What kind of initiatives a community manager should avoid when growing their online community?

You need to avoid initiatives that require a lot of time investment on your part. You need to work only on initiatives where volunteers can act autonomously. When you need to spend a lot of time on providing support for some initiatives, you won’t be able to help many other people and won’t have time to plan the next steps to grow the community. Your time is limited, this approach is not scalable.

Try to provide volunteers with access to all necessary tools and information. If this is not enough and you are required to do some repetitive activities that take a lot of your time, kindly ask volunteers to adjust the proposed initiatives.


This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.