As community management practice matures globally, the work is diversifying and specialising. We are seeing the growth of focus areas like moderation and governance, data and analytics, social design and engagement, among others. One area that’s quickly becoming a priority is Community Operations.

We ask Chief Operating Officer at Discourse, Hawk, to explain what this emerging speciality is, how it adds value to communities and organisations, and how you should start exploring an operational plan.

How do you define Community Operations?

Community operations is the practice of examining functions and processes within your community ecosystem, with a view to making it run more efficiently as a whole (in the same way that a COO maximises the efficiency of an organisation).

This allows you to meet goals more effectively, and scale without the need for additional resource.

Practices includes analysing data to uncover bottlenecks or pain points that could be mitigated, identifying processes that could be made more efficient or repeatable, and advocating for the community team and members across the organisation so that goals and objectives are aligned and clearly communicated. 

Why is it important for communities to develop operational models as they grow over time? 

In the early stages of community building, the majority of processes are very manual and time consuming. If you were to maintain the balance of resource to output that is necessary to meet early stage growth, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to demonstrate a long term ROI. That leaves the future of the community uncertain. In order to turn the tide, you need to scale.

The definition of scaling is to increase your target metrics without adding resource and to do that you need to optimise the resources that you already have at your disposal. The way to do that is to make existing processes more efficient. Once your community reaches critical mass you are in a good position to do that. 

Are there types of communities where operations are more critical or more relevant than others?

In the same way that operations as a practice can be applied to many different aspects of business (from sales ops to business ops), so it can with community.

If you have access to data, you have an opportunity to operationalise your processes. Communities with large member bases will likely see more immediate benefit, but any community professional that finds themselves repeating manual processes should start to consider how they could be optimising for growth.

If you have a community ecosystem that encompasses several different platforms or technologies, you would likely benefit from having someone in an ops role that has an overarching view of how everything fits together.  

Similarly, if you have a large community team, or one that spans several parts of the business, having an advocate that can help you to gather feedback and manage projects can have a huge impact on how you spend your time.

When done well, community ops will free up your time to be more strategic. 

How do we balance operational design with reflexivity and agility? How do we avoid over-engineering (especially for those start-up communities or early career community managers)?

Knowing when to bring in an ops specialist is important. In the very early stages it isn’t necessary. Until you reach critical mass and the community is self-sustaining you are essentially still in your proof of concept stage – during which a single CM or a small team is fine.

Once you get to the point where growth is inevitable, it’s time to start considering operational design. And that starts with data.

Over engineering is only going to be an issue if you have someone redesigning processes without data. Don’t get stuck in a cycle of trying to solve problems before they exist. Everything should start with a discovery phase – what is your data telling you? Are you adding new moderators every month? That possibly points to the need to streamline your moderation processes. Have you noticed that new registrations have slowed down? It might be time to dig into where in the journey people are dropping out.

The entire purpose of introducing operational design and management is to increase agility by identifying inefficiencies and mitigating them.

Do you think the growth of community operations indicates a further maturing of community as a professional discipline? What might this mean for the practice in future?

I do. Recognising the value of operationalising community as a practice speaks to a wider acceptance of the value that community can bring to business. Investing in community ops demonstrates a commitment to supporting community ventures at scale and organisations don’t do that unless they believe in the cause.

One of the most exciting things about the growth of community ops as a practice is that it takes a lot of pressure off community managers, allowing them to focus more on the member experience.

I also think it opens the door for community as a practice to be taken more seriously, which is something that we’ve been fighting for for years. If hiring an ops specialist empowers community professionals to demonstrate the value of their work more easily (either by communicating direct wins with data to back them up or more broadly through advocacy) then I think we’ll see a new confidence in the industry that has been missing for a long time.

What is most interesting to you about community today?

I am very interested in what the future of fast-lane vs slow-lane in community looks like.

We began to see a huge upswing in ephemeral chat based communities last year with Discord pushing hard into the market. At Discourse we are now seeing some push back as CMs struggle to moderate these communities and call to account their value. It feels like a resurgence of the Slack vs forums conversation from ~5 years ago. 

Hawk was a recent guest at Australian Community Managers’ annual Swarm Conference, exploring community ops with community practitioners around APAC. ACM membership gives you access to previous Swarm Conference talks, discounts on training and more.