Hiring an online community manager is a big step in your business. And while hiring help isn’t hard, it’s not as easy as some would lead you to believe.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard a coach or consultant tell a community leader to offload the proper care and feeding of their people to a virtual assistant (VA), I’d have vacation property on at least two continents. The reality of building a team to support the management of your online community is nuanced.

As someone who has designed and developed online communities professionally since 2007, I’ve seen firsthand how the wrong hire can actually create more work for you in the long run. But I’ve also witnessed the transformative impact of bringing in the right support at the right time.

The goal of this article is to provide a high-level overview of what it means to hire help, how to know if it makes sense for you, and how to go about it if you are serious about hiring an admin or moderator team.

Online Community Management is More Than Just Time Management

The biggest challenge in community management isn’t just finding time to do it all. It’s navigating the competing priorities of operational efficiency and authentic connection.

You can automate post scheduling or outsource member approvals, but you can’t delegate the heart of your community: the relationships you’ve built with your members. They joined your group for access to you, your resources and your perspective. And while you deserve healthy boundaries between work and life, this creates a paradox that can leave you feeling stuck:

You need help to serve your community better, but you can’t afford to compromise the relationships and connections that make your community special.

And if you’re being honest with yourself, you know you’re overwhelmed but you don’t really know what kind of help you need.

You can automate post scheduling or outsource member approvals, but you can't delegate the heart of your community — Tonya Kubo Share on X

When to Hire an Online Community Manager

You can hire help for your community whenever you want. There are business owners who hire moderators or teams of moderators before they even build their community. However, most community leaders start their groups as a solo endeavor. And that means they are a one-person show until that approach becomes unsustainable.

Every community leader runs into situations when bringing in support is not just helpful, but necessary. Sometimes, the need is for short-term help. Other times, you need a long-term solution.

Before you hire help, make sure you understand what community management is and is not. — Tonya Kubo Share on X

Short-Term Support (2-3 weeks)

Not every problem is permanent, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need support to get yourself to the other side of it. Here are some cases where short-term support makes sense:

• You’re dealing with illness or recovery
• You’re going on vacation
• You need to focus your efforts on a major project or launch
• You are managing a personal emergency

For these situations, a professional community manager might not be necessary. A trusted team member or veteran community member can often step in to maintain basic operations until you’re able to resume your normal routine.

Think of this like house-sitting — they keep things running but aren’t making major improvements or decisions.

Not too long ago, a family emergency forced me out of the office for a week without much notice. I reached out to the five most active members in the busiest communities I managed at the time, asking if they could step in to cover for me.

Knowing I didn’t have time to provide formal training, I asked them to handle the proper care and feeding of members by responding to questions, facilitating connections between members, welcoming new members, and alerting me directly if any bad behavior was detected.

Every person enthusiastically agreed to help, feeling privileged to be trusted with the task. And I could focus on my family, confident that the communities were in good hands while I was away.

Meanwhile, members were none the wiser about my absence. While the communities value my presence and insight when they are stuck, their top priority is getting the help they need in a timely fashion. These veteran members were just as capable as me, and they added even more value since their lived experiences are different from mine. It was beautiful to see how the community flourished under their temporary care.

Long-Term Support (1+ months)

If the problem preventing you from caring for your community like you want to will persist for more than three weeks, you need to consider long-term support. Situations where a semi-permanent or permanent solution is required include:

• Your business is growing rapidly, and you’re having a hard time keeping up with the growth
• You’re spending more than two hours a week on basic community management tasks (approving member requests, answering questions, enforcing community standards, etc.)
• You are unable to show up consistently in your community two to three times per week
• The volume of member posts, questions and comments have outpaced your capacity

These scenarios call for professional community management support.

Just like you wouldn’t ask a house-sitter to renovate your kitchen or manage your household operations, you need skilled help to maintain and grow your community’s momentum.

Hiring a volunteer or virtual assistant in these situations will likely only add work to your already-overflowing plate.  What you really need is someone who can truly step into your shoes with minimal direction and oversight. Only a trained professional can create strategic initiatives, determine the best tactics to execute those initiatives and analyze results to make data-informed decisions.

What Professional Community Management Actually Involves

Before you hire help, make sure you understand what community management is and is not. Too many people — even so-called experts — confuse social media management and community management. Understanding the difference will help you ask the right questions and set the right expectations in the hiring and training process. Likewise, a true online community specialist does a lot more than approve member requests and celebrate members.

Here’s what comprehensive community management typically covers:

Basic Support

Several virtual assistants who offer community management services provide fundamental support. They will handle the day-to-day operations that keep your community running smoothly.

Think of this like basic housekeeping — they maintain order and cleanliness based on the priorities you set. Your community manager will handle member request approvals, welcome new members into the group, and monitor for questions that need attention. They’ll also handle basic moderation to ensure everyone plays nice and schedule regular content to maintain consistency.

At this level of support, the community manager will expect you to provide the content for them to post, the resources they should reference and the tasks you want them to perform. But within that scope, they should be able to operate with minimal supervision.

Advanced Support

This is where community management transforms from basic maintenance into true cultivation of your community’s growth and development. An advanced community manager is a strategic partner in the design, development and day-to-day management of your group.

As a communities expert, they should be able to create content that specifically addresses member needs and facilitates deeper connections between community members. They can produce and manage live broadcasts, track important metrics, and use that data to make informed strategy adjustments.

They should also be prepared to handle crisis situations and actively work to develop and maintain your community’s culture. Think of this like having a house manager rather than just a housekeeper — they’re actively working to improve and enhance the community experience.

Expectations are a Two-Way Street

Setting clear expectations is crucial when bringing in professional help for your community. You need to be specific about what you want from them, and they need to clearly articulate the scope of service they are able to provide.

The term “community management” means different things to different people. It’s up to you to ensure alignment of expectations so everyone agrees on which results will define success.

What You Can Reasonably Expect from a Community Manager

A professional community manager should become a true advocate for your members, deeply understanding their needs and ensuring those needs are met. They’ll implement your community strategy with expertise and maintain consistent engagement standards that keep your community active and valuable.

They should support your business objectives by creating an environment where members naturally progress toward becoming clients or customers. You can expect them to provide professional insights based on their experience and handle the day-to-day operations that keep your community running smoothly.

What’s Not Reasonable to Expect from a Community Manager

Your community manager won’t be your clone or replacement. In fact, trying to make them act as you can backfire, coming across as inauthentic to your members.

They should be participating in your community under their own name and operating as a bridge between you and your members. Think of them as the collective voice of your members.

Don’t expect a community manager to grow your group externally, either. Their role is to nurture the members you bring in and strengthen the group culture, not to recruit new members. They also won’t design your offers or sales strategy. While they can support your sales process, they can’t create it for you. You still need to be the owner and visionary charting the course for your business. It’s up to you to determine and communicate how the community fits into your overall business model.

It’s also not reasonable to expect a paid community manager to have the same emotional investment in your community as you do. They can care deeply about your members and your mission, but this is still a job for them, not a passion project.

And perhaps most importantly, don’t expect premium results on a minimal budget. Just like you can’t expect a $25 haircut to look like a $250 one, you can’t expect full-service community management for the price of a part-time off-shore VA. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid as You Build Your Team

If you’ve never built a team before or hired help in a key function of your business, you will make mistakes. It’s part of being human. However, there are some common errors I see community leaders make when hiring admins and moderators to run their groups.

The Disappearing Act

The most common mistake community leaders make is thinking that hiring help means they can disappear. In their mind, they are paying someone to lead the community and that means they no longer have to worry about it.

However, there is a difference between delegating the role and responsibilities associated with the management of your group and abdicating your ownership of it. If your community is a key part of your business model, you can’t afford to be absent from it. 

Your members joined the community because of YOU. While a community manager can maintain engagement and facilitate connections, they can’t replace the unique value you bring. Your presence and leadership remain essential to your community’s success.

So instead of thinking that hiring help means you can ignore the group, recognize that it means you get to be more strategic about the time you spend in it. Your community manager can help you determine which efforts are most likely to move the needle toward your goals, so you focus attention there instead of on the busy work of keeping the community running.

The Budget Mismatch

Community management isn’t a “Task Rabbit” assignment. While you might fit your community into open pockets of time here and there, a professional community manager has a system by which they ensure your community is as successful as possible.

Launching a brand-new community or re-engaging a sleepy community usually requires the following investment of time:

• Month 1 – 40-45 hours
• Month 2 – 30+ hours
• Month 3 – 25+ hours
• Month 4 and beyond – 20 hours

If your group is large, busy or the primary driver of revenue in your business, it may always require 10-15 hours a week of active management (40-60 hours a month).

While the hours required for success are pretty standard, there is no hard and fast rule about who performs all the tasks associated with your community.

If you want to take responsibility for strategy, content creation, and nurturing members along the customer journey, you might only need 10 to 20 hours of support from your admin team each month. So consider that when figuring out your budget for hiring help.

The money and time you invest in your community has to fit within the complete picture of your business. Share on X

Standard Costs of Community Management

While some community managers bill hourly, most offer package rates. A strategic plan can cost between $2,000 and $10,000, depending on whether implementation support is included. Basic management averages $500/month for up to 10 hours of work. Advanced management can run between $1,500-$3,000/month.

Some tasks that affect service costs include whether you expect the community manager to connect with members via direct messages (DMs), create your content strategy, moderate livestreams and group calls, run group calls and events themselves, provide strategic guidance or metric analysis.

The Strategy Gap

No matter how much professionals charge for the help you want them to provide, the amount of money and time you invest in your community has to make sense within the complete picture of your business. If your community is only 5% of your business, it doesn’t make sense to spend 30% of your operating budget on it.

Before you ever think about hiring help, first get clear on what function you want your community to fill within your business. Then decide how much of your operating budget to invest in that function. From there, you can either create your own community strategy or hire an expert to create the strategic plan.

But under no circumstances can you skip over having a strategy in place.

Hiring help without a clear community strategy is like hiring a housekeeper with no plan for what parts of the house you want them to clean. You’re setting everyone up for frustration and failure. Your community manager needs to understand your vision, goals, and the specific ways you want to achieve them. Without this foundation, they have no way to define success, or project what’s possible.

Making the Right Choice for Your Community

After years of both managing communities and leading a community management agency, I’ve learned that success comes down to asking the right questions before you hire. As you think through whether to hire a community manager, consider the following criteria.

Understanding Your Support Needs

First, get crystal clear about what specific tasks need support. Are you struggling with day-to-day moderation? Content creation? Member engagement? Does everything feel scattered with no common thread? Understanding your pain points helps identify the level of support you actually need.

Evaluating Required Expertise

Different community management needs require different levels of expertise. Basic moderation and member approvals might be handled by a VA who specializes in communities, but strategic community development requires a strategic mindset and depth of experience in online user behavior and psychology. Be honest about what your community needs to thrive.

Setting a Realistic Budget

Remember that old saying, “You get what you pay for”? It’s especially true in community management. Consider what you can realistically invest and what return you expect from that investment. Don’t forget to factor in the value of your time that will be freed up.

Defining Success Metrics

How will you know if bringing in help is working? Establish clear metrics for success before you hire. This might include engagement rates, member satisfaction, or specific business goals your community supports.

Assessing Your Systems

Finally, take a hard look at what systems you have in place. Do you have documented processes? Clear community guidelines? A content strategy? Having these fundamentals in place makes it much easier for someone to step in and help effectively.

Next Steps in Hiring Help

If you’re considering hiring help for your community:

1. Document your current community management processes
2. Identify specific areas where you need support
3. Define your budget and expectations
4. Create or update your community strategy
5. Research potential solutions that align with your needs and budget

Whether you decide to hire help or continue managing your community solo, the key is being intentional about your choice and clear about your expectations.

Need help evaluating your community management needs? Book a strategy session to discuss your specific situation and explore your options.

Want to learn more about community design and development? Join us in The Secret to Thriving Online Communities, where we discuss these topics and more.