Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day. A day that recognises and celebrates the efforts of community managers/facilitators. So have you said thank you to them for all the effort they put in to keep your group relevant, interesting and active? What do they actually do? This is a question that gets asked a lot. If you facilitate a Community of Practice, you know that it can be hard work… and that you sometimes need a sense of humour to do it! If you’re someone who manages a facilitator, please realise the amount of effort that goes into to facilitating a community. Facilitators need your support and help. It’s not a quick and easy task for a member of staff to facilitate a successful community. It takes time, care and attention. Dawn Foster (Community Expert) mentioned that the day-to-day responsibilities of most community managers contain an interesting mix of tactical tasks and strategic planning, and the work usually falls into four areas:
What do they spend their time on? A colleague of ours, Erica Hurley (Knowledge and Innovation Network), suggested that for a healthy community the facilitator tends to spread their time as follows:
We also did a bit of research on this a few years ago in the Online Facilitators Community, which suggested active group facilitators would spend around 4 hours a week facilitating the community across the following areas:
So if you have a moment, a little thank you to those who facilitate your group on Knowledge Hub will go a long way. Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day to all of our Knowledge Hub facilitators! And thank you for everything you do to make Knowledge Hub such a vibrant network of communities.
