Smarter Community Management: From Prompts to Practice

July 26, 2025July 26, 2025 | Lana

Inspired by Hilary Gridley’s Making AI a Habit, I’ve started using AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to explore ideas on community management and work through different angels before putting them into practice. Like with any tool, AI works best when paired with critical thinking – much like trying on four shirts in a dressing room and walking out with the one that fits.

In each post, I’ll share which tool(s) I used, my preference, and the actual prompts that guided me. I’ll always refine the AI’s output so that it’s helpful and actionable.

Essentially, this series is my AI personal toolkit for community management. So let’s get started!

Stakeholders vs. Partners: Key Differences for Community Managers

February 26, 2025March 12, 2025 | Lana

It’s important to understand the difference between a stakeholder and a partner since each role has their own level of involvement, commitment, and engagement. This allows you to develop your relationships with each role appropriately through appropriate communication, decision-making, and strategic alignment.

Internal stakeholders are teams who are interested in your community because it affects them in some way. They want to know about your community’s outcomes and may give resources or share their opinions, but they don’t get involved in the day-to-day activities. These are teams you keep informed about your community metrics and other outcomes. Example: Sales

Internal partners are teams that are just as interested in your community as stakeholders, but these teams roll up their sleeves and work closely with you on shared objectives. These are teams that you directly collaborate with on projects and goals. Example: Product and Support

Knowing the difference between an internal stakeholder and partner gives you the ability to manage your expectations and build stronger relationships by understanding the level of

Communication and engagement – Partners will be more collaborative and involved while stakeholders will prefer a high-level summary.
Resource management – Partners are involved with your projects with shared goals which requires more resources while maintaining the level of support from stakeholders who aren’t as directly involved requires less.
Strategic planning – Partners will be more influential when you’re setting goals and project initiatives while stakeholders have a more indirect influence

The difference between a good and great community manager is recognizing the nuances between internal stakeholders and partners. Knowing how to approach each group using the right communication strategies, along with resource expectations and weaving them into your strategic plans not only builds stronger relationships, but also significantly contributes to your community’s success.

Try This

Label each team in your organization as a stakeholder or partner.
Identify your level of communication, engagement, and their involvement.
- How often will you give updates?
- What will you share with them? If metrics, which would be most beneficial and why?
- What is their level of involvement and expectations?
What are their goals and initiatives, how do they align with yours and vice versa.

Renewing my Thought Follower Pledge in 2024

June 13, 2024July 26, 2025 | Lana

In January 2022, I shared that I am a proud thought follower and had planned to summarize podcasts and articles to share them here. Little did I know that 2 months later, tragedy would strike and I’d be laying my fiancé, our hopes, and planned future together to rest. With the help of friends, family, Zuora co-workers, and other communities who rallied around me, I’m back!

The industry has changed since 2022 and so, my thought followership tales will focus on these 3 topics:

ChatGPT Tips – getting the most from generative AI chatbots
Community Management Math – allow me to dispel the mystique
Communities Across the Lifespan – helping all ages find their tribe

And as with most tales there are side stories so you may see some other topics as well.

Let’s continue!

Thought follower…and proud of it!

January 16, 2022July 26, 2025 | Lana

So many people want to be thought leaders – but what’s the point of leading if no one is following?

There are so many influential and brilliant community managers creating amazing content – books, articles, webinars, videos – that I’d like to start highlighting them as a thought follower. Author Todd Henry said in his article Forget Thought Leaders – We Need more “Thought Followers”

[Thought Followers]…are people who immerse themselves in the brilliant, challenging thoughts of others, commune with great minds, and then follow their own thoughts wherever they might lead. They have a disciplined Study Plan that challenges them to think about important problems and allows them to stretch their thoughts and explore uncomfortable places.

They aren’t afraid to humbly submit to the great insights of others and consider their implications to their own work. They are fiercely curious. They love process. They set aside time to savor great writing. They understand that brilliant ideas are excavated and assembled, not self-generated.

And this is what I plan to do starting in 2022 whether it’s listening to a podcast, reading a book or article, or watching a webinar or conference session. I’ll summarize each with my top 3 takeaways followed by my action items. I hope to follow my summary posts with my results as well!

So here’s to the Thought Followers! Let’s begin…

Advice for a New Community Manager

April 5, 2020February 11, 2022 | Lana

My winning submission from Khoros’ Community Manager Appreciation Day 2020 Contest.

Most community managers are on a team of one (as I am) so my advice focuses around that – especially when Community is new to one’s organization:

Don’t overwhelm yourself with tasks. Select up to 3 initiatives to focus on for that particular quarter or fiscal year. Is it growth? engagement? Your calendar and any task manager software are your friends!
Become familiar with your new organization and how it fits with your community. Go to your intranet, make a list of all of the departments and create bullet points on how they could contribute and benefit your community – tactically and strategically. This list will help you promote community internally and find allies that will help make your job easier.
Have an open-door policy to talk about Community. Find active community members (internal and external) and call them up to learn how they use community and what could be better. This information provides incredible insight into user behavior
Welcome new internal team members, introduce yourself and the Community’s value to their department. Newly hired folks need a buddy…so why not have it be you? Not only will you be their lifeline within the company, you can show them the value of Community. Similarly, newly hired folks want to be recognized and seen by their managers. Share how the Community would benefit their careers within your org (i.e. Give them something they can share on LinkedIn!)
Always think strategically. Connect with internal team members who are influential in making decisions and would encourage their department to participate more in the community. Take them to coffee or lunch to understand their current work struggles and leverage that information to demonstrate how your community will help make their jobs easier.
(Last but not least) Take that vacation…and enjoy it! Don’t feel guilty if you need to take a day off or a vacation. Come up with a process where you can casually check emails (or train a back-up) while you’re on vacation. You will be more influential and valuable when you’re refreshed and well-rested.

5 Tips to Increase Employee Participation

July 3, 2018July 26, 2025 | Lana

Workshop Presentation from Support Driven Expo (SDX), June 2018.

Encouraging your fellow employees to engage more with Community members can be a challenge, and it’s not a behavior that can be changed overnight. When you set strategize and plan realistic goals – no matter how small – you’ll gradually find yourself with more internal Community advocates.

In 2.5 years I went from being a new Zuora employee – not knowing anyone – to enlisting 80+ internal global volunteers for a Community-sponsored “Learners’ Lounge” at Zuora’s annual conference, Subscribed.

Where It All Began

I didn’t go to college expecting to become a community manager. In fact, I’ve worked 15+ years as a civil/structural engineer and my claim to fame is that I’ve designed some parts of the Tesla factory in Fremont, CA!

Check out how I discovered Community Management.

What’s Zuora?
Zuora creates cloud-based software on a subscription basis that enables any company in any industry to successfully launch, manage, and transform into a subscription business.

In a nutshell, Zuora can be used by any industry and can be customized. As you know, when you customize software, things can conflict and that’s where the Zuora Community can help!

About the Zuora Community
The Zuora Community is a space where anyone can talk about the Zuora product with their peers, Zuora staff and partners. Users can ask questions, share solutions, and use cases with each other as well as request product enhancements from our product teams, interact with engineers and other internal teams.

We launched our Community in January 2016.

Getting Employees Involved

Struggling to motivate internal employees to participate in your community is a common issue – people see the value, but are busy, don’t know how to begin, etc.

Being the problem solver that I am, I decided to monitor the community to see what people were saying – who were the people within Zuora that users want to talk to?

A couple months post-launch, I discovered that my internal celebrities were:

Product Managers: Users share their ideas and can interact with product teams to influence the product roadmap.
Subject Matter Experts: SMEs know everything which means that users get faster and more accurate solutions.
Engineering: Users want to know about upcoming maintenance and when issues are resolved.

3 top teams = identified. Now, how to get them more involved?

Dream Big, but Start Small

My first goal was to encourage teams to simply consider the Community as an option to solve any of their issues. They don’t need to know how the Community will help them (that’s my job!), they just need to reach out to me and we can brainstorm together. We called it our “Think Community” initiative.

Since I started at Zuora in 2015, these 5 tactics helped internal teams “Think Community” and include the Community into their processes.

Every company culture is different so what might’ve worked for me, might not work for you, but I hope that my suggestions will help inspire you to come up with some of your own.

Feel free to use my PDF worksheet that you can use for your own internal team engagement strategy.

DOWNLOAD WORKSHEET

Capture Quotes with Emotion

Customers are your bread and butter which is why you want to begin collecting any positive quotes about how the Community has helped them.

What Type of Quotes Should I Collect?
Gather quotes that evoke emotion from the poster and the recipient – in this case, use responses directed toward an internal employee.

For example, the Community member quote “WHOA! I honestly didn’t think this would even get a response! Awesome!” shows how impressed, happy and surprised the original poster is. The recipient, on the other hand, is one of our product managers and when he reads this response, he feels pride and a sense of accomplishment, which helps get him one step closer to participating again.

Executive Buy-In is Crucial for Internal Engagement.
When you find a great quote, email a “thank you” email to the internal recipient and cc: his/her manager. When upper management sees one of their team member’s positively interacting with customers, that’s a career and morale booster.

Develop Your Plan

One of my first tasks was to make a list of strategic and tactical goals for every department within Zuora so that you know which teams would be the easiest to convert to your Community. The ultimate goal of this task is to find that one team who’ll be your poster child with awesome success metrics and then knock ’em each out one by one.

Steps to Create Your Strategic and Tactical Plan

Using your intranet, write down each department within your company.
Under each team, write down your end goal strategies. For example, do you want your SMEs to answer more customer questions, or do you want your product team to post monthly release notes in your Community?
Next, write down how you hope to accomplish your strategies – will you send SMEs 3-5 questions a week for them to reply to, or maybe you’ll draft the most recent release note as an example to show the product team?

If you’re stuck, take one of the team members out for coffee, lunch or a walk break to find out what problems they’re facing in their job; people tend to vent about work when they’re socializing. That’ll be your “in”!

Create a V2MOM

Using your list above, pick a team to turn into your Community superstar and further detail so that you can have measurable results.

At Zuora, we use Salesforce’s V2MOM Method which really helps map out your action plan. It’s short and simple enough to help you stay on task and execute your vision.

While a V2MOM appears short and easy to fill out, it requires a lot of thought. Be as detailed and honest to yourself as you can be as this will be your roadmap toward success.

Plan on completing your V2MOM within one fiscal year so that you can have a success story.

What’s Next?

After you’ve written your V2MOM, assign realistic due dates for when you plan on executing your Methods and gather Metrics. Stick to this schedule and continue to revisit and refine it throughout the year.

Socialize Your Community Internally

Marketing teams create externally, so why not create an internal Community newsletter to showcase how other teams are using it.

Your newsletter is a great way to encourage internal teams to continue or start to “Think Community”, praise individuals or teams that have had success with Community and also educate employees on Community basics.

Include call-to-action areas so people know who to reach out to if they have Community questions.

At Zuora, we have an internal point reward system where employees can exchange points for gift cards. I started giving out “Think Community” MVP awards to individuals who’ve reached out to me about using the Community or introduced others to the Community. That rewards program really helped boost awareness.

Create “How To” Decks

As I talked to more employees about our Community, I found that most of them were eager to be a part of it, but they didn’t know how to do it or how their team could participate.

I recall going to our Beijing office and talking to one of our engineers there. He said that his team really wanted to engage more in Community, but they weren’t confident about how to do it or even how to get started.

From that conversation, I created an onboarding deck and continued to create decks for our account executives, customer success managers, partners, support teams and more.

Extra Tips

If your company has an internal channel, create promotional content using Canva. Above are some examples I used to try to get more volunteers at Zuora’s annual conference, Subscribed.

Another idea is to create an internal hub where employees can get Community 101 and FAQ tips.

Lastly, why not take a team member out for lunch? Eventually, the conversation will steer toward work and you can casually mention how you’re helping other teams succeed via the Community, which in turn will plant ideas in their head about how they can leverage the Community for their team.

Questions?

DM me via @lanalyzer314 on Twitter. I’d love to help brainstorm ideas, look over your V2MOMs, etc.

SDX Here I Come!

April 25, 2018March 31, 2024 | Lana

I’ve been asked to give a workshop at the upcoming Support Driven Expo (SDX) in Portland this July 21-22!

My topic will be “5 Tips to Increase Employee Participation in Your Community” and I’m pretty excited to share some of my ideas and how I’ve improved participation within Zuora.

Takeaway
Tools and strategies that will help thaw employee inactivity and turn your community into one that is vibrant and have users wanting more.

Description
You know the saying “Build it. They will they come.” How true is this for online support communities where internal teams hold a wealth of product knowledge, but they aren’t sharing it with your community users? If your users aren’t getting the answers they need from the Community, your Community will become a ghost town.

In this interactive workshop, Zuora Community Manager Lana Lee will share strategies that motivated Zuora employees how to leverage the Community for their teams while, at the same time, helping customers with their questions.

My First Podcast on Community Signal

March 24, 2018February 13, 2025 | Lana

I’ve always enjoyed listening to other people talk at conferences about community management and never thought that I’d be asked to actually be on a podcast…but then it happened!

Out of the blue, I received a Twitter DM from Patrick O’Keefe from Community Signal which is a bi-weekly podcast for community professionals.

I’ve heard of this podcast before and always thought that the guests were people who had done amazing things so I was definitely surprised when Patrick asked me to be a guest on his show. I was super excited about it, but also nervous because I didn’t think I had anything interesting to say.

To gauge whether or not he had a show, Patrick sent me a questionnaire and I answered it as detailed as I could because I wanted to be picked. He wrote back saying “We definitely have a show!” and we setup a time to chat.

Without giving away too much of my episode, we talked how I discovered Community Management and titled my show From Civil Engineer to Community Manager.

So without further ado, here’s my podcast episode. I hope you like it!

FAQs: Your Community's Best Friend

February 1, 2018July 26, 2025 | Lana

There’s nothing more annoying than fielding the same question…over and over again. When I was going through my Lithium training, the instructor said that the rule of thumb was that for every person who has a question, you can assume that 25 people have that same question.

That’s where FAQs in your Community help – especially with deflected tickets. When I was a Meetup forum moderator, I kept a cheat sheet of FAQs so that I could copy and paste the answer.

For the Zuora Community, nearly all of the questions are technical; customers usually search Google for their answer, which is why it’s crucial to have FAQs for error messages, security issues, “how tos” and so forth.

Customer Solutions Articles (CSAs)

Since we’re on Lithium, we have our support agents write what we call “Customer Solutions Articles” based on questions asked in their Zendesk tickets. They post the question as the original post, followed by the reply in the subsequent post. Then they mark the reply as an accepted solution. Right now, we don’t showcase our accepted solutions (I know, I know….I’ve logged that request with our IT team), but when we do, those will show up.

CSA Tracking

Each CSA is given a “Customer Solutions Article” label so that I can track the number of label views.

Quality Controlled CSAs

In our first year, we used to have a Q&A process, but that took forever to get something posted so the community would get, at most 5 CSAs posted a month, if the agents didn’t have many fires to put out. The number of views were around 1000 page views/month and the “Customer Solutions Article” label was consistently #1 – not bad for a brand new community!

The problem with this process was that there was a lot of back and forth – checking, editing, rechecking – such that the CSA queue was getting longer and longer and it wasn’t a priority.

Enter…the Kraken!

At the beginning of our 2nd year, the CSA queue got to ~60 pending articles waiting to be quality-checked. So we said “Screw it…let’s just get the articles out there for our customers!” There were some folks who were hesitant on letting incorrect information float around the Community, but my opinion was that it’ll create a great discussion; any engagement is good engagement to a Community Manager, right? 🙂

So, we released the Kraken…

Did all hell break loose? No! Our CSA views skyrocketed to around 4000 views/month!

One can easily assume that a percentage of those views resulted in a deflected ticket as many customers didn’t ask additional questions in the CSAs. We also had very few corrections.

Wait…it gets better!

Requiring CSAs Upon Ticket Closure Results in Metrics of Gold!

If agents posting CSAs at-will increased the article views 4x as much, we should require agents to write a CSA (if it makes sense) before they’re allowed to close a Zendesk ticket. Sounds evil, right?

We followed this process for a few months (no more than 2 quarters) and the Community was overflowing with CSAs. Imagine how many tickets an agent sees a week and translate those tickets into CSAs. It was awesome and the metrics supported it.

One month prior to this requirement, CSA labels were seeing an average of 4000 page views/month. The month after, CSAs skyrocketed to 7000 page views/month.

While these numbers are impressive, we found that agents were getting burnt out and a little sloppy writing their CSAs, so we went back to posting articles at-will. Still, our CSA metrics hang out around the upper 7000 page views/month.

FAQs are Your Best Friend

It takes time to build up a FAQ, but the payoff is well worth the effort. Our agents were reporting that customers were asking fewer lower-hanging fruit type of questions, which made their job more interesting and customers were getting their questions answered.

Start out with 10 FAQs and built it up from there. Remember that browsers will crawl your site when people Google their questions so keep SEO in mind.