absolutelyskilled/community-management

When this skill is activated, always start your first response with the 🧢 emoji.

Community Management

Community management is the discipline of building, nurturing, and sustaining groups of people united around a shared interest, product, or goal. Done well, a community becomes a durable competitive moat - members recruit each other, generate content, surface problems, and amplify launches. Done poorly, it becomes a moderation burden and a reputation liability.

This skill covers the full lifecycle: strategy and positioning, day-to-day moderation, member advocacy programs, engagement design, feedback loops, and the metrics that tell you whether any of it is working.

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When to use this skill

Trigger this skill when the user:

• Designs a community strategy or chooses a platform
• Writes or audits community guidelines and moderation policies
• Creates an ambassador, champion, or advocate program
• Plans engagement programs (events, challenges, office hours)
• Builds feedback loops from community back to product or leadership
• Defines community health metrics or builds a reporting dashboard
• Scales community operations (hiring, tooling, automation)

Do NOT trigger this skill for:

• Pure social media marketing or paid ad campaigns (use a marketing skill instead)
• Internal company culture programs (those are people-ops, not community management)

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Key principles

1. Community is a garden, not a broadcast channel - You tend it; you do not control it. Members talk to each other, not just to you. Your job is to create conditions where good things grow, then get out of the way.

2. The 1-9-90 participation rule - In any community, roughly 1% create original content, 9% contribute (reply, react, upvote), and 90% lurk. Do not design only for the 1%. Lurkers get value, generate SEO, and often become contributors later. Measure reach, not just posts.

3. Moderation sets culture - What you allow is what you become. If you tolerate low-effort negativity, your community fills with it. Enforce rules consistently and early. The first 100 members set the tone for the next 100,000.

4. Value before extraction - Ask nothing of your community until you have given generously. Answer questions, write guides, make introductions, celebrate member wins. An ask for a survey, testimonial, or referral lands differently when you have a deposit history.

5. Measure engagement depth, not vanity - Monthly active members and reply rate tell you more than follower count. A community of 500 people who help each other daily is more valuable than 50,000 who never interact.

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Core concepts

Community types

| Type | Primary value | Examples | |---|---|---| | Product community | Support deflection + feedback | Figma, Linear, Notion communities | | Developer community | Ecosystem growth + advocacy | GitHub, Stripe, Twilio DevRel | | Interest/hobby community | Connection + identity | Subreddits, Discord servers | | Customer success community | Retention + expansion | Enterprise user groups | | Professional/learning | Career growth + networking | Dev.to, Hashnode, alumni networks |

Knowing the type determines success metrics, content strategy, and moderation bar.

Engagement ladder

Members move through stages. Design experiences for each transition:

Aware -> Lurker -> Reactor -> Contributor -> Champion -> Leader
  |         |          |            |             |           |
discovery  reads     likes/     posts/         creates      co-runs
 content   only     reacts     replies         content    programs

Most programs focus on converting Lurkers to Reactors (low friction - add emoji reactions, polls, "introduce yourself" threads) and Contributors to Champions (recognition, early access, direct feedback access).

Moderation approaches

| Approach | When to use | Trade-off | |---|---|---| | Reactive | Small/early community | Low overhead, slow to catch issues | | Proactive | Scaled community | Prevents problems, requires mod team | | AI-assisted | High-volume channels | Fast + consistent, misses context | | Community self-moderation | Mature, trusted community | Scalable, requires strong culture | | Graduated enforcement | Default for most communities | Fair, builds trust, reduces appeals |

Community metrics

Health metrics (weekly review):

• Daily/monthly active members (DAU/MAU ratio - above 10% is healthy)
• Question response rate and time-to-first-response
• New member 7-day retention (did they come back after joining?)
• Member-to-member reply ratio (community helping itself vs staff only)

Growth metrics (monthly review):

• New member growth rate
• Top-of-funnel sources (organic search, product in-app, referral)
• Activation rate (lurker -> first post within 30 days)

Business impact metrics (quarterly):

• Support ticket deflection rate
• NPS delta (community members vs non-members)
• Feature adoption driven by community education
• Qualified leads or expansions attributed to community

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Common tasks

Design a community strategy

Use this framework to scope a community before building it:

1. Define the community job-to-be-done - What will members get that they cannot get elsewhere? Be specific. "Connect with peers" is not specific enough. "Get unblocked on [product] integrations within 2 hours" is.

2. Choose the right platform - Match the platform to member behavior:

   | Member behavior | Platform | |---|---| | Async Q&A, SEO-friendly | Discourse, GitHub Discussions | | Real-time chat | Discord, Slack | | Long-form content | Circle, Beehiiv | | Professional network | LinkedIn Group | | Developer-native | GitHub Discussions, Dev.to |

3. Define the success metric for month 1, 6, and 12 - Month 1 is activation (10+ active members, first unanswered question answered by a peer). Month 6 is habit (DAU/MAU above 8%). Month 12 is impact (support deflection, NPS lift).

4. Write the founding documents - Community purpose statement, code of conduct, and welcome message. These set culture before scale forces you to enforce it.

Build moderation guidelines

A moderation policy template:

## [Community Name] Community Guidelines

### What this community is for
[One paragraph on the community's purpose and who it's for]

### What we expect from members
- Be helpful: answer questions you know, ask questions clearly
- Be respectful: disagree with ideas, not people
- Be on-topic: [specific scope e.g. "questions about the API, not general JS"]
- Be real: no impersonation, spam, or promotional posts without disclosure

### What will get you removed
- Harassment, hate speech, or personal attacks
- Spam, affiliate links, or undisclosed promotion
- Sharing private information without consent
- Deliberately spreading misinformation

### Enforcement ladder
1. Post removed (no warning needed for clear violations)
2. Public or private warning
3. 7-day suspension
4. Permanent ban

### Appeals
Email [address] with your username and a description of what happened.
We review appeals within 3 business days.

See references/moderation-playbook.md for escalation procedures and edge cases.

Create an advocacy / champions program

A structured advocate program creates a high-trust inner circle that amplifies content, provides product feedback, and helps new members.

Program tiers (3-tier model works well for most communities):

| Tier | Name | Requirements | Benefits | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Contributor | 90 days active, 10+ helpful posts | Badge, early blog features | | 2 | Champion | 6 months, referred 5+ members | Private Slack, beta access, swag | | 3 | Ambassador | 12+ months, created community content | Co-marketing, advisory council seat |

Program launch checklist:

• [ ] Define nomination criteria (quantitative + qualitative)
• [ ] Build a private channel or space for advocates
• [ ] Create a benefit matrix (what they get at each tier)
• [ ] Write the welcome packet (expectations, perks, how to get help)
• [ ] Set up quarterly touchpoints (call or async update)
• [ ] Build a way to graduate/remove advocates who go inactive

Design engagement programs

Recurring programs sustain activity between product launches:

• Weekly threads - "Show and tell Friday" or "What are you building?" reduce the barrier for sharing. Templates make posting easy.
• Office hours - Monthly live Q&A with a founder, PM, or engineer builds trust and generates questions the docs should answer.
• Community challenges - 30-day build challenge or integration hackathon drives activation. Small prizes (credits, merch) beat large cash prizes for engagement.
• Member spotlights - Interview a power user monthly. Signals that contribution is recognized. Converts lurkers who aspire to be featured.
• Onboarding drip - Automated welcome sequence: day 0 intro post prompt, day 3 resource digest, day 7 "have you tried X?" nudge. Dramatically improves new member retention.

Implement feedback loops

Two types of feedback loop matter:

Community -> Product:

• Maintain a public roadmap or idea board (Canny, GitHub Discussions, Linear)
• Tag and route feature requests from community to PM weekly
• Close the loop: comment on ideas when shipped, declined, or deprioritized
• Run quarterly "community pulse" surveys (5 questions, NPS + 4 open-ended)

Product -> Community:

• Pre-announce features to advocates 2 weeks before launch for feedback
• Share release notes in community first, before email
• Post a "why we built this" explanation, not just "here's what's new"
• Create a changelog thread where members can comment and ask questions

Measure community health

Build a simple dashboard updated weekly:

Community Health Dashboard - [Week of DATE]

ENGAGEMENT
  MAU:                  [N] (vs [N-1] last week, [N-52] last year)
  DAU/MAU ratio:        [X%]  target: >8%
  New members (7d):     [N]
  New member 7d return: [X%]  target: >25%

SELF-SERVICE
  Questions posted:     [N]
  % answered by peers:  [X%]  target: >60%
  Median time to reply: [Xh]  target: <4h

ADVOCACY
  Active champions:     [N]
  Content created by members: [N pieces]

TOP TOPICS THIS WEEK
  1. [topic]
  2. [topic]
  3. [topic]  <- feed to PM weekly

Scale community operations

Signs you need to scale: response time exceeds 4 hours, mod queue grows faster than you clear it, no single person knows what happened last week.

Scaling steps in order:

1. Document everything first - Playbooks, moderation guidelines, onboarding scripts. Undocumented processes cannot be delegated.
2. Promote community moderators - Trusted members make excellent part-time mods. Lower cost, higher trust from community, deep context.
3. Automate the repetitive - Welcome messages, FAQ responses, link-to-docs for common questions. Tools: Zapier, Community.com, or Discord bots.
4. Hire a community manager - When paid staff is needed, hire for empathy and writing quality first, platform expertise second.
5. Add a second platform only if members demand it - Resist the urge to be everywhere. Every additional platform splits attention and quality.

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Anti-patterns

| Anti-pattern | Why it fails | What to do instead | |---|---|---| | Launch and abandon | Community stalls without consistent presence; members feel ignored | Commit to a minimum weekly activity level before launching | | Megaphone mode | Broadcasting announcements with no dialogue; members disengage | Reply to every post for the first 90 days; model conversation | | Inconsistent moderation | Enforcing rules for some members but not others breeds resentment | Write rules down; apply them to everyone including your champions | | Vanity metric focus | Optimizing for member count inflates numbers without engagement | Report DAU/MAU ratio and peer reply rate alongside member count | | Extracting before giving | Asking for surveys, testimonials, or referrals from a cold audience | Build a history of value before any ask; follow the 10:1 give-to-ask ratio | | Scaling platform before culture | Launching on five platforms before one is healthy | One platform, one community, fully activated before expansion |

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Gotchas

1. Launching before minimum viable activity exists - A community that opens to the public with zero existing content and no seeded discussions looks like a ghost town. New members arrive, see nothing happening, and leave permanently. Seed 20-30 high-quality posts and recruit 10-15 active founding members before any public launch.

2. Inconsistent early moderation sets permanent culture - The first 100 members watch what you allow. If you let one snarky reply or off-topic promotion slide because the member seems valuable, you've told everyone that rules are negotiable. Apply the guidelines uniformly from day one, including to champions and early advocates.

3. Onboarding drip through the wrong channel - A welcome email sequence works only if new members gave an email address. On Discord or Slack, members may join without providing email. Build the onboarding drip natively in the platform (pinned welcome messages, introductions channel, bot prompts) rather than relying on email for activation.

4. Platform migration destroys community momentum - Moving from Slack to Discord or Discourse to Circle requires re-importing content, re-authenticating members, and rebuilding integrations. Most communities lose 40-60% of active members during a migration. Only migrate when the current platform has a fundamental limitation; don't chase the newest tool.

5. Measuring success by member count, not engagement - A community of 50,000 members with a 0.5% DAU/MAU ratio is dead. Report the ratio, not the raw count, to stakeholders. Optimization for follower count (e.g., paid social to grow the number) produces empty membership with no real community value.

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References

• references/moderation-playbook.md - Moderation policies, escalation procedures, and edge case handling. Load when writing or auditing community guidelines.

Only load the references file when the current task requires detailed moderation policy or escalation procedure depth.

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Companion check

On first activation of this skill in a conversation: check which companion skills are installed by running ls ~/.claude/skills/ ~/.agent/skills/ ~/.agents/skills/ .claude/skills/ .agent/skills/ .agents/skills/ 2>/dev/null. Compare the results against the recommended_skills field in this file's frontmatter. For any that are missing, mention them once and offer to install:

npx skills add AbsolutelySkilled/AbsolutelySkilled --skill <name>

Skip entirely if recommended_skills is empty or all companions are already installed.