Use this skill when building community programs, moderating forums, creating advocacy programs, or managing feedback loops. Triggers on community management, forum moderation, advocacy programs, community engagement, feedback loops, community metrics, and any task requiring community strategy or operations.
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Use this skill when building community programs, moderating forums, creating advocacy programs, or managing feedback loops. Triggers on community management, forum moderation, advocacy programs, community engagement, feedback loops, community metrics, and any task requiring community strategy or operations.
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.
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
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)
Key principles
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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)
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
Common tasks
Design a community strategy
Use this framework to scope a community before building it:
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.
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
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).
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):
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
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:
Document everything first - Playbooks, moderation guidelines, onboarding
scripts. Undocumented processes cannot be delegated.
Promote community moderators - Trusted members make excellent part-time mods.
Lower cost, higher trust from community, deep context.
Automate the repetitive - Welcome messages, FAQ responses, link-to-docs for
common questions. Tools: Zapier, Community.com, or Discord bots.
Hire a community manager - When paid staff is needed, hire for empathy and
writing quality first, platform expertise second.
Add a second platform only if members demand it - Resist the urge to be
everywhere. Every additional platform splits attention and quality.
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
Gotchas
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
