You’re Leaving the Community: How to Properly Handover the Responsibilities?

In the community journey, a person's path in a community is both an onboarding process (official and unofficial) and an offboarding process (when a person leaves the community). In a community manager's work, there might also be a process of handing over the community. How can this be done properly, whether there is a successor or not?

Let’s figure it out!

1. Collect All Community Artifacts

I like the word "artifacts," but it’s pretty ambiguous... For me, artifacts are anything directly related to the community, and they can include:

• Branding: logos, brand style, colors, examples of covers, links to Figma boards, etc.

• Channels and resources: platform, chat, email, social networks, etc.

• Communication examples: community rules, onboarding content, and examples of newsletters.

• Access and expenses to maintain the community: the most typical according to the Community Management survey in Ukraine, conducted with MetaCommunity in 2024: platforms (Circle), design tools (Canva), AI tools (Fireflies), project management tools (Notion), etc.

• All mentions of the community manager across channels: if different parts of the community specify you as the contact person, arrange who will take over your role.

• All pages that need regular updates: certain information may become outdated or needs to be checked or updated, so gather all pages and write instructions on how to do this and who to contact to get updates.

• Regular formats and approaches: some processes may already be in place and must continue. For example, monthly event digests, industry news, and job openings. Some communities have regular columns, and your successor needs to be aware of them.

Important: Your corporate email will become inactive when your offboarding begins, so you need to ensure that any access linked to it is updated. Switch to a general email created for the project.

2. Create a Brief Community Workflow Scheme

This could be a concise overview with key points and formats carried out in the community for the new community person or someone from the team who will temporarily take over your responsibilities.

Example of what might be included:

• List of main initiatives

• List of secondary, lower-priority initiatives

• All formats and how they are interconnected

Here is an example of a very brief scheme:

3. Describe the Event Organization Process

Since different people from various teams might be involved in external and internal community events, it’s worth clearly outlining who is responsible for what. This helps avoid confusion and unnecessary actions.

Here’s an example of the outlined responsibilities of three event facilitators in the community:

	L&D Specialist*	Event Manager*	Community Manager
Before the Event:	Shares event information via channels for educational initiatives.	Creates the event on the Event Management platform with all necessary information. Works with vendors.	Receives the topic from the community and finds the expert.
During the Event:	Responsible for the educational content of the event and moderates the session alone or with the Community Manager, if needed.	Coordinates logistics, monitors timing and solves organizational issues.	Engages participants actively, communicates with the expert, and maintains the community atmosphere.
After the Event:	Gathers feedback on the educational aspect of the event and analyzes its effectiveness.	Conducts a retrospective on the event's organization and resolves financial issues with vendors.	Collects key insights from the experts and shares them with the community, supporting further discussion.

**Important: Provide the contacts of everyone involved in event organization. The new Community Manager needs to not only understand who is responsible for what but also who will handle it directly.

4. Describe the Communication Flow

I recommend gathering answers to the following questions, which I’ve split into blocks.

4.1. Information Gathering

To gather everything for your successor, I recommend answering the following questions:

• How do we correctly gather information from various stakeholders?

• Who uses which channels to get information from stakeholders: email, Slack, or prefers to share news offline over coffee at the office? Understanding who should be included in the CC when you make requests is also essential.

• How is information collected from the community? For surveys, quizzes, and feedback forms, maybe there’s a shared corporate email where any participant can send a query?

4.2. Content Creation

Here, it’s about the tools your successor will need to use to work with the information that can be gathered or created. I won’t list the tools everyone already knows and uses (hello, AI! Yes, I’m a millennial addicted to ChatGPT). Here, you must describe the formats and hashtags already used and their purpose.

Specifically:

• Overview of the main chats and the type of content the team or community posts.

• List of formats. For example, in one of the communities I worked with, we regularly created 5-10-minute videos with a clear call to action. This format responded to stakeholders’ needs to broadcast information to the community. Still, the volume of information wasn’t enough for a full 30-60 minute agenda (our typical regular call that we used to gather the entire community). So, for anyone with short updates, we helped them record short videos, added text with a call to action, and posted it in internal channels with the corresponding hashtag. While only 20% of the community attended the calls on average, half of the community watched the videos.

• Regular digests. We had a monthly digest of internal and external events in one community. Another community had a regular newsletter with the latest news in the domain, examples, and links to primary sources that the community members were most interested in.

• List of regular initiatives to share with the community. Annual reports, quarterly projects, and how the community shined in them, Professional Day for community members (you’d be surprised, but even Community Managers have their day!), Speaker Day, Mentor Day, etc. Everything that concerns the community should be included.

4.3. Content Placement

Who owns the internal communication channels?

In my experience, the community manager is the primary owner of the community's internal communication channels. Therefore, you’re responsible for distributing content, designing formats, and defining the content calendar. My practice shows that if the community is built around people in leadership or managerial positions, the flow of information that everyone wants to deliver will be fast and large.

Therefore, the Community Manager needs to establish an approach to contacting the community, creating a communication strategy, a content plan, a posting schedule, and the approach to different content formats (texts, videos, images, announcements, surveys, links to external sources mentioning community members, etc.).

This is all needed to avoid spamming and over-saturation with communications and ensure smooth distribution. How is this process set up in the community now? This is something the person taking over your role should be aware of.

5. People to Get to Know

Typically, the new person undergoes basic onboarding in the company, while onboarding within the team may be less detailed. Your successor needs to understand who’s who. I advise creating a list of stakeholders and process facilitators connected to the community. Also, I recommend writing an introduction for the team.

Things to Remember:

• A list of all team members with a brief description of their responsibilities and roles. For example, I interviewed all team members in one community I worked with. I asked them about their responsibilities, how they could assist the community, what topics they could help with, and their contact email, and I added photos to each page. This was one of the most visited pages in the community. Team members, especially in internal corporate communities, need to see the whole team and understand what work they do for the community. Collecting this information will be helpful for your successor and the community as a whole.

• Requests that other team members might bring to the Community Manager. For example, asking about new educational opportunities for the community or news that should be shared in the upcoming month. Usually, the Community Manager has ideas and content that should be included in the internal communications list.

• Requests you might have for the team if needed. For example, the team can offer the community a list of services or tools. Knowing everything about the team will help you direct requests to the right person who can assist.

• A list of facilitators and other stakeholders. For example, in a Web3 community, this could be the Growth Manager, Sales Manager, Tech Team, or Director of Marketing. Since in such communities, the Community Manager typically reports to the Director of Marketing/Head of Marketing, the list should include SMM (Social Media Manager the collaboration with whom I described in detail in this article), Event Manager, HR BP, L&D Specialist, etc.

  
  

You’re interested in everyone who influences the community or is invested in developing specific skills and "muscle groups" and regularly interacts with the community manager. They also have managers who cascade certain information and have a top-level impact on the community’s processes.

6. About the Community

For your successor to relate well with the community members, I recommend answering the following questions and gathering information about:

• What are the strategic goals of the community?

• Provide an example to visualize the "spirit" or values of the community.

• Tips on how to help the new person integrate into the community culture. Perhaps the community is very extroverted or introverted, or maybe you’ve tried certain formats or approaches that didn’t work well... This is also worth mentioning.

• Who are the community leaders? What do they do, and how do they interact with the Community Manager?

• Is there an ambassador program or mentorship? Who’s involved in these projects, and what stage are they at?

• What are the benefits for community members? A list of rewards or perks for active participation. For example, we had Amazon certificates for participants who answered the most weekly quizzes. In another community, there were Yakaboo certificates for book purchases. Some communities offer merch as rewards for activity. All of this should be mentioned in the materials that the new Community Manager will receive.

7. Nearing the End of Your Tenure

It’s also vital to help the newcomer adapt, if possible. Consider how to inform the community about the change of Community Manager. You might want to write the communication with the manager or draft a letter for the community if it aligns with the company’s tone of voice. You should send or post it a day before completing all tasks and closing access. And another thing I almost forgot: about a week before leaving, you should email partners informing them of the new contact person in case any issues arise.

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There’s much more to consider when handing over your responsibilities and leaving the community. The amount of information depends on the specifics of the community: whether it’s paid or free, what tools are already provided by the company, and whether there are tasks set by the "old" community manager that need special attention.

I wish you success and exciting new opportunities ahead! :)

I always enjoy talking about communities, so if you have ideas, questions, or thoughts you'd like to share, here are my contacts:

My LinkedIn, where you can schedule a consultation or connect with me.

You can book a mentorship session with me on the Prjctr Mentorship Platform.

You can view the research I conducted with the MetaCommunity team here.