Community Management Software on WordPress: One Dashboard

Looking for community management software? This video shows online community management from one WordPress dashboard: the member list, the spaces, the moderation queue and strike system, and the numbers.

Transcript

What is community management software? It is one dashboard to run the people, the groups and the rules of an online community. It tells you who your members are, where they talk, and what needs your attention today. Without it, online community management is done by hand. The member list is a spreadsheet somebody forgets to update. The groups are spread over three different apps. And when a member behaves badly, the complaint arrives in a private message and gets lost. A community manager has four jobs. Members, spaces, moderation and numbers. Here they are in one WordPress dashboard. Job one, members. Every person who joins is on one list, with a running total at the top. The list is yours. You can search it, and export it as a file whenever you need it. You also decide how people get in. Open sign up, or a new member waits until you approve them. Job two, spaces. A space is a group inside the community, and all of them are on one screen. Each space can be open, private or secret, and each has its own members and its own moderators. Job three, moderation. Members post freely, and when something is wrong, a member reports it. The report lands in one queue, not in your inbox. You can dismiss it, warn the member, or give a strike. Enough strikes lead to a suspension, so a first mistake and a repeat offender are not treated the same. Here is that strike system on the real site. You set how many strikes it takes. If you run a forum too, its reports are in the same WordPress admin. And you do not do it alone. You can promote trusted members to moderators for the whole community. Each space has its own owner, who handles its join requests. Every moderation action is recorded, so you can show what happened and when. Job four, numbers. How many members you have, how many are active, and how much they post, at a glance. When the numbers show a quiet week, you can act. A welcome series emails new members on its own. And if you add events later, they are managed from the same place. Side by side. A list you update by hand, or a member list that updates itself. Rules nobody can see, or a strike system that is written down. Guessing who is active, or numbers on one screen. And your data in five different accounts, or on your own site. A community managed by hand gets harder with every member who joins. The time to put it in one place is before it grows. BuddyNext is the free community plugin for WordPress. Bring your members, groups and rules into one dashboard this week. Get BuddyNext. The link is below.