Part of the community builder’s job is to find and train his/her replacement. You don’t want The Apple Dilemma; one great leader propping everything up.
But how do you find your replacement?
Give your community members as many opportunities to put themselves forward. Here are a few ideas:
- Open up forum moderation duties
- Ask for help creating content
- Create a size-limited committee to discuss community issues and strategy.
- Who wants to help create a new logo/design?
- Arrange an interview with your client or someone within your field, and call for questions from the community. Who submits 1? Who submits 5?
- Create new roles, and see who wants them “head of growth”, “traffic analyst” hmm..
- Run a campaign. Say you’re leaving in 3 months and you need a replacement. The community gets to campaign and vote. Watch out for rifts (and Alaskan pitbulls).
When you find a replacement, or several, be sure to give them responsibility. And some money would be nice too.
