What is the best structure for an online community team?

Let's take the example of a typical customer community aimed at user acquisition, engagement, and retention. Here is the list of activities that need to be distributed in your team:

  • Organizing the community, brainstorming about the new initiative, and building roadmap. 
    This should be owned by the Head of Community.

  • Content seeding, initiating conversation and facilitating discussions.
    This would be owned by the community manager.

  • Moderating content, members, and enforcing community guidelines.
    This should be owned by the moderator.

  • Executing programs designed to harness user-generated content and keeping users engaged.
    This can be delivered by the community manager.

  • Collecting product feedback and communicating to the product team.
    This can be delivered by a member from the community management team.

  • Identifying super users and acting as an interface between the company and super users.
    This can be delivered by the community manager.

  • Building dashboards to measure key metrics for different teams and communicating the same.
    This can be delivered by the community manager by liaising with data integration and reporting team.

  • Thought leadership and initiatives around the brand building.
    Someone from the community management team who will work with the marketing department.

  • Planning and organizing community events.
    A member of the community management team in charge of events.

Apart from these, your community team will need to work with a design and development team to make changes to the community and keep it updated to work with your existing tech stack. Also, as a community manager, it is imperative to focus on the ways with which you can leverage your existing community members to contribute (more than just user-generated content).