Community of Community Managers / Improving Our Channel

Interviews and Findings

One year after the founding of the Telegram channel for a community of community managers Telegram channel (CofC), @robbiebent initiated research to understand the state of community management and how to improve the utility of the channel for its members. Judy Gordon (OmniSparx) and Andreas Wallendahl (ConsenSys and Kauri) conducted the interviews with the members of the CofC channel.

Recommendations for the channel are below, followed by the paraphrased results of the some of the interviews. Andreas will publish another summary of the developer relations interviews.

CoC channel members at a meetup at DevCon4

Suggestions for Improvement of the CoC Channel

Everyone we spoke to acknowledged how important community is. However, most projects’ community teams are small; most of the projects interviewed had just one to three people working on communications and community.

Because the teams are so small, the CoC channel can really play a role in supporting people and helping to build knowledge.

Interviewees made these suggestions for how the CoC channel can help members, and the ecosystem:

➡️ Create a unifying mission statement

➡️ Collaborate together and doing one project to help with the mission

➡️ Increase participation from people outside of the Ethereum community

➡️ Move from Telegram to another social media or forum platform

➡️ Adding educational events including lean coffees, meetups, podcasts, classes for new community managers (Gitbook?) and even our own conferences

➡️Consider having small working groups focused on achieving the goal of the channel. These groups would have the added bonus of helping the channel feel smaller and keeping the community close-knit.

To continue to foster the values of the channel, increase engagement and get more done together, we propose that we form the following small groups:

✔️Technology: a team volunteering to evaluate other technology platforms the community can use

✔️Education: a team volunteering to organize and catalog educational events

✔️ Mission / Unifying Project: a team volunteering to create a mission statement and propose ideas for a project we can do together to further these ideas

✔️Other: Collaboration? Events? Hiring? Legal?

Interested in these groups or any other topics you think would be good to have a subcommittee on? Sign up here.

State of the Community Interview Themes

Comments from interviewees are grouped into the themes, following:

➡️ Main goals and challenges for 2019

➡️ Best community initiatives

➡️ What makes communities valuable

➡️ Tips for people starting today

➡️ Community management thought leaders

Again, note that interviewee contributions are paraphrased, and should not be taken as direct quotes and that the developer relations interviews will be summarized in another blog post.

Full transcripts of the interviews can be found here.

Goals and Challenges for 2019

In 2019, most of the interviewees are focused on targeting developers. Many community managers are also reaching out to communities of end-users and with other projects with whom they can collaborate.

Community managers are looking to target developers in 2019

• Brady (District0x): Major goal is to encourage a strong development community. Education is at the core.
• Jared (Quantstamp): Getting people to use Quantstamp as their development workflow and to be node operators.
• Onur (Oscoin): Solve problems for a small and highly engaged group of developers and to build a community around this core.
• Derek (Bloom): Leading a big push on getting developers to use the protocol.

Community managers are also targeting the ultimate end-users for their products

• Simona (Bounties Network): Seeking to make sure that new people come into the space, and that we broaden and define our communities.
• MP (Golem): Targeting developers, providers (anyone with computing power from laptop users to big data centers), and requesters (people who need the computation)
• Derek (Bloom): Leading a big push on bringing more organizations into the fold and getting them to integrate the protocol.
• Zayi (MetaX): Key 2019 goal is content creation for the digital advertising vertical and blockchain community.

Collaboration with other projects is also an important goal for 2019

• Simona (Bounties Network): Collaborating with projects in our ecosystem will help speed up adoption. It’s about individuals and communities, a re-design of collaboration.

With the downturn, many community managers talked about how their communities had turned somewhat toxic and how this year their goal is to build and grow positive community engagement.

• Jared (Quantstamp): With the downturn, faced a quieter community
• Ziggy (POA): Address toxicity, and keep shipping product. Keep making amazing open source software.
• Jelena (DFINITY): Find a way to get community members active in organizing meetups around the work.
• Brady (District0x): Leveraging the CMX community engagement curve as a tool to help think about increasing engagement
• Auryn (Colony): Supercharging engagement, increasing web traffic and audience numbers, pushing content, articles, having a strong presence at events. Giving people a feeling that they are part of something bigger than themselves. Making people feel like they are part of the community.

Community managers also mentioned other challenges including:

1. Hiring

• Finding the right people

2. Conferences: Quantifying which events will have the best returns on invested time and money

• Zayi (Metax): prioritizing events that are substantial

3. Metrics

• Jared (Quantstamp): curious to know how people think about and approach analytics.

4. Legal

• Derek (Bloom): (with a) largely US-based team, managing different regulations

Best Community Initiatives

We asked each of the communities to tell us about their best community initiatives; answers included:

1. Ambassador programs

• Ziggy (POA): Ambassador program. Ambassadors are people who represent POA to a wider community. Best thing they’ve ever done. POA can’t go to all of the conferences and meetups. Globally distributed. All on a voluntary basis. POA pays for expenses and sends some merchandise.

2. Collaboration and Partnerships

• Simona (Bounties Network): One of the main things we focus on is collaboration. That translates through partnership with projects and trying to find synergies.

3. Discord

• Brady (District0x): Discord has been a big win. Different conversations. Educational onboarding which brings people in. Leveling system. Small handful of channels.

4. Games

• Derek (Bloom): Trivia night. Create a question and run it live. Earn points — if you hit 50 points get Bloom t-shirt and with 300 points get a Bloom hoodie.

What makes your community valuable?

Every project talked about how valuable their community is. For the most part, projects discussed that the community helps spread the word, provide valuable feedback and support the project in the wider community.

• Jared (Quantstamp): Community has bought up all of the scammy address and URLs. They’ve helped moderate each other, keeping the culture of the chat on point. They’ve supported us when we ask. They show up to meetups that we put on.
• Zayi (MetaX): Feedback is the most valuable. Community feedback is the best way to measure impact.
• Onur (Oscoin): Our community are experts in the field who help inform the product and the product roadmap.
• Derek (Bloom): Helps keep people honest. Highlights very quickly any pattern when people see the same questions over and over again and see people’s main concerns.

Tips for new community managers

We asked the community managers what they know now that they wished they knew when they started and heard the following:

• Ziggy (POA): Know that community can become toxic
• Simona (Bounties Network): (1) How important it is to have relatable, easily digestible on-boarding material. What we fall into is the curse of knowledge in this space and forget what it’s like to see/read something for the first time. (2) Get to know what other projects are doing (more intimately from the beginning, and discover angles for collaboration)
• Brady (District0x): Need to think about retention and engagement.
• Rayi (MetaX): Understanding what you can and can’t say. Have to watch and make sure it’s not going to influence the market.
• Derek (Bloom): The restrictions on what the community managers can talk about who limit the amount of conversations that happened.

Community Manager Thought-Leaders

Following are the people who community managers told us were thought-leaders in crypto community management:

Robbie Bent, Naval, Griff, Brady McKenna, Chase Cole. Mike from DFINITY, Andrew from Origin, Bob Summerwell, Kevin Owaki, Kevin Seagrave ETH Security from BitCoin, MP, Helena, Reese from Colorado (eTH Denver) and Jeff Atwood (Discourse).

Thank you to everyone who participated in these interviews. Please put comments, suggestions and/or your feedback on these topics in the comments section of the blog. We hope to repeat these interviews every six months.

Notes on process

The CofC Telegram channel has almost 300 members. The channel is private and participation is by invitation only. If you would like to join, please contact Robbie Bent or Tor Bair with your name, role and project name.

Full interview notes can be found in a public Google folder here

Participants largely fall into three segments:

1. Community Managers

2. Developer Relations Managers

3. Influencers and Other People who Support Community Managers (Consultants, Legal, HR People etc.)

We conducted interviews with people from all three segments. While some people including in the interviews chose to remain anonymous, most allowed their names to be associated with the paraphrased interviews above.