If you’ve started your own community, then you’ve probably started building a moderator team. People believe that hiring moderators externally is better than picking them from your community. This is wrong.
Admins or moderators should always come from the community itself. Their incentive should be status within the community, not working a 9-5 job.
Although moderators aren't a part of the brand, they need to feel connected to it. They're part of your team — they need to feel like they have access.
Community moderation hack: A community catch-up
This is why you should seriously consider implementing moderator standups. Now what do we mean by this? In essence, these standups are quick meetings with your team of moderators. Meeting discussions include the progress and challenges being faced in the community. On our Discord, we did weekly stand-up sessions with our moderators. During each session, we would run them through what our plans for the community were over the next week. Since mods will be the most neglected part of your company's ecosystem, make sure they're heard.
Rules of engagement
Remember to always default to open communication (one manager to many moderators) as much as possible. Make sure you have a private channel on your own community that mods have access to. It should be invisible to others. has a pretty cool feature that allows easy creation of a private channel like this.
The right strategy is to have calls at least once a month, talking about issues they are concerned with, previewing updates and anything that moderators want to have their input on. Get them involved early.
Even if only 1-2 people show up, that's fine because those who attended will spread the word on what the brand is working on. Make your moderators club so exclusive that folks want to join.
Success is 75% the actual program and 25% the perception of the program.
To pay or not to pay your community moderators
Most moderators on Discord are unpaid, they do it for status. But this also depends on how much time they spend working on your server. Moderators who are heavily invested in your company and what you stand for wouldn’t expect to be paid.
However, we do recommend that you should give them some sort of remuneration eventually, by absorbing moderators into your company. Status doesn't pay bills.
Your moderators want access to the business (if you have one) and founders. Make sure that can happen once a quarter. But as community manager, you want to make it clear that they are not going to get any higher up the chain on a daily basis. You have to make it clear that you are their point of contact.
As a community manager, you are the representative of your moderators, and you want to make it clear that you are there to fight for their needs and their voices will be heard with upper management.
Are you new to managing a community? If yes, you’re probably looking for some neat tips and tricks to add under your belt. Have a chat with our team of community builders, who have been managing a slew of different communities for nearly a decade. We’d be happy to help you out.
