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And not just that, but which to merge with other topics, which to add moderator tags to, which to mark ‘best answer,’ which to respond to … 

I’ve looked at all of the topic titles in this Moderation tips & tricks forum and didn’t see quite my situation, so I’m hoping to find some insights with this new thread.

Context: I’m one of two community managers for a community of about 26,000 people, which is growing at a rate of about 1,000 new members/week. Ours is not a customer-support focused community like I know many of your communities are. Our community is designed to help people learning on the Coursera platform to connect with each other and to get support for their learning and life goals.

I’m responsible for most of the moderation activity. We do not have any other moderators. Now I’m at the point where I need to put together a new moderation strategy. I can no longer read all posts and do all other associated moderation tasks – here’s a rough list of the tasks I do on a regular basis:

  • Reading posts
  • Replying to posts
  • Editing posts (e.g., deleting sensitive content, improving titles)
  • Moving posts to new topics
  • Moving posts to existing topics
  • Moving posts to different forum
  • Reading private messages (PMs)
  • Replying to PMs
  • Investigating technical issues raised by community members 
  • Checking spam filter and restoring ham (and if needed, trashing duplicate ham posts)
  • Reviewing flagged posts
  • Sending PMs to members who have flagged a post
  • Sending PMs to members who have violated code of conduct
  • Investigating questionable community members / banning
  • Writing new topics
  • Adding moderator tags
  • Adding public tags
  • Removing moderator tags
  • Making decisions about which posts to feature or stop featuring (including marking as ‘sticky’)
  • Reviewing posts labeled "reply needed"
  • Updating the sidebar widget (calendar events)
  • Converting questions to conversations
  • Marking 'best answer'
  • Adding to team notes
  • @mentioning community members in posts
  • Liking posts
  • Deleting posts (e.g., when two identical posts are made, or in the case of totally irrelevant content)
  • Sharing learner issues/posts with colleagues

My questions:

How have you approached efficient moderation when there’s just one (or two) of you?

What strategy do you use to ensure you read/respond to the most important posts first? And do you let other posts go permanently unread?

Have you found some moderation tasks to be much more valuable than others in terms of long-term impact?

Thank you – I really appreciate any insights you might be willing to share.

Topics here that I’ve already read and found helpful are:

Hi@LPortalupi, I hope the following is helpful :)

 

How have you approached efficient moderation when there’s just one (or two) of you?
I don't think there's a more efficient way to moderate than what's described in the topics you referred to. The only difference is: when there's just 2 of you and you have a lot of topics to look at, you're going to have to choose which topics you're going to address and which ones not. I think the biggest challenge you face is to make sure you're not running far behind all the time. Being too slow is a pitfall. I assume you've already noticed this :)

 

What strategy do you use to ensure you read/respond to the most important posts first? And do you let other posts go permanently unread?
Some community teams use 'dispatchers' to sift through the newest topics and see which ones need addressing the most urgently and quickly. These topics can be addressed immediately or marked with a label so that you can filter these. If possible, I'd ask a third person at your company to do this, for example each morning. If there's really just the two of you, then you need to flip a coin I guess.:yum:

When your community matures (not sure where you are on that aspect), you'll get a bunch of active users who will a) help you address posts before you've had a chance to and b) provide general feedback about your performance.

 

Have you found some moderation tasks to be much more valuable than others in terms of long-term impact?
PM's are often regarded as less valuable than topics, because they only serve 1 user at a time. To give and example of how to deal with this: sending PM's can be something you discourage by explaining on your community that PM's won't be addressed unless they were asked for. It's not the nicest thing to do, but it can help you prioritize addressing topics over PM's without a sense of guilt.
In the end, it all depends on what you think is valuable. The most important thing you should do, is determine your top priorities. What KPI's do you want to track? When you've determined this, you can determine which actions are most important. 
When you're in 'operation mode', it's easy to forget about your community's performance as a platform for people who are not logged in. About 90-99% of the people who visit a community are lurking. So it's important, I think, to know which topics are visited the most and if these visits are by people finding the content they're looking for. And then it's important to find ways to promote the best content. You can use Google Analytics to analyze all of this.

 

We use Adobe Analytics and our own tagging, which enables me to make pretty dashboards like this:


Good luck!

Wow, @Jurgen, thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge, experience, and ideas with me. I really appreciate it! Your observation about PMs and people lurking on the community is especially useful. Right now we have it configured to send newcomers automated private messages, so most of the PMs I get now are replies to those. We’ll have to weigh the value of activating community members this way against the inevitable consequence of getting PMs in reply. I really like the idea of setting expectations around this / determining how to strike the right balance when it comes to availability of community managers. Thank you again for your insights.

You're welcome!

By the way, if I were you I'd try to find an alternative for the automated welcome PM to save you the time to read and reply to their replies. You can customize the welcome banner your users see when they've activated their account and you can customize your home page to help new users navigate to content that you'd like them to read. Just like Insided did here. 

Insided can probably assist you with making these adjustments :)

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