Digital Community Leaders - Giulia Guizzardi
This week on the podcast we're venturing oversees to gather more valuable advice for community leaders. Italian-born and German-based Giulia Guizzardi is a community manager at Platform Engineering, with experience leading communities such as Score and DFINITY.
Knowing Your Audience
The nature of Giulia's work at Platform Engineering involves a community of developers, DevOps experts and 'platform nerds'. Boasting a hefty 10,000 members, it's important that Giulia works to maintain engagement and encourage growth.
When asked about her techniques and methods to achieve this, Giulia highlighted the fact that her approach to community is specific to her demographic. With developers following a similar pattern of behaviours, Giulia is able to lead her community with member-driven purpose.
Thinking from this perspective can help your members feel seen and valued, thus maintaining high retention and potentially generating growth.
“My keyword is always 'balance'. What I've found out is that pushing engagement never works. What I usually do is involve the most active members... they engage with other people, creating smaller groups where people feel more comfortable.”
Building a Self-Sustaining Community
As a community leader, it's easy to spread yourself thin and have your mind on multiple different aspects. Giulia spoke about some of her objectives to achieve a self-sustaining community model.
Being the sole community manager of a 10k+ community, it's important for Giulia to be working in the right place at the right time - and avoiding burnout. Setting up some self-sustainable elements of your community can be an effective way to keep things ticking without the need of the CM's presence.
Giving responsibilities to active members and automated features are some simple examples of self-sustaining actions which can be put in place.
“What I'm really doing is I'm scaffolding the community.”
Giulia Guizzardi was a brilliant guest and a delight to listen to. Her expertise and insight sparked some brilliant ideas and inspiration for any digital community leader - worldwide!
Check out the full episode, which is now available across all platforms.
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