The Scrappy Community Manager's Toolbox 🧰

The Scrappy Community Manager's Toolbox 🧰

There are already many great articles on the internet about community management. However, given how many hats community managers (CMs) have to wear, a vital aspect of success is having the right tools at your disposal.

The problem is, even if you find a service that would greatly improve your efficiency and effectiveness as a CM, these tools can be out of your price range. Your team may not have the budget to pay for them, you may be a one-person team, or an independent freelancer. Add internal bureaucracy on purchasing tools on top of that, and your actual options in this sea of software marketed to CMs are limited.

I’ve had to work under tight budget restrictions in the past, so I’m here to tell you that having the most important tools that you need to be successful doesn’t have to break the bank.

This blog will address a combination of tools needed by CMs that are easy to use, readily available, and affordable. The best part - If you like them, you can download them on your own devices to use for your own personal projects.

Below, you can find examples of programs for each need that I have been using myself for years, and not just for work.

Before you read on

  1. Make sure that there isn’t already another team at your company with a license for the same or comparable tools - or perhaps your company even makes such a tool for internal or external commercial use. Siloed needs are real, especially at big companies, and if you’re able to get the swanky proprietary software, you should try to do so.

  2. Familiarize yourself with your company’s policy when it comes to installing software. You may only be able to choose from a list of tools that have been approved by your employer or that you need to get sign-off from your IT/InfoSec department, before downloading any new software.

Live Streaming

Many CMs do live streaming to communicate with their communities. I’ve used OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) when streaming games via Twitch. OBS allows me to check the streaming setup before going live and lets me include customized overlays for each “show” that includes the name of the show and social handles, making the stream look more professional and interactive.

OBS is one of the most popular streaming tools and it also happens to be open-source. If you’ve never used broadcasting software, getting your stream set up may take some trial and error, but before you know it, you’ll be streaming like a pro, using stream overlays and growing your audience on Twitch, YouTube, or wherever you stream.

For streaming to multiple sites (e.g. Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn), Restream offers a free plan and was recommended to me, but I have not used it, personally.

Social Listening

This is a tricky one. While social listening is key for CMs to see trends in community discussions and identify emerging issues, finding free tools that automate the process is challenging.

One option that I’ve tested is to set up a series of Google Alerts. You can get news blogs, videos, Tweets, and Facebook posts delivered right to your inbox or to an RSS feed. This solution still requires manual searches to get a full picture of what people are talking about, but it will give you a baseline amount of information.

There are a number of other tools with free plans. For instance, I used to search for blog content specifically with Buzzsumo, but it seems like there is also a social listening functionality now. Hootsuite also offers a free plan.

For the more tech-savvy among you, Jordan Jasuta Fischer has posted an article that explains how you can use APIs to create a simple social listening app.

Productivity Suite

Let’s start with the very basics. How do you write up your blog draft, track your social media activity, or create a presentation on your plans for the next community contest? What do you do if your employer doesn’t provide you with a full productivity suite, or you are missing a particular program in your suite?

When it comes to offline use, LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice are great options for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. If you’ve ever used one of the corporate suites, you should be able to easily find your way around the UI. Downside: These tools do not allow you to collaborate with others in the cloud.

For online collaboration, CryptPad offers the basic productivity tools as well as kanban capabilities and whiteboards. Other free (non-open-source) tools that are great for online collaboration are Google’s tools and Microsoft's free Office online version.

Online collaboration suites are great when multiple people update a file online, such as a private spreadsheet of community council members or for following an editorial process for a document, for example, a blog that needs to be reviewed and edited by multiple people.

Visual Assets

If you want to build up a repository of generic images that you can use as-is or edited to match your company’s branding, sites like Pexels and Pixabay can be extremely useful. All images are available for free. Just make sure to use attributions as needed. AllFreeStock is a great aggregator for checking multiple platforms for images with the Creative Commons Zero licenses (meaning that you are free to use them for commercial purposes) at once.

You can find some really visually stunning photos by using these resources. I use images for video call backgrounds or when I need generic stock footage to represent my community.

If you want something that’s unique, you may also want to try one of the many AI art websites that have popped up, such as The Stable Diffusion Image Generator (thanks to Austin for the recommendation), which generates images from text prompts.

Image Editing

Many times I have wanted to create a graphic to promote a new contest in my community forum carousel or on social media, but the in-house design team has been tied up (or nonexistent). So, it’s been imperative for me to be able to put something together myself. I’ve gotten around design constraints in a few ways. I’ve used presentation software like Google Slides or PowerPoint to create a graphic that allows for easier editing and layering than a lot of image editing programs. However, that doesn’t always quite cut it. You need something closer to the likes of the leading proprietary software to have an image that looks professional and has the correct branding.

Enter GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Not only does GIMP allow you to create your own graphics, it also comes in handy when your image editing skills are rudimentary and you would like to make minor changes to PSDs created by a professional design team. This was actually how I learned to work with Photoshop - by making changes to files that someone else had created.

Krita is another free tool that I like to use in combination with my drawing pad, because I feel like it’s a bit more intuitive when using a digital pen.

Password Management

As a community manager, it’s likely that you will be using a good amount of logins for social media accounts, collaboration software, social listening, etc.

This is a category where you need to be especially cognizant of company security policies. My personal favorite, especially because it can be used offline, is KeePass. It’s not good for sharing passwords with other team members but it is a great tool for reducing the risk of leaked account passwords. If you prefer cloud-based password managers, there are plenty of those, as well, such as Bitwarden.

Computer-Assisted Translations

If you are a polyglot CM working with an international community, your work is likely to involve some degree of translation work. You may be translating the latest release notes and game strings or doing a last-minute translation of a blog that the translation contractor could not get to in time. While you could use word processing software to translate the text, this is not the best solution. If you’re translating the same words and phrases repeatedly, having translation memory and other features of computer-assisted translations (CAT) will help immensely.

Just in case you are not familiar with CAT tools, I should issue a word of warning: these programs do not use neural machine translations to do all the translating for you, but they rely on your knowledge. CAT recognizes phrases and words used before to make the human translation process more efficient. Fuzzy matching for the win!

My personal recommendation for a free open-source option is OmegaT. Years before discovering OmegaT, when I was going to school for being a translator, I had taken a course on using the proprietary market leader for computer-assisted translations, and it was very easy for me to find my way around OmegaT, with the knowledge that I had gained in that course.

I found it to be especially useful for translating patch notes for games that I supported, as they contained a lot of repeating information in the form of names for in-game military units and their associated stat categories that were being updated, with only the metrics themselves changing (e.g. “added +5 hit points to [insert name of unit]” or “decreased attack bonus of [insert name of unit] to +2”). You can see how this can get very repetitive after a while. Having a program that recognized words that had already been translated made the translation process much quicker.

If you encounter languages that you do not speak, machine translation comes in handy. Besides the widely-known Google Translate, DeepL is a handy machine translation tool. When using any translation software, I make sure that I am clear that my response was not checked by a speaker of the language. While machine translations have become much better over time, being a native speaker still beats automatic translation.

These are just some of the tools and resources that I have used over the years.

Thanks to Julia, Mike, Austin, and Chuck for all the feedback.

What are your favorite free/open-source tools that you use as a CM? Are there free tools that you’re looking for? Let me know in the comments below.

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