Community teams continue to become more common within complex and mature community ecosystems. As the “lone wolf” community manager seeks to elevate their program, build a team, and develop an operational approach, they need someone to do the heavy lifting of community engagement. This includes activities like new member onboarding, community events/programs, moderation, and metrics.
A Community Specialist fills this role and while they are often seen as a junior member of the team (and paid accordingly), they are critical to the health and growth of their community. The Community Specialist role should not be outsourced to someone wholly unfamiliar with community practices.
AKA
Community Specialists are also known as: DevRel Specialist, Engagement Specialist,
Marketing Coordinator, Community Coordinator, Customer Experience Specialist, and Communications Specialist.
Online Community Specialist Skills Assessment
Primary skills: Being comfortable with fostering engagement and managing content is foundational for community specialists. New member onboarding, behavior change programs, and gamification all are must-haves in an Online Community Specialist’s toolkit. Community Specialists are often required to write content, produce multimedia assets (video and podcasts), and curate existing content for specific community audiences. Larger community teams may have multiple individuals to focus on these areas, but often these skills are wrapped into a single role.
Secondary Skills: While technical skills are not typically a focus of the specialist role, they may be asked to work on technical projects like data collection and analysis, technical issue resolution, and tool evaluation and recommendation.
Skills to consider: Community specialists rarely own strategic projects, but can provide input and look for opportunities to get involved in roadmap planning, executive coaching (i.e. reverse mentoring), and evaluating engagement techniques. In previous editions of this research, we noted that business skills were often a weakness of community practitioners. Community Specialists with strengths in this area are more likely to move into more senior roles quickly. In particular, being comfortable selling, influencing, and evangelizing community approaches within your organization is a powerful skill to cultivate.
Download the Community Careers and Compensation report to learn more about community roles, view the profile of a community specialist, and explore trends in community careers.
