Context

At Ava Women, I launched a community and grew it to 60,000 members. Participants were highly engaged and reported that they valued the knowledge and support they received from the community. But managing such a high quality community required intensive, hands-on moderation and was a drain on team resources. We needed a way to maintain an excellent community experience without spending so much time on moderation.

My Approach

To solve the resourcing issue, I leveraged the community’s greatest asset: its sky-high level of member engagement. Because our members felt such a sense of ownership over the community, I shifted responsibility for moderation to the community itself. Here’s the process I used:

1. I divided all community moderation activity into two groups: activities that could be automated, and activities that needed human involvement. I built systems and processes reduce the workload for anything that could be automated.

2. Next, I contacted a small group of community super-users and asked if they would be interested in collaborating with me to create a job description for volunteer community moderators.

3. I hired one paid moderator from the community to serve as the head community moderator. She managed training and onboarding of volunteer moderators, and was my single point of contact among the community moderation team.

Results

• Ava went from devoting one full time employee to community moderation to spending $2000 per month on a contract community manager—while community quality remained high

• There was consistently more interest in the volunteer moderator program than we had capacity for

• The Ava community continued to thrived via self-management for several years after the company was sold and resources were no longer invested in moderation