues to product and engineering teams.
Design and run lifecycle and retention campaigns (onboarding sequences, re-engagement drip emails, milestone celebrations) in partnership with CRM and marketing teams to increase activation and reduce churn.
Build and manage advocacy programs including referral incentives, case studies, beta testing cohorts, and user-generated content campaigns that amplify brand awareness and organic growth.
Track, analyze, and report on community health metrics (DAU/MAU, engagement rate, retention cohorts, response time, sentiment, NPS, CSAT) and translate insights into actionable optimizations.
Create and maintain community policy documents, content moderation playbooks, escalation matrices, and crisis response plans that align with legal and trust & safety requirements.
Implement and maintain integrations between community platforms and internal systems (CRM, ticketing, analytics) to ensure a single view of member activity and streamline support handoffs.
Conduct regular member research (surveys, interviews, usability tests) and synthesize findings into user personas, journey maps, and prioritized product & content recommendations.
Collaborate with growth, product marketing, and PR to design community-driven campaigns that support product launches, go-to-market activities, and earned media opportunities.
Design experiments to test hypotheses for community growth and engagement (content formats, posting cadences, reward mechanics) and run A/B tests using analytics to measure impact.
Manage budgets and vendor relationships for community tools, platforms, event production, and creator partnerships to maximize ROI while maintaining quality community experiences.
Localize community content and engagement tactics for regional audiences, working with translation partners and regional moderators to ensure cultural relevance and legal compliance.
Lead crisis management for escalated community incidents, coordinating with legal, trust & safety, and executive teams to respond quickly and transparently while protecting brand reputation.
Build and maintain a robust knowledge base, FAQs, onboarding guides, and help center content derived from recurring community questions and pain points to reduce support burden.
Facilitate cross-functional working groups with product, engineering, marketing, and support to prioritize community-driven initiatives and ensure timely execution.
Monitor competitive communities and industry trends to identify gaps, new engagement tactics, and partnership opportunities that can be leveraged to improve our community offering.
Mentor junior community staff, provide coaching and performance feedback, and help define KPIs and career development plans for community team members.

Secondary Functions

Operate and continuously optimize community tooling: set up automations, bots, moderation filters, and workflows to reduce manual work and improve member experience.
Produce monthly and quarterly community performance reports and executive summaries that highlight KPIs, trends, member stories, risks, and strategic recommendations.
Support cross-functional product launches by coordinating early access groups, shepherding feedback loops, and driving participation in product betas from community members.
Maintain a content repository of evergreen resources, templates, and case studies that internal teams can reuse for campaigns, sales enablement, and onboarding.
Help define and implement a measurement framework for community ROI (influence on MQLs, retention lift, conversion to paid plans, support deflection) and collaborate with analytics to validate impact.
Coordinate with legal and compliance teams to ensure community content, contests, and data handling meet regulatory and privacy standards.
Provide ad-hoc training for customer-facing teams on community signals, common issues, and how to leverage community content for support and marketing.
Participate in hiring and interviewing for community-focused roles and contribute to onboarding and ramp plans for new hires.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Community platforms: proven experience managing Discord, Slack, Reddit, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, and/or proprietary forum platforms.
Moderation & trust & safety tooling: familiarity with moderation workflows, AutoMod, moderation dashboards, and enforcement escalation processes.
CRM and support systems: hands-on experience with Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Salesforce Service Cloud for routing community-sourced tickets and tracking member lifecycle.
Analytics & tracking: proficiency with Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, or similar analytics tools to track community KPIs, funnels, and cohorts.
Social publishing and scheduling: experience with Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, or native platform scheduling for cross-channel content distribution.
Content production: ability to create written, visual, and short-form video content; familiarity with CMS tools (WordPress, Contentful) and basic graphics tools (Canva, Figma).
Event platforms and production: experience running webinars and virtual events using Zoom, Hopin, Eventbrite, or similar platforms and coordinating in-person events logistics.
A/B testing and experimentation: understanding of experiment design, hypothesis testing, and interpreting results to inform community growth initiatives.
Integrations and automation: experience with Zapier, Make, or native integrations to connect community platforms with CRMs and analytics tools.
Basic SQL and data queries: ability to run simple queries or partner with analytics to extract community usage data for reporting and insight generation.
SEO and content optimization: knowledge of SEO best practices to ensure community content (docs, forums, FAQs) is discoverable and drives organic traffic.

Soft Skills

Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with the ability to represent brand voice consistently across channels.
Empathy and active listening to understand member needs, de-escalate conflicts, and build trust.
Strong facilitation and community leadership skills to run discussions, workshops, and events that drive meaningful participation.
Conflict resolution and crisis management to handle escalations calmly and strategically.
Cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management to work effectively with product, marketing, support, and legal teams.
Data-driven mindset: translate qualitative signals and quantitative metrics into prioritized product and content recommendations.
Creativity and content intuition for designing engaging campaigns, formats, and incentives that resonate with different audience segments.
Excellent project and time management: ability to run multiple campaigns, events, and initiatives concurrently with attention to detail.
Coaching and mentorship skills to recruit, train, and empower volunteer moderators and junior staff.
Adaptability and resilience in fast-paced environments with evolving community needs and platform changes.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Communications, Journalism, Business, Human-Computer Interaction, Sociology, or related field or equivalent practical experience managing online communities.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s degree plus certifications or coursework in community management, digital marketing, social media strategy, or UX research.
Continuing education in analytics, growth marketing, or trust & safety policies is a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Marketing / Digital Marketing
Communications / Journalism
Sociology / Psychology / Anthropology
Human-Computer Interaction / UX Research
Business Administration / Product Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

2–5 years of hands-on community management or adjacent roles (social media, customer success, content marketing). For larger communities or enterprise products, 4–7+ years is common.

Preferred:

3–5+ years managing active online communities with demonstrable improvements in engagement metrics (DAU/MAU, retention, referral growth).
Experience scaling moderation programs, running virtual/in-person events, and influencing product roadmaps using member feedback.
Proven track record of growing organic membership, launching ambassador/influencer programs, and demonstrating community-to-revenue impact or clear ROI.
Solid portfolio or case studies that show community initiatives, content assets, event recaps, and metric improvements.