Bonus Episode: How does Community Manager Work and Who is it Best for?
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
Creative Coworking Partnerships: How to negotiate and structure management agreements from the landlord and operator perspective
TRANSCRIPTION
Bonus Episode: How does Community Manager Work and Who is it Best for?
00:00:02,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast, where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how-tos in Coworking. I owned and operated Coworking spaces for eight years, and then served as the executive director of the Global Workspace Association for five years. And today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you thought provoking operator case studies and inspirational interviews with industry thought leaders to help you confidently stay on top of what's important and what you can apply to your own role in the co-working industry."
00:00:44,"Hey there, I'm recording this bonus episode because I often get questions about our Community Manager University program. Who is it for? How does it work? Should I join? I get occasional questions in our live chat on our website that make me think, oh boy, I really need to figure out a more simple way to explain this program. So always working on it."
00:01:13,"As marketers, we're always working to simplify. I'm a huge Donald Miller fan, and you know, his line is, if you confuse, you lose. So we'll keep working on our website description, but I thought I would record a quick episode for you, our podcast listeners and anybody else who's interested in the program, and use it as a way to make it easier to explain what is the Community Manager University for?"
00:01:37,"Who's a good fit, how does it work, et cetera. So let's start with why did we create it? We launched it three years ago and we created it because I operated Coworking Spaces for eight years, and I started supporting new operators through our Coworking, Startup School as they launched, and they had to hire community managers and everybody was training their community managers from scratch,"
00:02:05,"reinventing the wheel every time. And the operators that I supported, both in the Startup school and in our operator membership program suffered from turnover, right? Community managers have a lifespan of, you know, maybe two years. And then we have new community managers. So not only are we training community managers from scratch when we first hire them, then we're gonna have turnover."
00:02:28,"We have to train a new Community Manager. So this poses a challenge for the industry. There's no training for Coworking community managers, and it's a fairly unique role, right? This role wears a lot of different hats. If you have a larger space, then you may have the role broken down into a few different hats per, you know, resource that you have."
00:02:50,"Maybe somebody's focused more on operations on your team or sales or community management and sort of more member-facing skills. But you probably have team members that are wearing a lot of hats, and it's a bit of a unique role and it's a fairly new industry. So how do we help community managers be more successful? How do we help community managers that might be on a small team or have no team at all,"
00:03:15,"feel like they have a network of other peers that a professional network that they can turn to? And for our operators and owners out there, how can we solve some of the pain of onboarding new community managers? Of course, you're gonna have things that you do your way, you have your own sort of secret sauce around how you deliver aspects of the business."
00:03:41,"That is totally fine. Of course, we actually voice over that a lot in our content. We say, look, you probably have a specific way to do this. Here's a baseline to consider. And certainly, so who is the Community? Manager University for It is a great resource for brand new community managers. It's also a great resource for experienced community managers."
00:04:04,"It is really designed to be a training and development platform and resource for community managers kind of at any stage of their career. And we're constantly looking for ways to support our more experienced community managers. We just hired a couple of coaches and they're gonna be doing some outreach with our more experienced folks to look for more ways that we can serve them and help them be successful in their role and enjoy the role."
00:04:32,"We think if community managers feel supported and like they're growing and learning and developing and having fun because they're part of a professional community that they enjoy, then we might get them to stay a little bit longer than they would have. And that's a huge win for everyone. So it doesn't matter whether the Community Manager is new or more advanced, we do training and other programming that fits Community managers throughout the life cycle of their career."
00:05:02,"So how does it work? It's kind of course and kind of a membership, which I think is really where the confusion probably falls. So we have a lot of content. So first, let me kind of talk about the pillars of the program, and then I'll give you a peak into the type of content that we have. So the pillars are really around,"
00:05:24,"like I said, training and development, learning and connecting. So we want your Community Manager to be able to really go deep into aspects of the role that they want to be, have some expertise around, or you know, learn more about. So there's content. And then we also want our community managers to learn from each other. Nobody's giving away any secret sauce,"
00:05:48,"but we all have a lot to learn about how someone else might manage something. And you know, if you've been in this industry, you know, it's very willing to share and very transparent. And we still believe rising tides rise all boats. So basically everybody wins as this industry does better. So folks will share, you know, best practices and help solve challenges."
00:06:12,"We've had some really, you know, we have p you know, people from all walks of life that wanna be members. And sometimes that can be a little bit challenging. We've had some kind of recent interesting questions about challenging members, but community. So we have an active Slack group, and it is busy pretty much every day with people sharing ideas for community events they're doing,"
00:06:32,"or you know, upcoming holidays, people asking for resources or support or Hey, how do you handle this? And then we do live calls every month to share best practices and case studies and answer questions and have really rich discussions. And then we also do live training once a month. We also just started to kick off a couple of work sprints that we think will help sort of solve the problem around needing inspiration and kind of focus work time to work on social media and event planning."
00:07:05,"So those are totally optional, but we're always looking for ways to solve our members. So there's content and there's community, and both of those are ongoing. And our content starts from kind of very basic 1 0 1 level and goes into 300 level. So if we're gonna to kind of transition to talking about the content, the content, we do have tracks and we're building additional tracks."
00:07:30,"We have a primary certification track. So we issue the only co-working Community Manager certification in the industry. And it's fairly rigorous. You have to take four 13 different modules and you have to complete an assessment for each one so that we know you really understand the content. And this, these courses are across industry knowledge, community building, sales, and marketing and operations."
00:07:56,"So those are kind of the core content areas that we focus on for this role and kind of line up with those hats that we see community managers usually wearing. So all of the content that we create goes into one of those core areas. We have certification track, which is 13 modules, and then we have about 30 elective courses that you can take that again,"
00:08:20,"fall under those buckets. So they're categorized for easy search, and we use a learning management platform that is excellent, it's very easy to navigate, it's mobile friendly, and it has an amazing search feature. So if you are want wanting to do a deep dive on virtual office, you can type that in and it'll show you all of the training modules,"
00:08:43,"resources, templates, et cetera that we have on virtual office. If you want to get some training on optimizing your Google business profile, we have a lot of training on that. Of course you can type that in and pull that up. So there are tracks and then there are, it's also just kind of on demand. And we add to that library of training almost every month because there are always new topics that are coming up for our industry or things change."
00:09:09,"Like I recently did a podcast on how we just updated our member onboarding processes. We learn, you learn, you know, there's always new information and better, more up-to-date ways to do things. Upcoming, one of our co-working coaches is going to host a session on how to use chat G P T in the Community Manager role. So we're going to take baby steps one thing at a time,"
00:09:32,"but start to work on, okay, what are a few ways to use that tool to be more efficient in the role? And also just to learn, it's a great opportunity to learn about chat G P T in context. So that's just one example. So we have a giant library of content. I'm not gonna read through it all, but like I said,"
00:09:53,"we break it down into industry knowledge, community building operations, and sales and marketing. So the industry knowledge bucket, I won't go into too much, but really talks about, you know, what is the Coworking industry, what are other U words that are used to talk about different models in the industry? How is it growing? Who are the major players?"
00:10:13,"When we talk about, you know, getting to know the other players in your specific market, we do a lot with community building event planning. You know, why community matters, member onboarding would fall. A lot of our content kind of crosses these categories, right? So member onboarding might be a little bit of community building. We put it into operations."
00:10:35,"We help new Community managers understand what onboarding and offboarding looks like, what the tech stack looks like. We cover leadership topics like having a weekly meeting with your team. We do a lot with sales and marketing. We have a lot of templates. So we teach the sales funnel. We have resources on onboarding and offboarding email series. We have a sales funnel email template series."
00:11:02,"We do tour training. Gosh, we have how to, how, how to host your member, your first member event. We talk sort of bigger picture about the Coworking success path. We do training on the Coworking p and l. We do training on the concept of ads in seo. We don't assume that Community managers are running those things, but to help them understand how they fit into sales and marketing."
00:11:30,"We do a lot of training on the Google business listing. What else we do? We've done some automation training, co-working metrics. So what are KPIs that your space might be tracking? So again, some of these are pretty intro level topics and some get pretty high level. And honestly, you know, I run an operator membership and oftentimes I'm trying to figure out,"
00:11:53,"okay, like a lot of the content can, you can go at it from an owner perspective and from a Community Manager perspective. So we try to really put our Community Manager lens on it. We do some leadership modules around prioritizing and you know, focusing on getting the right things done. And we have coffee training, virtual mail training, so much so there's a ton of content that you could totally create on your own."
00:12:23,"It would take a very long time. We've been adding to this library for three years, every single month. And certainly at the beginning we seeded the library. So that's a little bit of how it works. Again, it's really for any level. It's a training and development platform. It's a little bit course, it's a little bit membership, it's a little bit content,"
00:12:44,"a little bit community. It's a great resource for your team. We would love to have you join us in the community. We have community managers from all over the world. And if you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to reach out to team@everythingcoworking.com. And of course, if you're looking for all the details and the blink to register to join the community,"
00:13:08,"you can find that at everythingcoworking.com/communitymanager. I should also mention that we do multi-seat discounts. So if you have multiple team members that you want to register for the program, again, send an email to team Everything Coworking dot com and we will get you set up with that discount. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like what you heard,"
00:13:34,"tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review. It makes a huge difference in helping others like you find us. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to Everything Coworking dot com. We'll see you next week."
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