Being a community manager is multi-faceted. Not only are we often the “face of the community”, interacting and engaging with the community members, but we are generalists and program managers who often wear a dozen different hats throughout a single day. With cross-functional projects, an ongoing calendar of content and events, and oftentimes a plethora of ad-hoc events thrown at us, it’s important to stay organized.
In this post, I’ll share a few examples of how the Asana Community Team uses Asana in our regular community management to ensure community initiatives and priorities are clear and run smoothly.
1. Slack Engagement Calendar
The Asana Ambassadors have a private Slack workspace where they can engage and connect with others. From Asana hacks to questions, to industry-specific use cases, to program announcements and reminders from the community team, it’s a vibrant space with lots of ongoing conversations and interactions. To ensure we’re always engaging with our community members in meaningful ways, we have an Asana project that serves as our Slack engagement calendar. This allows us to schedule and track our posts and announcements across the team, each post having an owner, a due date, a channel that the post will be shared to, and visibility into what the post will say.
There are a few key items to note in the project:
- The overview task - This provides details like what the Slack workspace is and who it is for, why we have this calendar and the importance of following the process, and how to use the project itself. We often have other teams asking us to cross-promote feedback opportunities, webinars, and events with the community, so this empowers them to add items in here for us (or them!) to post in the community without overlapping or conflicting with other planned content.
- One-off posts - Continuing from the above bullet point, we get a lot of requests for one-off posts in Slack about upcoming initiatives and opportunities. These are ‘one and done’ posts, and having a dedicated section for them allows us to keep track of them, post them on the proper days, then mark them as complete and not have to worry about them anymore.
- Recurring posts - The community is constantly evolving. New people are joining, program updates are made, and there are recurring themes that we want to occasionally remind the community about. Additionally, we have recurring discussion prompts to facilitate regular conversation amongst members. This section contains recurring tasks with a particular repeating cadence. For example, every Friday, we like to celebrate our wins together, and this recurring task helps ensure we remember to make that post.
In addition to supporting our immediate team, the Slack engagement calendar also serves as a valuable resource for cross-functional stakeholders. By providing visibility into our scheduled posts, external teams can stay informed about upcoming announcements and community initiatives. This transparency allows them to seamlessly add items they wish to share, ensuring their messages align with our existing content strategy. This collaborative approach not only enriches our community interactions but also empowers stakeholders to actively participate in the conversation, fostering a cohesive and well-coordinated communication effort across the organization.
This structured approach to our Slack engagement ensures that every interaction is intentional and impactful, maintaining the vibrancy of our community. By using Asana to manage our engagement efforts, we not only streamline communication but also foster a collaborative and dynamic environment where there’s transparency and visibility internally.
2. Community Newsletter
We send two community newsletters a month to the Asana Ambassadors, keeping our members informed, engaged, and excited about upcoming events, new features, and updated on conversations happening internally at Asana and throughout the community. The Asana Community Team uses Asana to draft, plan, and schedule every newsletter.
We use a task template, creating a new task for each newsletter that will automatically create subtasks assigned to various team members with corresponding due dates. The newsletter is truly a team effort, with each team member contributing content to share. This structured approach ensures our newsletters have relevant content spanning across community and education program areas. Additionally, there are a number of cross-functional stakeholders, like from product marketing and field marketing, who have subtasks in the task template, so they can also share any relevant opportunities or initiatives with the community.
When it’s time to draft the newsletter, all we need to do is go to the task, and view the updates in each subtask. I tend to also add a little 
emoji in the task name to indicate that I’ve added something into the newsletter, since my teammates mark the task as complete when they add their content into the task. I also have two follow up tasks that are created for me to track newsletter performance and share it with the team, one week after the newsletter send date.
3. Roadmap Planning & Backlog
The community team always has concurrent initiatives and projects going on, and bandwidth is often tight. As such, it’s important to keep a source-of-truth roadmap so we stay organized, know what the priorities are at any point in time, and also know what each person on the team is working on. The roadmap is also a fabulous resource for people on other teams to have visibility to what our priorities are, allowing for better cross-functional collaboration and alignment. Additionally, we have tons of things we want to do - from various fun community activities, to operational improvements, to supporting additional segments and audiences, and to keep track of it all, we have a backlog list, all in Asana.
A few things to note about this project:
- What you see in the screenshot is a bunch of our completed roadmap items - we aren’t currently sharing the community roadmap publicly, but the active roadmap typically has different statuses other than just ‘complete’ (though wouldn’t that be nice!).
- Custom fields - We have a number of custom fields to help keep our backlog organized.
- Status - to track the status of the item, whether it’s not started, coming up, in progress, blocked, on hold, or completed
- Whether the task is a new initiative, an improvement, fixing something broken, or a run the business item
- What the tool or platform is that the task pertains to, if relevant
- Priority
- Effort
- Quarter
- Region
- What big goal it aligns to
- As a team, we re-visit this backlog regularly, making sure we update dates, change statuses, and ensuring there are no duplicates. We also try to regularly pull from the backlog when we finish other initiatives, in addition to the items that are already on the roadmap.
- Active section - We have an active action in this project to show the items currently in progress.
- Multiple views - We have a number of views to see the backlog and roadmap in different ways, like by status, by person, by quarter, etc.
Planning out our community’s growth and future initiatives requires a clear and strategic roadmap. With Asana, we are equipped to map out our long-term objectives, breaking them down into actionable tasks and timelines. This process not only aligns our team’s efforts with our overall goals but also provides transparency, allowing every team member to understand the bigger picture and contribute strategically.
4. Events & Webinars
Hosting events and webinars is an exciting way to engage and educate our community members. Whether it’s a webinar on recently released features, a community panel on a particular topic, or an intimate roundtable discussion, our events require meticulous preparation and coordination, spanning across multiple teams. Using Asana, we manage the entire lifecycle of our events—from concept to execution. This includes everything from logistical details, speaker coordination, marketing plans, to post-event follow-ups. Asana helps us ensure that no detail is overlooked, and every event is executed flawlessly.
We use project templates to coordinate both our in-person and online events. The project templates will auto-assign tasks and due dates based off the event date. In the project, we also have a number of reference tasks which contains information like the event details for others to easily share with customers and help promote, and also instructional documentation on how to do various event tasks like how to create the event landing page and source the UTM parameters.
Event planning oftentimes becomes a rinse and repeat - aside from key differences like the event topic, location, speaker, date, etc., a lot of the key tasks are the same. As such, having this project template with designated tasks, owners, and relative due dates ends up saving our team a lot of time when it comes to kicking off a new event.
5. Team Meetings & Collaboration
Collaboration and innovation are essential, especially when working with a global team spread across Europe, Australia, Japan, and the USA. Coordinating team meetings where everyone can participate simultaneously becomes a logistical challenge. Therefore, we leverage Asana to facilitate seamless team collaboration and meetings, ensuring everyone’s voice is heard.
Every week, we use a task template in Asana to organize our team meetings. In this task, each team member has a section in the task description with their name and a subtask for them to provide their weekly updates. To accommodate our diverse time zones, we alternate meeting times between APAC and EMEA schedules, and team members unable to attend live due to time zone differences contribute by recording a video of their updates and attaching it to the task.
In addition to updates, our task includes a section for discussion topics—a space where team members can propose ideas or issues for group brainstorming. As updates are added, everyone can comment and add their perspectives, fostering a dynamic and inclusive discussion, even if some participants are engaging asynchronously. This method ensures that all team members can contribute meaningfully, and our meetings are both productive and collaborative.
As we look forward to the new year, we’re excited to continue supporting the amazing Asana Community by providing engaging and relevant content, hosting educational events and webinars, and finding opportunities for members to engage with one another. By utilizing Asana itself, we ensure our team is aligned, productive, and equipped to tackle challenges, all while delivering exceptional value to our community members.