Community Leader Best Practices
Community leaders play an integral role in the success of your Wisr network and the role offers a fairly low commitment way to involve students, campus partners, or alumni volunteers in the health of your Wisr site.
When recruiting your community leaders, it is helpful to set expectations, so they understand what they are agreeing to do and feel comfortable saying yes (or at least being voluntold). The three main responsibilities of community leadership are to:
- Generate content
- Drive engagement
- Moderate activity
Your team should empower community leaders to use the vast resources of your institution already available to them to generate new content aimed at keeping their communities active and vibrant. To generate content, institutional websites, news, events, and information that is relevant and related to the community’s purpose can be easily shared. We encourage you to create a cadence of communications that is based on certain topics or themes so new content is provided consistently whether that be daily, weekly, or monthly depending on your site’s purpose. We have created a handy content calendar you can share with your community leaders to plan and track community activity.
Driving engagement makes a community more than a one-way street of information sharing. You want members of your community to actively participate in conversations. Community leaders can contribute to driving engagement by posing open-ended questions that encourage members to respond, and take the time to reply to their posts and comments to model the behavior you want to see in your members. Read the Create Engaging Discussions in Wisr article for more ideas. If resources are available, find way to incentivize participation and return engagement with giveaways and recognition.
Finally, moderating activity is essential to ensuring communities stay active and follow whatever guidelines your institution sets forth for participation in your network. Moderation includes being responsive to questions that arise, ensuring that posts are replied to in a reasonable timeframe, and keeping an eye out for offensive or disruptive comments and managing them appropriately. To support your community leaders and members overall, we recommend institutions create community guidelines that are publicly available or new network members agree to upon joining your site. This will eliminate confusion for members and provide clear expectations for participation, and if necessary, removal. If you want community leaders to play a role in promoting your Wisr site, they also have the ability to directly invite new members to communities and therefore the network overall.
If you are wondering how many community leaders you need and how often community leaders should interact on the site, we are here to help. The things you need to consider are the purpose of your Wisr network, the size of your overall network, the expected size of your community, and the activity level you anticipate. We are going to break up recommendation by purpose.
Short-Term Program Use
For a short-term program uses like Orientation, a cohort-based program, or an Enrollment Yield Program, where we expect high levels of activity over a relatively short period of time of a few months, we recommend one community leader per 20 community members. You will reach an economy of scale as communities reach more than 100 students in which case four to five community leaders will be sufficient. For shorter-term programs, community leaders should plan to post and respond nearly daily in their communities to quickly build rapport and trust. Having more community members allows leaders to split up activity and moderating by day of the week. Community leaders should also plan to host weekly events or share related news or information about other events that would be of interest to your members. Administrators can also work with the Wisr team to obtain lists of community members who have not participated in a set length of time. Community leaders should be encouraged to reach out to their members individually through the Wisr chat functions if they have not been active over a period of time.
Long-Term Initiatives
For longer-term initiatives like Virtual Welcome Centers or Alumni/Student Career Mentoring, community leaders may not need to be as regularly active. New postings and information could be shared weekly with monthly events and you should set a reasonable time frame to respond to questions and posts; we suggest 48 – 72 hours. Again, depending on the size of your communities, we recommend one leader to 20 members although instead of dividing responsibility daily, you could consider dividing responsibility weekly among your community leaders.
If you find a community is not thriving, particularly if it is due to inactivity among your community leaders, don’t be afraid to archive a community or start a new one. Introducing new communities into your Wisr network keeps content fresh and provides reasons for old members to log in again.