Community building is the process of bringing a group of people together to achieve a series of collective goals.
In this process, this group of people needs to have different talents. We can observe that there are three most common main roles involved in the process of community building:
- Settlers: responsible for operations, focusing on stable growth and maintenance of the community;
- Explorer: Responsible for experiments, focusing on the leapfrog development of the community;
- Planner: Responsible for strategy and focus on community optimization.
Settlers (community management)
Community settlers must maintain the core basic functions of a community, and are committed to promoting the steady organic growth of the community. This role is most often understood as a “community manager.”
The settlers are responsible for various community operations, such as:
- Accept all kinds of community requests;
- Coordinating Discord and Telegram groups;
- Promote the active participation of stakeholders in the community;
- Attract new community members to join
- Write documentation, or anything that can be used by existing community members.
The settlers are the backbone of the community.
Explorer (community growth)
In a community, an explorer is a person who focuses on enabling the community to develop by leaps and bounds and exploring new opportunities.
The focus of the explorer’s work is to explore and create new opportunities for the community, not just to promote the development of existing communities. Explorers need to establish new community distribution channels, create content, cultivate partners, build relationships, and conduct customer interviews to analyze the opportunities in the untapped market.
Explorers are experimenters who can promote community development.
Planner (Community Strategy)
Community planners are those who promote community strategies. They are responsible for planning how the community should develop and assigning the best solutions to community construction work. The planner’s responsibilities need to understand how to allocate community construction work and resources appropriately and make them Play the biggest role.
Let 20% of the effort get 80% of the effect.
The formulation of community strategies is a process of discovery and iteration. Through the realization and initiatives of settlers and explorers, the community will continue to learn, and community strategies will continue to be optimized and improved over time.
Common misunderstandings about these three roles
- Exploration is limited to settlement. Before building a community with a certain level of user participation, most projects try to develop quickly. But the problem is that you need to make sure that the needs and priorities of the current community can be effectively fulfilled before actively developing. If a community cannot “take care” and retain existing community participants, it will be futile to further attract new participants.
- Building a community is a creative process, the core of which is building relationships. This process can rarely be forced-settlers and explorers need to have enough patience, and spend more time and various methods to run the community . If you do not give enough creative freedom to experiment, you will end up wasting the time and energy of the community team.
- Community planning requires operational experience. Some project founders always want to play the role of planner, but they have no experience in community building, and sometimes they are not even aware of this, so it is easy to fail. If the settlers or explorers in the project team cannot fill the role of the planner, then you might as well try to find a consultant or a more experienced third party to improve help and support. The planner needs to have a clear understanding of the project and maintain continuity.
Community building is a team sport. A community needs different “talents” to be successful.
The purpose of writing this article is to analyze the different roles required to build and nurture the community with a different mode of thinking. I hope this article can provide a better framework to help you understand who should be hired for different community building positions. And in which areas need to invest more energy and resources.
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