Growing Successful Communities

[#1]

I'm helping a well known author research material for their next book - currently not going to tell you who - but the odds are pretty good that most of you will own a copy of their best selling social media book.

One of the big questions they have is, how many moderators do communities have? It's a good question, and I have an addendum, which is how on average how many users are there to a moderator?

If you have 2 mins and you can answer these four questions it will help out a lot.

• How many full time moderators do you have?
• How many part time moderators do you have?
• Do you promote external superusers to be moderators?
• How big is your community (roughly)?

This will really help out the author - many thanks all!

[#2]

1. One - me.

2. Two, both from Lithium.

3. At some point, that is definitely our desire and goal, but we're not there yet with our superusers.

4. Could you clarify what you mean by this question?  A bit more specificity would help greatly.

[#3]

Paul,

I'm sure folks will be happy to share... might I also suggest some other qualifications / considerations?

1) To what degree do community admins perform moderation of the site (how should they be counted?)

2) If you just divide the number of registered members by the number of mods I suspect most of us will see a pretty high multiple (lot of members per mod).   However, not all members are active.  Do you want to qualify this some by saying members with at least 1 post (because having posted, they are active and the post requires reading).  This might change the skew significantly - keeping the 90/9/1 rule in mind.

3) How to compensate for duration?  I.e. the members accrued over time and the mod team in most communities likely had turn over as well.  I wonder how the ratio of mods to users plots out against community age and not just size.  Are morays more established in mature communities such that the super users wind up helping with a lot of the "soft" moderation needs (coaching, directing to other resources, etc)?  This might be another variable to consider in the model.

4) Any consideration for the volume of posts the moderators make?  I'm guessing at what the researcher might be interested in.. .if it were just a comparative workload factor, we could consider looking at total posts for a given internval, and then how many mods were available for the same interval to see comparatively how many posts a mod might have to read for a given community.   Another factor, and I'm guessing this might be more interesting, is to see how the amount of visible moderator prescence affects the community - are they just moving posts and threads / doing housekeeping, or are they interactive and frequent posters? 

So, getting back to what you were specifically asking for....

• How many full time moderators do you have?

No full time moderators per se, but as admin, I spend some time doing moderation

• How many part time moderators do you have?

11 Active volunteer (part time) moderators, 6 of which are extremely active.  We also have 4 retired mods - volunteers who were active as mods at one time, but now have other comittments.

• Do you promote external superusers to be moderators?

Yes, our moderation team watches our super user pool carefully and we look to recruit / promote to scale with the community and the team's personal life commitments - vacations, family, illness, and career.

• How big is your community (roughly)?

50K + registered members

[#4]

Hi Rho

Thanks for the quick response. For Question 4 I was looking for a rough estimate of how large your community was in terms of users - both registered and guests.

For example, one of the communities I ran had 7k registered users and about 100k guest users.

Thanks - PG

[#5]

Mark, as always great comments. I will bring these topics up with the author when I talk to them next - not sure how broad or indepth her content will be in this area.

However, I am definitely intrigued. I think with all the community managers in Lithosphere, we could dig into some user vs moderator metrics that could be pretty useful for people - maybe leading to a best practices white paper.

What do you think? Thanks for the info too.

[#6]

Hi All,

Working out which metrics you use to measure moderation requirements is a never ending story. Ensuring you get the balance right in terms of users and moderators, we are finding ourselves looking at the level of traffic and how that is influencing the work load of moderators, then scratching our heads accordingly.

To that degree, we would think about the following:

• Number of posts being made in your community, and how many people are making them.
• The "usefulness" of those posts, measured in terms of Kudos, accepted solutions and insight (talking to them)
• The number of posts which generate complaints (use of report abuse button)
• The number of posts removed / edited by moderators
• The level of engagement (posting) being done by moderators

Once you think you have that nailed, there are a million "wild card" influences to consider.

• Type of community - Support communities generally need less moderation than enthusiast communities.
• Language / culture - when working in multilingual environments then the number of moderators required suddenly rises in a large (and sometimes expensive) way.

[#7]

Thanks for the note Phil. I definitely think there is some good research in here. Will chat with Dr Wu when he's back from vacation to see what he thinks. In the meantime did you have any thoughts about the numbers of Mods and users in the PS communities?

[#8]

Well that teaches me to not check my login! I somehow managed to post from my old non Lithium account... heh ho.. the question still stands!!!

Thanks all for the input.

[#9]

<----- n00b

How can I find out how many registered users are in my forum? 

/sheepish smile

[#10]

Ah, found it.

20k registered users.