Online Communities Handbook: Building Your Business and Brand on the Web

Adapting Your Infrastructure

As your community grows, one intern and a computer with Microsoft Outlook may no longer be enough to manage your member support. If your community managers are overloaded, we recommend looking first to technological and process solutions to optimize efficiency, and then adding human resources as needed to do the work that cannot be automated.

Signs that you need to improve technology or processes

You’ll know it’s time to upgrade software or streamline work flows when you find that community managers are repeating each other’s work or spending a significant amount of their day on the following:

• Sorting or clearing out emails

• Performing tasks that require no thought or decision-making, such as responding to members’ ...