The Importance Of Resources + Documentation

Role: Sr. Community Manager

Problem: I was Smile Rewards’ first-ever Community Manager. This meant that I started with a very, very blank slate: no strategy, no monthly calendar, no backend resources and toolkits. Anytime you start a new role, there’s a pressure to jump right in and start Making Things Happen, and that’s only amplified when you originate a role. But I tend to approach every new role with the thought: “If I disappeared tomorrow, is there enough documentation that someone could figure out what I do without me?” Almost everywhere else I’ve ever worked, the answer to that would’ve been a resounding, “lol no,” but at Smile I was blessed to have a manager who understand the importance of all this backend work.

Plan.

I decided to use Notion as the main home for all of the various resources. Partially because Smile was already using it as a company database, and also because I really, really, really (really) love it. Plus, I knew I needed these resources to fall into three main categories:

Company Facing, high-level to keep other teams informed about what I was doing;
Team Facing, more specific for improving the work I did with the wider marketing and content team;
and Social Only, hyper-specific to help me and anyone else on the social/community team.

The company-facing resources included a Community Management 101 that explained what I did and why it was important; a Community Playbook that broke down our social/community strategy; and a redesigned Marketing Hub that put various marketing/content/social resources all in one place, like style guides and data/insights pages.

The “social only” resources were the biggest undertaking, as it was essentially documenting everything to do with my community and social work—and if you know anything about working in social media, there is a lot that goes into it. And not just simply documenting, but organizing it all in a way that was dynamic and easy to navigate. After testing out a few different formats I landed on this for the Community Hub:

• Opening with a Table of Contents for quick navigating and the other essential pages that help shape the role(s).

• Then a Week At A Glance to show the basic daily social and community tasks.

• Followed by a Resources database with all the various tools/apps and Brainstorm Dump database for keeping all the random ideas in one place.

• When it came to the actual work, I decided to first focus on the individual Tasks and then I created a separate database for the specific Content series/pieces. (Basically all content pieces are made up of many (so many) tasks, but not all tasks are part of content series.)

Takeaways.

Creating resources like this aren’t just good for the employee or team, they’re good for the company too. Companies! Be smart AND selfish here! Life happens. People quit or get fired or move to different departments. Wouldn’t it be nice to have lots of role and team specific documents to help with that?

It can and will take a while. It took me over three months for just the Community Hub (note: I was doing other things at the same time). And since it’s a living resource, I’m regularly having to update it as well. Daunting yes, but 100% worth it!

Living resources, where you can track progress and note changes/updates, are essential for accountability and posterity.

It’s important to find a balance between “providing useful information” and an information overload. If it’s too dense, not only will it take wayyyyyy too long to build, but folks may find it too frustrating to want to use. Think of these resources as memory jogs and helping hands, not full-blown tutorials. AKA, don’t have 50 steps or bullet points when 5 will do.

When it comes to social media work, I find that I’m still spending a surprising amount of time proving my worth and helping folks to understand what I do and why it’s important. (Yes even in the year of our lord 2023.) Company-facing guides and walkthroughs can help to bridge these gaps.

Sometimes you don’t realize just how much you do until you start to document it. This can be helpful if you want to have a good cry about all the hats you wear but, even better, it can be the “proof” to make the case for new teammates, promotions, and raises.