A case of the eyes being bigger than the stomach
To be truly community-led, we need to pay our community builders better
Let’s face it, nearly everyone wants the benefits of community-led growth these days. In fact, it’s beginning to become a bit of a buzzword in a lot of ways. We’ve come to a point where blog posts from brands hyping up their support of community-led growth have become a dime-a-dozen, only for them to post job openings for community managers at a paltry $36k annual salary1.
If you want leaders, you need to pay the salary of a team that leads
Look, I get the startup grind and the need to conserve budget. But it seems a bit…odd for companies to hop on the community hype train while paying the people who are in charge of building their communities the bare minimum. To truly be community-led, you need to be paying your community team at the top of the salary bracket. Full stop.
I’m not sure what the term led means to other people but in the Oxford dictionary, it’s defined as:
be in charge or command of.
"a military delegation was led by the Chief of Staff"
Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but if you are expecting someone to be a leader, then you need to be paying them leader wages.
To claim community-led status, community needs to be given first-class status
In theory, this should be a simple concept, but in practice it’s far from one. It’s too common to see companies who label themselves as “community-led” post roles and contracts that pay well under the average salary for community managers, but have expectations far beyond the compensation they are offering.
Let’s think about what a community manager is often expected to handle in a typical role. If we take the most generic opportunity you can typically expect a community manager to have to handle:
Cross functional relationships
Event planning and hosting
Chat moderation
COC implementation
And other tasks…
If you’re going to make the claim that community is leading your organization, then these tasks should be at the top of your organization’s hierarchy of importance. I’ll reiterate, you cannot make the claim of being community-led without paying your community team a salary that shows community if top of mind for your organization.
New with Tribecrafters
There are a lot of changes swirling around at Tribecrafters at the moment! I’ve been hard at work creating new resources for the community and I’ve come back with some awesome updates:
Moved the community over to Slack 💬
Launched our Affiliate program 💸!
Kicked off the brand new Talent Collective
Opened up the community to sponsorships
Due to these changes, I have a couple calls to action for my readers. First, if you’re looking to join a growing Slack community for community builders, I’d love to have you be one of our first members. It’s a small space at the moment, but the can make for some valuable collaborations!
Second, if you’d like to share Tribecrafters with your community and potentially make some commissions out of it, sign up for our affiliate program. Third, if you’re looking to receive a steady stream of community jobs, then you won’t want to miss out on signing up for the Talent Collective.
Lastly, we are a very indie and bootstrapped community. There are a lot of extremely valuable ideas we have that we would love to build for our community, but as is the reality of the world, funds can be a blocker. If you’re part of a community-led organization and you would like to sponsor a growing community that has some big goals, check out our Sponsorship page and see if what we offer out supporters is in line with what you look for in a sponsorship.
Next Time
In the next issue of Communities of Tomorrow, I will continue the theme we touched on in this issue by highlighting one of the worst offending industries for salaries that don’t meet the bar for claims of being community-led. To whet your whistle a bit, I’ll give you a hint… rhymes with tiptoe. Be sure to come back for that fun time.