Aurora: Getting Started as a Community Manager

Welcome to Aurora! Aurora is Khoros’ re-imagined Community experience that leverages more than 20 years of experience and learnings in the digital community space.

This introduction guides you through the most commonly used features for common community management tasks and provides links to the best articles for these tasks.

Tip: Take a tour of Aurora in this 1-hour video training course, which will help you familiarize yourself with key Aurora features and concepts.

Let's get started!

Community Managers often wear a variety of hats to develop and lead a community. Depending on how your team is organized, you could be responsible for one or more of the following:

• Working with senior stakeholders in the business to define a strategic plan for success for the community. This plan must align with the company's goals.
• Coordinating with stakeholders, including admins and developers who support in customizing and configuring the platform to support the strategic plan.
• Defining the community guidelines so that members feel safe and welcome and the content is relevant, helpful, and up to date. Lead and support the moderation team to moderate the community content and users.

Let's dive into each of these areas:

• Building the Community Strategy
• Measuring your community health
• Building a Community Structure
• Setting up members, roles, and permissions
• Community Analytics

Building the Community Strategy

Community Managers are the face of the community. They own the day-to-day management and implementation of the brand’s digital community strategy.

As the Community Manager, you are primarily responsible for building and leading your community to align with your company's goals. Apart from these, in support of your company goals, you’ll be working to increase user engagement and advocacy, accelerating innovation, driving sales, and reducing sales costs.

Before you start building your community, you must:

Understand the audience:

• Who is the intended audience?
• What are they looking for?
• What is their level of experience?

Decide the type of content that best:

• meets the audience needs
• drives site traffic
• improves peer-peer communication
• keeps users engaged

Understand the stakeholders or internal audiences, including:

• Marketing team
• Product team
• Support team
• Analysts
• Legal team

The answers to these questions help you develop a community strategy that connects members and your brand content, leading to your Community's Structure.

Before you start building your community structure, you must understand what your business is trying to accomplish with your community. Hence, the structure of the community must align with the community's goals and objectives.

Measuring your community health

To build your community strategy, you must first determine what success means and how you will measure it. When measuring community, keep in mind that a healthy and successful community is one that meets the needs of your audience.

For this, you must:

• Identify Key Performance indicators (KPIs) to measure community success. These KPIs must be relevant to the business and community goals. For example, the KPIs to deflect support calls or increase revenue or increase retention or increase loyalty, and so on.
• Measure member success rate via Aurora Analytics.
• Use Community Analytics to measure Community Metrics. Metrics help measure community health, which in turn supports achieving community success.

Building a Community Structure

Members join and stick with your community (sometimes even becoming your brand advocates) based on the content, their journey through finding knowledge, and whether they succeed with the content they find. Hence, members need a community structure in place that makes sense for your business and how you want members to engage in the community.

When defining your Community Structure:

• Decide on the content type that will best suit to drive user engagement. Khoros Communities offers various content types to manage content and enable users to participate in the community.
  Take a dive into Atlas for great examples to better understand our widely used content types: Forums, Knowledge Bases, Blogs, Ideas, Events, and Groups.
• Identify powerful search techniques to bring knowledge directly to the user. Aurora search tools offer powerful search techniques.
• Identify the list of tags to increase findability. Although while building the structure you may not be able to come up with a complete list, it is good to keep in mind to come up with a list that will best suit your community content.

After you have understood the intended audience and decided the Community Structure and content types, you must define member permissions to map to the access and actions you want different members of the community to have.

That brings us to our next step on setting up members and identifying roles and permissions.

Setting up members, roles, and permissions

• Identify and define the Default permissions that drive the experience for all members—new, experienced, and superusers. You can think of permissions as allowing or denying users to perform actions in different areas of the community.
• Determine if you want to provide a different experience for some users—for example, access to a private area in the community. Based on the decision, you can create roles and tie permissions to the roles.
  Here’s a list of default roles that Khoros provides while launching your community.

Note: When granting elevated permissions to a member, you must apply them via a role.

Check out our Getting started as community admin to know more on creating, deleting, cloning, and assigning roles to members.

Although in smaller communities, a Community Manager can play the role of an Admin, Moderator, and Developer, we recommend that you delineate these tasks and assign them to different people or even teams.

After you have built the community structure with content types, roles, and permissions, your community is ready to go live.

Tip: If you're new to deploying a community, check out Building your first site for some tips and suggestions.

As your community evolves and grows, you must make sure that it lives up to its standards by moderating content and members. You must also collaborate with the legal teams to make sure that your community is GDPR compliant and protects your member's personal information.

Community Analytics

As a Community Manager it is very important for you to study various trends and activities across the community and analyze if your strategies are working towards your company’s goals. Learn more about using Aurora Analytics.