There’s a lot of little weird things that give us community managers dopamine hits. Landing pages looking just right. Conversations with threaded replies. Someone replying to a three-year-old thread with “THIS. Thank you. You saved my whole afternoon.”
You bask in the momentary glory and then screenshot it for your quarterly deck (don’t pretend you don’t), because it’s proof. Proof that the thing you built works, that people found it, that it mattered.
Needless to say, we’ve hung a lot of our sense of worth on that moment. The thank-you reply. The accepted solution. The member who says, out loud and in public, that the community helped.
But I’m also learning to realize there are a lot of moments out there where I’m doing good… and I’ll never know about it. And that’s okay. I’m still awesome.
So let me tell you about a woman on a bus.
Last week, I was on the last leg of one of those planes, trains, and automobiles days. The kind where you stop being a person somewhere around the second form of transportation. Across the aisle from me, an older couple was chatting,. The gal in the pair was telling him - with the kind of pride you can’t fake - that she had fixed the printer at the place she volunteers. “Of all people!”
The printer had been starting every job on page two and flashing some cryptic message nobody could decode. She’d called the help desk, gone a few rounds of have-you-tried-this, now-try-that, and walked away with a promise of a callback. While she waited, she took a photo of her print settings, a photo of the printer’s little screen, typed out what was going on, and handed the whole bundle to “the ChatGPT.” Minutes later: fixed. When the help desk called back with more things to check, she let them know she’d handled it and told them how in case someone else needed it.
My first reaction was pure delight.
My second was a small, petty voice that said somewhere out there is a printer forum that made this possible, and nobody is ever going to know.
My third thought was “Man, us community managers are AWESOME.”
That fix came from somewhere. And very likely some person in a support community, maybe years ago, hit the same page-two weirdness and asked. Someone else confirmed it. Someone added the edge case for a different model. A moderator (bless them) merged the duplicate threads so the answer lived in one place. That collective knowledge got pulled together, translated, and handed to her with the context she never would have had the time or the vocabulary to dig up herself. A few years ago she wouldn’t have gone near a printer forum. Would you have, honestly, for somebody else’s printer?
Reality is she will never thank that forum. She doesn’t know it exists. For all intents and purposes, she fixed it herself.
And here’s the thing I keep landing on: She’s kind of right. You go, gal. Proud of you.
The best thing a community can produce is a person who thinks they did it themselves.
That was always the goal, wasn’t it? Well, maybe we never said it that way. We said “self-service” and “deflection” and “member enablement”… the sanded-down corporate versions of the same idea. People getting unstuck. People feeling capable. We just assumed we’d get a front-row seat when it happened with all them dopamine hits to come.
So what do we do with a success we can’t see?
We start by loosening our grip on the thank-you as evidence. Gratitude was always a skewed sample (the folks who come back to say thanks are a sliver of the folks who got helped), and that sliver is shrinking fast these days. A deck built on screenshots needs new bones: tickets that never got filed, content that gets retrieved and cited, problems that stop recurring. Harder to collect. Much closer to the truth.
Curation also just got a promotion. The merged thread, the clear title, the solved answer written so a stranger with zero context can follow it. These are the bits and pieces that survive the trip through an AI and comes out useful on the other side. An answer buried in reply forty-seven was hella hard for a human to find. It’s hard for a machine too, and the machine is doing more and more of the reading.
Then there’s the story we tell the people who fund us cause nobody else is going to tell it. Infrastructure doesn’t get thanked. Nobody calls the water department to say the shower was lovely this morning. Our best outcomes are now invisible by design, so making them legible to leadership becomes part of the job - maybe the biggest part.
And finally, the ego bit. Let it sting a little, and then let it go knowing that we’ve likely done a whole ton of unseen and unsung good. Most of us got into this because we love watching people help each other. Let’s not forget our core values.
The last thing I caught before I put my headphones back in: She’d printed the fix (on the fixed printer). Just in case. So somewhere in a volunteer office there’s a sheet of paper taped beside a cranky printer, waiting for the next person stuck on page two, written by a woman who has no idea she just became a community contributor.