One of the most important things is to have community management guidelines. It is because it will help you to follow the proper roles. To have a clear understanding, let us find out more.
What Are Community Management Guidelines?
Community management guidelines are the sets of responsibilities and rules of the community. It is a document that helps you to manage your community.
It also includes:
- The community roles, who will take them, and when to use them.
- How you will communicate with your users.
- What the community rules are and what happens if they are broken.
Why Do You Need Guidelines?
To create a healthy and happy community, you need to follow a set of rules and guidelines. Here are some reasons why you need it:
- It is a guideline for new members to understand how to contribute to their community.
- It helps you make decisions in tough situations. For example, if you receive bad content from a member or something else is happening in your community, you can refer back to the guidelines.
- It will help you to make decisions according to the rules of your community.
- You can also use it as a reference if someone breaks one of the rules. You can ban or warn them accordingly.
- You must always remember that it’s not about you but about the members who are contributing to your community.
Who Usually Has Guidelines?
1. Some Public Figures Who Have Community Management Guidelines
A lot of public figures use community management guidelines. They include:
- Taylor Swift
- Britney Spears
- Justin Timberlake
Also, RuPaul and Wendy Williams are some public figures who use them.
2. Communities Who Use Community Management Guidelines:
Some communities which use guidelines are:
- Bebo
- Quora
- StackOverflow
- Even your community.
How Do You Create Your Community Management Guidelines?
Now you can learn how to create your guidelines. How do you create it? Here are some things that you need to create it:
1. Time:
Guidelines require a lot of time. If you want to create a good one, you will have to invest a lot of time in it.
It’s because you need to write down everything according to the specific rules of your community. For example, if your community has specific language rules, then you have to put that on your guidelines too.
So make sure that you have enough time for this project.
2. A Good Team:
Another important thing is that you need a good team to create a great document for your community management guidelines. You will need different experts from different areas such as law or marketing.
So they can help you with the process of creating it.
3. An Excellent Design:
The design of your document is also very important. It is because it will be read by the members of the community and they might feel inspired by how well it is designed.
To have an excellent design, make sure that you use templates or design tools. So it will be easy for you and your teammates to edit or add more content once they are done creating it.
There are a lot of free tools like Canva (a free online tool). So make sure that you check them out before finishing your document.