The Top 5 Online Courses for Community Managers

Discord is an online community platform tool allowing millions of people to connect across the world over a centralised topic. There are millions of communities, also known as servers or guilds on Discord and it’s important to always try to improve your community to stay ahead of the competition and communities like yours. It’s also a great tool for personal development and building up your experience for later in life depending on where you are.

These are our top 5 online courses for community owners, managers, and moderators to better learn about the ins and outs of the platform as well as community and marketing management more broadly.

Discord Moderation Academy

Discord’s moderation academy is your one-stop shop for all learning content Discord related. There are many guides and tutorials ranging from dealing with toxic behaviour to looking after your team of moderators and stopping them from burning out.

These guides have been made by world-class community leaders and they’ll give you the necessary knowledge to moderate and keep your server as clean and safe as possible for your members. Here are some of our favourite guides.

· The basic guide on how to report content to Discord

· How should a moderator behave?

· What your responsibilities as a moderator are

· How do you handle difficult scenarios?

· Create some community guidelines

· Recruit your team

· Moderate the moderators

· How to make your community feel safe

· How to train new moderators

· How to engage your community through moderation

· Transparency & Trust

There are a whole bunch more guides and I recommend taking a look at all of the ones that you think you may apply to you and trying to put some of the points into action in your own community.

Discord Creator & Community Academy

Like the moderation academy, Discord also has a creator and community academy that focuses more broadly on engagement and bringing new members to your community and how you can monetise it.

The creator academy focuses on building a paid following to generate income, while the community academy focuses on building a great community. Here are some of our favourite articles from it:

· Learn how to create a content strategy to market your community

· Learn how to earn money on your Discord with a range of ideas to offer your community members

· Learn how to take advantage of Discord’s community tools to help expand and better manage your Discord Server

· What do you need to think about before monetising your community?

· Going from a free community to a paid one

· How to make Discord a home for your community

· How to set up a wicked community onboarding system for your Discord Server

· What you need in your community to succeed

· How to brand your community like a business

· How to bring value to your community through the conversations that take place

· How to use social media on your Discord Server

· How to use Discord’s built-in analytics for your community

· How to promote and grow your Discord Server (hey, that’s what we do)

· Use social media to grow your Discord Server (check out our next course)

· The basics behind managing Discord communities

· How to learn more about your own community and what your members feel/want

Discord does truly have a lot of content when it comes to community management, and the great thing is, that they’ve collaborated with industry experts to help you grow your community with these tools.

Social Media for Discord Communities

This is one of our courses. Have you ever wanted to grow your social media channels like you do for your Discord Server? Or even wanted to find new members on your socials? Well, this is the course for you, led by Cailee and Will.

In our Social Media Marketing for Discord Communities course, you’ll learn the ins and outs of how you can integrate social media with your Discord Server and how you can use it in conjunction to grow and engage your community.

The great thing is that it only takes about an hour to complete and is completely free!

Audience vs Community

From our friends over at Commsor (the community experts for community-led businesses), learn the difference between an audience and a community and how they both should be treated. Audiences focus more on pushing information out, while communities are more about sharing information and interacting with others. A community is owned by its members, while an audience is owned by the business or individual behind it.

Commsor has made an entire course on an essential introduction to online communities for free. Learn how communities create impact and how communities are different from social media.

HubSpot

For the final course on this list, we thought it would be essential to include a digital marketing course as community building is very similar to growing an online business in the way you need new members, to engage them and retain them as well as get them to invite more people. Digital Marketing is a skill that is lacking across a lot of newer community managers so having a good marketing skill set will help when deciding how to market and brand an online community.

HubSpot is one of the leading tools and schools on digital marketing with a huge range of free online courses. This course is an introduction to Digital Marketing but there is a lot more to it than that.

I hope you found this guide helpful in starting your community journey. We’re always looking for ways to help grow online communities better as well as make their management of them more efficient and impactful on the members. Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email with any feedback or additions. Feel free to also let us know what you think of the courses mentioned and if there are any others you’d recommend!