More on Community Management Best Practices from Paul Pavlinovich

More on Community Management Best Practices from Paul Pavlinovich
If you run a community or are thinking of doing so - you need to read this

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Community Management Best Practices: Writing Community Guidelines

(This post was written for the Best Practices series by Community Vanguards member, Paul Pavlinovich.)

Communities are societies, they tend to attract people from all walks of life with a common interest that the community targets. When you first start out possibly with yourself and some of your friends chatting and sharing your topic everything is rosy.

Over time, strange things start to rear their heads: different interests; cliques; politics; and new directions. These things are all ok in their place, but do they belong in your community?

Generally speaking a community has a topic, cause, or common interest in mind when they’re started by the owner. This can drift over time driven by the community members and sometimes even the moderators in ways that the owner didn’t anticipate. This can lead to exciting new adventures, but it can also leave the owner feeling a little left out or it can lead to rifts in the community that ultimately may lead to an unexpected outcome, in the worst case the community becoming lost.

Guidelines help provide direction. The community owner, the moderators and the members need a combined vision of what the community is about and how everyone is expected to behave.

Start with a Vision, an example from one of my communities called COALS is “COALS discusses all aspects of Live Steaming in Australia.” - this immediately sets the scope for everything that goes on. It’s has some key elements - “live steaming”, “Australia”, “discuss” which helps people understand what the community is all about and what it’s for.

Always positive before negative in your guidelines, try to reinforce what you want people to do in your community worded in a positive way. For me, nothing turns me off more than a list of “No” and “Don’t” when I first enter a community. You’ve only got about 10 seconds to intrigue a prospective member. I love to see things like Discuss any aspect of live steaming limited to Australia, and please respect each other and each other’s views. We celebrate difference and robust but polite discussion.

Once you’ve established the positive it’s ok to talk about the things you don’t want people to do which could be things like Please limit your posting to one or two at most each day. Please ensure any material you contribute is your own or that you have permission to share and always attribute the source when it’s not yours. This statement is still a “do” style of wording but it’s clearly giving the reader an understanding of the “don’ts”.

Stay brief and on the member’s level try to keep your guidelines simple and brief, they’ll be much easier to digest and enforce. Write in a way that you would want to receive the information if you were a member. It’s very easy to talk down to people. Have your moderators or someone else read your guidelines before you put them in place.

Establish the moderation process sometimes it is necessary to sanction someone, it’s good to define how that will happen e.g. Members who are unable to abide by the guidelines may be removed from the community after a warning. you may also wish to establish how much power the moderators have e.g. “Moderators may delete posts or comments that do not fit in with the community guidelines. Only the owner may ban an established person from the community. Any moderator can ban an obvious spammer via the spam queue.

(Photo Credit: Paul Pavlinovich, who runs the Photograph Melbourne Community, among others: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/116476435425093945441_)