Online Community Management Guide: How to Foster Inclusion
Want to learn more about online community management or what it takes to be a good community manager? Find out here – and learn 5 steps to building your strategy!
In today’s world, with most Americans spending over 5 hours on their phones every day, it’s hard to believe that people still feel disconnected. But the truth is that our always-on digital environment can feel lonely if we aren’t truly engaging with others. This phenomenon is particularly evident when it comes to relationships between organizations and their members, and brands and their customers.
So, why don’t people feel engaged with the organizations they join and the brands they buy from? Often, this disconnect has to do with a lack of community-building.
Online communities allow people to connect with an organization and other like-minded people who are passionate about the same topics they care about, but these spaces require strategic management. This guide will cover everything you need to know, including:
Community management is easier with the right software.
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Online Community Management FAQs
What Is Online Community Management?
Online community management is the process of designing, monitoring, moderating, and advocating for digital community spaces. The goal of online community management is to facilitate meaningful, productive connection and engagement.
Managing a branded community is much more involved than moderating chats on online forums or social media. As communities grow and evolve, so does the need to ensure that they’re functioning, safe, and on topic—and that’s the community manager’s job. Community management is strategic and intentional, encompassing all kinds of day-to-day responsibilities that aim to foster inclusive, valuable relationships with your organization.
Why Manage an Online Community?
Well-managed online communities benefit everyone involved. First and foremost, community members gain a sense of belonging. They can share experiences and resources and discuss the things that matter to them.
For businesses and associations, some benefits of effective community management include:
- Member loyalty and retention: Organizations that build online communities meet their members and customers where they already are. They can humanize their brands and create meaningful relationships with customers or members, which increases engagement and drives loyalty and retention.
- Peer-to-peer support: Members, customers, and/or brand advocates can discuss industry news, best practices, and products in a dedicated space, or ask for help to learn from each other. A well-managed online community makes all members feel included, supported, and empowered, which can take some stress off of your internal team.
- Brand growth and trust: With strategic management, online communities can turn the tide for your organization, opening doors to new product ideas, wider audiences, and greater trust in your offerings. Active community members can even become brand advocates who spread the word about your organization to new potential customers or members.
How Has Online Community Management Strategy Changed Over the Years?
At its core, it hasn’t. Over the past decade, the best practices of successful online community management have remained the same. It takes listening, empathy, and the ability to truly engage people in a positive way. What has changed, however, are the tools available for managing your online community.
There are now powerful software solutions, like Higher Logic Thrive and Vanilla, built to facilitate your online community with features that deliver personalized experiences across the entire member or customer lifecycle. By capturing behavioral data and surfacing relevant content, communities can create a more complete picture of each member and enable smarter, more targeted communication. Ultimately, tools like these create a more connected, mature digital ecosystem for your members and users.
Additionally, modern online communities have evolved from discussion forums into central hubs for the member experience. The most successful organizations make them a place members go to find trusted information, access resources, and engage with content that supports their work. In this way, communities are becoming more content-forward—fueling engagement through relevance, not just conversation.
As organizations embrace this broader role of community, they build connected, intelligent ecosystems that support learning, discovery, and long-term relationships. And as organizations see the value of community, they dedicate more resources to online community management, see better results, and allow leaders to apply community in new ways to show us what is truly possible.
The Role of an Online Community Manager
An online community manager is the person or team of people responsible for owning your online community – i.e., setting the strategy, choosing the right online community platform, building out the experience, and making your community a great destination where people want to engage.
The day-to-day work of online community managers includes the following tasks:
- Set guidelines for the community.
- Moderate community discussions.
- Foster community member engagement and connections.
- Create, post, and share relevant community content.
- Ensure the community is a welcoming environment for all.
- Resolve any conflicts between community members.
- Act as a liaison between the online community and your association.
How these duties play out in practice depends on the size of the organization, the maturity of the community, and the needs of community members. For example, at smaller companies, your community manager may do everything, while at larger companies, you’ll find community managers focusing on strategy, planning, and programming. They can manage moderation teams and work on the overall concept of how community members engage with one another while delegating the nitty-gritty of moderating actual discussions to other team members.
But every organization needs at least some dedicated community management. Lack of active community management is one common reason some communities flounder. Communities need somebody to take care of them. A small community may not need a full-time community manager, but a large organization with a lot of customers, members, or users probably will.
Don’t have the resources to hire a community manager? Get expert help!
With Higher Logic Thrive Services, our industry experts can help you achieve your community goals – fast!
How to Manage an Online Community: 5 Steps
A winning online community management strategy is comprised of many elements. Here’s a breakdown of some of the most critical components to consider.
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1. Choose an online community management platform
1. Choose an online community management platform
Before building out an entire strategy, online community managers should first evaluate which community platform to work with and understand the features they’ll need (both now and in the future). Some organizations start their communities using social media groups, but that approach isn’t ideal for engagement or growth. Others invest in a dedicated online community platform that offers features to help you build and manage a flourishing community.
That said, not all providers are created equal. As you look at different solutions for your online community, make sure your chosen platform lets you:
- Customize the look and feel to really make your community your own.
- Moderate discussions, control segmentation, and set user flows.
- Leverage automation by developing email triggers, automation rules, gamification elements like awards or badges, and other workflow improvements so your team doesn’t get bogged down with repetitive tasks.
- Integrate your community with your other technology (your marketing platform, job board, mentor and volunteer management tools, chapter management solution, submission platform, etc.) to ensure seamless information transfer.
Higher Logic Thrive checks all of these boxes. It easily integrates with most AMS providers and offers add-ons that are built to work together to create a complete member experience.
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2. Create a moderation framework
2. Create a moderation framework
With your platform in place, your first order of business is to define some ground rules, both for your online community and its moderators. Come up with a set of guidelines or terms and conditions. What’s allowed, what’s not tolerated, and what can members expect from your community?
Setting community terms ensures everyone joins with a common set of beliefs, and it gives you a guidepost for moderation. If any discussions start to go off the rails, you have the tools to steer the conversation without killing your community’s vibe. Make sure to share these guidelines across your organization to ensure that all internal stakeholders know and abide by the rules.
Once your online community is up and running, be firm and consistent with the rules you set. Remove inappropriate posts immediately and be respectful when explaining why you removed the post (often, a user doesn’t even realize that they were breaking the rules!). And, if a heated discussion gets a little too fiery, remember to de-escalate by confronting problems, not people.
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3. Plan your launch
3. Plan your launch
As you plan your new online community (or relaunch), think through how to introduce your online community to current and future members and customers. If you don’t orient your users to the community and spread the news, you could end up with an empty platform.
Before launch, follow these steps to prepare:
- Recruit users to help you work out bugs by beta testing. If you have a group of community ambassadors, customer advocates, or a product advisory board, these are great places to start. A small group (we recommend approximately 25 people) will give you the best feedback. Beta testing can provide helpful feedback if you have any gaps in your plan, and they often help you recruit new community members after launch.
- Plan initial launch messaging to raise awareness about the community and get people logging in.
- Create an onboarding flow to get users familiar with your community and make it part of their routine.
- Design a content calendar and posting schedule for at least four weeks so you can always be one step ahead. Ideally, you’ll have your next quarter planned out as you move forward, with room for last-minute additions or adjustments as needed.
- Seed some content in advance so that you get the most engagement. Your content repository can help if you hit any unexpected speed bumps in your launch planning.
Once you feel good about your plan, get potential community members excited! Hype up your launch with a series of promotional materials or plan events around the launch to drive signups and logins.
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4. Implement engagement strategies
4. Implement engagement strategies
Once your community is up and running, your job as an online community manager is to give members a reason to engage with you and each other so they’ll keep coming back for more. First, make sure you’re properly segmenting users so you can deliver the right content and information at the right time.
Having a content calendar that covers all your planned resources, events, education, recognition, and interaction is crucial for seeing the bigger picture and planning what’s next. A staffing calendar, meanwhile, can help you ensure all the right people know their responsibilities to keep your online community engaged.
Don’t be afraid to test out new ideas or formats! Consider:
- Gamifying the community experience by rewarding members for taking action (e.g. for their first post or years of involvement).
- Developing recurring content ideas like Tip Tuesdays or monthly member spotlights so members know to come back on those days.
- Creating a list of expert super-users who can run Ask-Me-Anything sessions, answer questions, host webinars, and support general content creation.
Keep an eye on engagement data to see which content and topics perform best so you can adjust your planning accordingly.
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5. Get other employees involved
5. Get other employees involved
Your online community management strategy should not live in a silo. Rather, it should be part of a wider organizational strategy to become member- or customer-centric. One part of a community manager’s job is to get staff buy-in by providing guidance, training, and support.
Having more of your organization engaged with your branded online community not only spreads out the work and responsibilities, but it also creates a more engaging experience for your community members, who might be interested in talking directly with people from different teams. For example, they may contact your events team about a conference, your membership team about their member benefits, or the product team to explain a new feature.
While some employees might feel a little reluctant to get involved, once they do, they will discover all the ways the online community can make their day-to-day work easier. Employees can gather feedback to improve product development, identify subject-matter experts for mentoring programs or speaking opportunities, test new ideas to inform future communication strategies, understand how customers really use products, and identify loyal members for referral and advocacy programs, among other insights.
Measuring Online Community Management Success
One fantastic thing about online communities is that they are rich with data. Use it. Not just for KPIs and reporting (although that’s important, too), but for the big picture stuff like learning about your customers or members, their evolving needs, and how you can best cater to them.
You’ll start to see recurring topics in your community that you can address, or complaints that you can fix. Your community can help steer departments in their planning – from marketing to education to sales to product to support. You can even use your community as a sounding board for new ideas – just ask what they think! This can be particularly useful for content ideas, new feature developments, UI/UX changes in your product, and more.
And when it comes to KPIs to measure the health of your online community, keep an eye on things like new users, logins, digest open rate, number of posts/replies, or connection requests to understand how your community is growing and engaging.
Learn more about community metrics in our on-demand webinar: Benchmarks for Success.
Community management isn’t static. As your strategy evolves, it will need further refinement and segmentation based on user activity. Additionally, your approach to managing communities must keep up with the latest advancements in community technology.
In particular, this means integrating and embracing cutting-edge AI features that will define the future of online community management. Artificial intelligence is changing the technology landscape, and it’s essential to get on board now before your community is left behind.
Get familiar with features like AI search assistants, AI-suggested tagging, sentiment analysis tools, and smart campaigns. These features help community managers enhance the member experience by providing answers faster and increasing personalization. AI-powered tools can also provide deeper insights into your community, all while saving you valuable time that you can redirect towards relationship-building.
The more you leverage up-and-coming technology, the more prepared you’ll be for the future of community management.
A Final Word on Managing Online Communities
Developing and optimizing your online community management strategy involves a lot of moving parts and people! But once you get it rolling, the pieces will fall into place, and it will be well worth the effort. When managed well, online communities are the best way to connect your association or brand with your members or customers. You’ll build deeper relationships and drive results for the people you work with and the people you serve!
Simplify community management and drive more engagement with Higher Logic.
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This post was originally published June 29, 2021. It has been updated as of April 8, 2026, to reflect our latest resources.
