How to Develop a Community Team  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deb Schell]] - Full Title: How to Develop a Community Team - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #community-building - #community-management - #team-structure Author: Deb Schell Source: Medium article Reference: https://deb-schell.medium.com/how-to-develop-a-community-team-85e7831b7553 date created: 2025-08-22 00:00 --- # Title: How to Develop a Community Team ## Table of Contents: - [✅ Overview](#-overview) - [🧭 Strategy First, Hiring Later](#-strategy-first-hiring-later) - [🧘 The CALM Method](#-the-calm-method) - [🧑‍🚀 Strategy 1: Run It Solo](#-strategy-1-run-it-solo) - [🧩 Platform Choice and Member Fit](#-platform-choice-and-member-fit) - [👥 Core Community Roles](#-core-community-roles) - [🤝 Strategy 2: Run It With One Team Member](#-strategy-2-run-it-with-one-team-member) - [🌱 Facilitator Qualities and Ops](#-facilitator-qualities-and-ops) - [💫 Strategy 3: Run It With Volunteers](#-strategy-3-run-it-with-volunteers) - [📚 References](#-references) ### References: - Community Strategy Podcast (Season 2) mention in-article - Contact: [email protected] ## 📝 Summary: The article argues that many community builders rush to do everything themselves or hire a community manager without first defining strategy. Deb recommends clarifying how the community supports the business model and then choosing an operational model: run solo, with one teammate, or with volunteers. She introduces the CALM Method (Clarity, Awareness, Learning, Motion) as a practical framework to keep things simple. The piece also outlines key roles (host, facilitator, manager, strategy consultant, marketing manager), emphasizes fit between platform and member behavior, and suggests structured, time-bounded programs (e.g., 90 days) to create urgency, set expectations, and enable iteration. ## 📖 Main Content: The central thesis is “strategy before staffing.” Without a clear vision of how the community advances business goals, hiring tends to add complexity and distraction. The CALM Method provides a stepwise approach: define the unique concept (Clarity), validate demand and needs (Awareness), determine the right structure (Learning), then execute (Motion). Three operating strategies are proposed: - Solo host: you set vision, run programming, onboard members, and handle marketing. To reduce overload, run a timed program (e.g., 90 days) to set expectations, create urgency, and evaluate outcomes. - With one collaborator: split responsibilities between a host (aligns community with business goals) and a facilitator (content, programming, events). Define roles clearly and consider whether the facilitator acts as a “go-between” with members. - With volunteers: recruit from within the community for enthusiasm and cultural fit. Clarify responsibilities, timelines, and outcomes. Volunteers or managers may handle content planning, event facilitation, onboarding, documentation, and more. A key caution: tech/platform choice should be driven by member behavior. Deb shares that her Zoom-based mastermind thrived, while an asynchronous community tool went unused because members preferred email—evidence to co-design the experience with members. Personal insights: - Treat your community like a product: iterate with short cycles, validate assumptions with member interviews, and instrument success with benchmarks. - Begin with the minimal viable operations team. Add roles only when the load impedes quality. - Codify operations early via a playbook; this reduces single points of failure and accelerates onboarding. ### 🗒️ Notes - Strategy-first approach - Don’t hire a manager before clarifying business alignment. - Early multi-person involvement can dilute focus. - CALM Method - Clarity: your unique community concept and purpose. - Awareness: validate through research, pilots, and member interviews. - Learning: choose structures and platforms that match member workflows. - Motion: execute, measure, iterate. - Solo run (timed programs) - 90-day cycles to set commitment windows and create urgency. - Evaluate results to refine structure and programming. - Manage your own marketing, onboarding, facilitation. - Platform fit - Choose the “gathering place” based on actual member communication habits. - Interview members; don’t overbuild tooling that won’t be used. - Roles to consider - Host: vision, mission, purpose; aligns strategy to business goals. - Facilitator: programming, events, education, content. - Manager: onboarding, participation, day-to-day ops. - Strategy consultant: processes to improve conversion and growth. - Marketing manager: promotion and scaling. - With one team member - Decide who is host vs facilitator. - Clearly define duties and public-facing leadership. - Facilitator can serve as the member liaison if no manager. - Volunteers - Recruit internally for cultural fit and enthusiasm. - Set clear responsibilities, timelines, goals, and outcomes. - Volunteers/managers can author playbooks, onboarding materials, guidelines. ## 📖 References: - Deb Schell, “How to Develop a community team,” Medium, 2023-08-04. https://deb-schell.medium.com/how-to-develop-a-community-team-85e7831b7553 - Email contact: [email protected] - Community Strategy Podcast (Season 2) referenced in-article ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1) Original idea: Many founders either try to do everything or immediately hire a community manager; instead, clarify strategy and how community supports your business model before staffing. Paraphrase: Rather than rushing to wear every hat or bringing in a manager too early, first determine precisely how your community advances your business. Without that foundation, extra hands can create noise and delay the strategic decisions you must own. 2) Original idea: A 90-day program creates urgency and sets expectations, enabling a test-evaluate-refine loop. Paraphrase: Time-box your community program to about three months. The start-and-end dates push prospective members to choose, define their commitment, and give you a clean window to test assumptions, review results, and decide what to keep or change. ## 📰 Newsletter: Learning WordPress dev this week? We’re spotlighting sustainable community ops. Quick hits: - Fresh lessons: mastering PHP arrays and modern JS modules, plus Git workflows for open-source contributions. - Community highlights: new contributor cohorts are shipping their first patches—join office hours to get your PRs reviewed. - New plugins: a performance-focused image optimizer and a role-based content access tool—great for membership sites. - Strategy tip: before hiring a community manager, clarify how your community drives your goals. Try a 90-day cohort to create urgency, gather feedback, and iterate your program design. Recommended reading: “How to Develop a Community Team” by Deb Schell for a crisp breakdown of roles (host, facilitator, manager) and the CALM framework (Clarity, Awareness, Learning, Motion). It’s a practical primer for building sustainable, member-aligned operations. Useful links: - WordPress Contributor Handbook for onboarding and roles - Open Source Guides on building healthy communities Keep shipping, stay human, and remember: the best community tools are the ones your members actually use. ## ✅ Action Items: Prompt for alignment with your Developer Advocate/OSPO trajectory: - Clarify alignment with open-source advocacy: Identify how the community model supports contributor pathways (onboarding flows, mentorship, docs, async collaboration). - Map roles to WordPress ecosystem needs: Host aligns strategy to project goals; facilitator runs contributor sessions and workshops; manager maintains onboarding, mentorship rosters, and engagement metrics. - Apply CALM to contributor programs: - Clarity: define contributor value props (learning, recognition), governance alignment, and funding models. - Awareness: validate via contributor interviews, issue triage data, and event feedback. - Learning: pick structures (sprints, 90-day cohorts, mentorship circles), and platforms members already use (Make blogs, Slack). - Motion: run a time-boxed contributor cohort; measure retention, PR throughput, review latency. - OSPO readiness: document a community playbook (roles, code of conduct - Summary: Developing a community team involves careful strategy and consideration of roles and responsibilities. Instead of doing everything yourself or hiring a community manager, it is important to clarify your strategy and understand how the community will support your business model. Depending on your needs, you can hire professionals or engage team members to manage various aspects of the community, such as design, content writing, marketing, or education. Another option is to run the community with the help of one team member or volunteers from your community. Clear communication and defining responsibilities are essential for a successful community strategy. - URL: https://deb-schell.medium.com/how-to-develop-a-community-team-85e7831b7553  So many community builders either plan to do everything themselves or hire a community manager. Instead, I recommend getting clear about your strategy first. Yes, having someone to help you moderate and handle mentorship is excellent. But if you don’t know how the community will support your business model, or if you don’t have a business yet, it may be too soon to know exactly what that support should look like or whether you need any. Sometimes when several people are involved, distractions increase and break the focus needed to strategize. A client I worked with had challenges in this area. While developing her strategy, she attempted to onboard her team, confusing everyone. As the host, you set the vision for your online community’s future. You’ll guide and support the members until you’re ready to bring on the proper support for your community. You may hire professionals who offer services to support you as the host or engage team members to manage aspects of the design, community building, content writing, copywriting, marketing materials, education, or funding. We will talk about this more in the upcoming sections. I hope you can see how much goes into creating a community with purpose, but it’s worth the work if you are dedicated to the process. When starting the search to fill your community roles, you may find different definitions than I offer here. Be aware there are many different types of communities and infinite possibilities for a community’s structure and strategy. The more complex a community strategy is, the more time it will take to educate your team and audience. ### Strategy 1: Run it by yourself A community host sets an online community’s vision, mission, and purpose. This person makes decisions about the community structure and develops the community strategy (and launch plan) through the phases of the CALM Method. The CALM Method™ has helped me over the course of my community-building journey. I will break down the CALM Method™ of Clarity, Awareness, Learning, and Motion to help you find calm in community building. The fastest way to find calm in community building is to keep things simple. (Which isn’t easy) This framework became what is now called the CALM Method™ I’ve developed and improved over the years to come up with the best way for me to help myself, clients, and community members in an easy way to find calm in the process of building, launching, and growing an online paid community. #### You can read more about the CALM Method™ [here](https://findcalmhere.com/the-calm-method/). * Clarity of your unique concept. * Awareness of your validation sources * Learning what structure will work best for you. * Motion through taking action. A single host structure comes with limitations to time and resources. It depends on your ability to keep yourself accountable throughout the community-building journey. Without a community program facilitator, you will guide members during virtual meetups and onboarding new people into the community. You are also the person who will market and promote your community on social media and through emails or live streaming. If you intend to build a community on your own, consider how to minimize these tasks or eliminate what is not imperative to your program’s success. An effective way to do this is to start with a timed program, say 90 days. This gives participants a start and end date to commit to, which helps you set expectations. Another benefit of a timed program is that you can create urgency. A start date requires participants to decide — whether the program fits their schedule. They also know when it ends, so they aren’t locked into any specific “what’s next” concept. You can develop your program, test it, and evaluate the results. What worked, and what didn’t? From there, you can decide if you want to do it again. Another critical factor is your gathering place. Don’t underestimate the importance of your chosen platform, as it affects your participants’ experience and your own. The technology available to build a community is where many of my clients get stuck. Knowing how you’ll use the platform is critical. For example, will your members connect between sessions? If unsure, I suggest interviewing potential members about how they want to gather. When I hosted my initial business development mastermind, we met weekly via Zoom. Members enjoyed it and showed up consistently. I can’t say the same about the community space I’d put in place. I’d invested in a tool that allowed members to share, connect, and collaborate between our calls, but they never used it. I received feedback they didn’t feel it necessary because they communicated via email. This taught me about the members of my program and their lack of need for additional tools that cost me time and money to set up. As we advance, I learned that a community can look like many things, and it is up to you and your members to define what is ideal for your community culture. #### Here is an example of a few community roles for a paid online community, network, or program: * A Community Host — to guide the vision, mission, and purpose. * A Community Facilitator- to support the programming, events, or workshops. * A Community Manager — to onboard and support members and encourage participation within the community. * A Strategy Consultant — to create processes and tools to increase conversions from your marketing and advertising efforts to your programs. * Marketing Manager- to help promote, advertise, and scale your business. ### Strategy 2: Run it with help from one team member When developing your strategy with a partner, it’s up to you whether one or both of you will function as the community host, as I’ve defined above, the person setting the community structure and strategy. When working with one or more collaborators, it is best first to identify how each person can best contribute. When launching a community as a startup with two or three people, identifying each person’s strengths is to identify their role within the community. As I’ve outlined above, there are a few core roles that a community should have when launching a paid program. In the future, I’ll refer to the host as the person who aligns the community strategy with the business goals. Assuming you’re the business owner, this is likely to be you. The community facilitator is responsible for the community content, programming, and events. There are various ways for a community facilitator to engage, so think about what makes sense for your people and your personalities. Make sure to clearly define who does what and how active you will be in taking the “lead role.” For example, you may decide the facilitator should be the “go-between” for the host and the members instead of a community manager (if you don’t have one). Community facilitators could be course instructors, co-hosts, coaches, or advocates. For an active, forward-facing role like this, the facilitator should possess self-awareness, eagerness to learn and adapt, empathy, integrity, dedication, service, the ability to inspire others, motivation, and strong communication skills. A host may also bring in a community manager to help facilitate and manage the daily operations. Their role may be less visible in this case, but it is still vitally important to the community’s health. Community Strategy, Marketing, and Sales support can be outsourced by hiring professional consultants or agencies to help create content, develop a launch plan, and implement a sales strategy. One of the tasks you might ask of your community facilitator or manager includes writing a community playbook or operations manual so that new team members can be trained easily. Additionally, community facilitators or managers may be assigned to write onboarding materials like welcome videos, guidelines, or how-to manuals. ### Strategy 3: Run it with volunteers from your community When hiring a community manager, I recommend starting within your community. Not only do these people already know the ropes, but they also tend to bring an infectious enthusiasm. The host may or may not be able to pay for this part-time role, but it’s not unusual for online community managers to volunteer for reasons other than money. Depending on your community’s size, scale, and purpose, the manager may also be responsible for content planning, event facilitation, leadership development, marketing and promotion, member onboarding, or dealing with the community’s ongoing challenges. Designating and communicating clear responsibilities for your host, leader, and manager is key to crafting a successful strategy. Not only should you identify who will take ownership of each step, but you also establish a timeline for the community launch or relaunch with benchmarks, goals, and outcomes. Email [email protected] with questions or comments. The Community Strategy Podcast Season 2 has begun; [check it out here](https://findcalmhere.com/podcast/)., How to Develop a Community Team, Deb Schell, 01h7akn09dhja3st64z5ngp06p.