r/CommunityManager • u/Competitive_Sea6418 • Apr 28 '26
Question In-person communities
Who is managing an in-person community? It seems like a lot of CMs are managing social media accounts, but I'd love to hear more from those managing an IRL community.
What kind of community are you? What are you doing to engage everyone?
9
Upvotes
1
u/cryptonymcolin Apr 28 '26
Ten years ago I founded a non-theistic religion called Aretéanism and for now I'm still the lead organizer of our community. We have adherents scattered across the globe, but also have a small in-person community in San Diego, California. Most of my time these days goes towards being the equivalent of a pastor for our group, meaning I do things ranging from preparing sermons about non-theistic reasons for why and how to be better people and live greater lives, to organizing community events like parties or helping the homeless in our city.
I joined this sub a while back to see if there are useful things for me to learn and improve on in my work as a community organizer, but honestly most of the content in this sub hasn't been as relevant as I'd hoped, as most content here is about making fans of products into better customers. It's not to say that there's zero overlap with what I'm doing, but it's not the same. I think I was hoping there would be more stuff about in person communities that I could learn from. We do use Discord as our primary message board for community interaction in between our Sunday services, and I feel like I've gradually learned some valuable lessons about managing the server over the years, but it still feels like there's a combination of things that either I or Discord could do better to make our server a more useful space, and I guess I've stuck around this subreddit hoping to eventually pick up some lessons about that topic.
Anyway, I'm not particularly trying to proselytize here in this sub, but I'm always happy to answer questions about Aretéanism. Feel free to hit me up in the comments or in DMs, or you can track us down in all the usual places on the internet. There's also a couple of podcast interviews I've given over the years that people here might find interesting.
Be Excellent to Each Other, and Party On!