community-manager

name	community-manager
description	Grow, moderate, and activate user communities across forums, groups, social channels, ambassador programs, and customer spaces. Use when the task is to shape community strategy, moderation policy, engagement programming, response playbooks, or health reporting. Do not use for one-off support troubleshooting, pure brand copywriting, or paid acquisition planning.

Community Manager

Build communities that feel active, safe, and worth returning to.

This skill exists to help teams grow durable engagement, manage community norms, respond to member needs, and turn scattered participation into a healthy operating system.

Scope

Use this skill for:

• community strategy and channel planning
• moderation frameworks and escalation rules
• engagement calendars and activation campaigns
• ambassador, advocate, or champion program design
• member onboarding and retention flows
• community health analysis and reporting
• crafting replies, updates, and discussion prompts for community spaces

Use this skill when

Use this skill when the task needs:

• a plan to grow or stabilize a member community
• moderation guidance for safety, tone, and rule enforcement
• engagement programs that increase participation quality, not just raw volume
• repeatable response patterns for community managers or moderators
• reporting on community health, sentiment, churn risk, or activation patterns

Do not use this skill when

Do not use this skill for:

• individual support tickets where troubleshooting is the main job
• pure social-media ad strategy or acquisition media buying
• isolated copywriting with no community context
• PR crisis communications where corporate communications lead the work
• product management decisions that only happen to reference community feedback

Inputs to gather

Before acting, identify:

• community type and platform: Discord, Slack, forum, Reddit, customer community, etc.
• member segments and desired behaviors
• current health signals: active members, post frequency, response times, churn, sentiment
• moderation challenges, risk areas, and escalation thresholds
• voice and brand boundaries
• goals such as retention, activation, advocacy, education, or feedback collection

If the community is struggling, separate low activity, poor fit, trust issues, and moderation failures. Those require different interventions.

Output expectations

Return outputs such as:

• community strategy brief
• moderation policy or escalation matrix
• engagement calendar or campaign plan
• member onboarding flow
• health scorecard or KPI framework
• response library for common community scenarios
• recommendations for team staffing, rituals, or measurement

Good community work should increase trust, clarity, and useful participation.

Working method

1. Define the community job

Start by clarifying what the community is for:

• peer support
• product education
• customer retention
• advocacy and referrals
• professional identity
• feedback collection
• creator or partner enablement

Healthy communities are designed around a real member job, not around empty activity goals.

2. Segment members by behavior, not only demographics

Look for groups such as:

• lurkers who need lower-friction entry
• new members who need orientation
• regular contributors who sustain conversations
• experts or champions who can model norms
• at-risk members who disengage after poor experiences

Different segments need different prompts, recognition, and moderation attention.

3. Build norms and moderation before scale

Create clear rules for:

• acceptable behavior
• self-promotion limits
• safety and harassment handling
• escalation paths for legal, trust, or security issues
• moderator tone and consistency

A fast-growing community with weak norms becomes expensive to repair.

4. Design engagement loops, not random posts

Strong engagement programs usually combine:

• onboarding rituals
• recurring discussion formats
• expert sessions or AMAs
• recognition systems
• feedback loops into product or operations
• reactivation outreach for members who stalled

Optimize for repeat participation and relationship depth, not vanity impressions.

5. Measure health with a balanced lens

Track more than top-line member count. Use signals such as:

• active members by cohort
• contribution depth and response rate
• time to first response
• unanswered-post rate
• retention of new members
• moderator workload and incident rates
• sentiment or trust indicators

A louder community is not always a healthier one.

6. Write responses that de-escalate and invite contribution

Community language should:

• acknowledge the member’s context
• set boundaries without sounding robotic
• redirect conflict early
• reward useful participation
• move sensitive cases into the right escalation path

The goal is to preserve trust while maintaining standards.

Adjacent skill boundaries

• customer-support: solves individual product issues; this skill manages the broader community system around those interactions
• social-media-manager: focuses on outward publishing and channel marketing; this skill focuses on member ecosystem health and participation
• copywriter: writes polished messaging; this skill designs community operations, rituals, and moderation logic
• feedback-analyst: synthesizes feedback data; this skill helps structure how community feedback is gathered and handled
• escalation-handler: handles sensitive case escalation; this skill defines when and how those escalations happen in community spaces

Quality bar

A strong result should:

• improve community trust and participation quality
• distinguish growth problems from moderation problems
• produce concrete playbooks instead of generic engagement ideas
• show clear metrics and operating rituals
• balance member experience with safety and operational load

References to use

Use prompt.md for tone, moderation posture, and planning structure. Use guides/qa-checklist.md before finalizing. Use examples/README.md for deliverable shapes. Use meta/skill.json for boundaries and metadata.