Most community managers were never trained. So we built the program they've been asking for.

Ask most people what a community manager does and they’ll say “delete the bad posts.” That misconception is exactly why community management training barely exists as a field and why so many of the people holding digital communities together are doing it with no formal preparation at all.

For me, these conversations started at GDC 2023. I was hosting a series of roundtables with Dr. Elizabeth Kilmer, one of our groups was made up of digital leaders in games — community managers at studios large and small, heads of communities with 10+ years of experience, brand-new leaders one year in, and everyone in between. We were there to talk about the intersection of games and extremism (I promise I'm fun at parties), but the most alarming thing I took away from those rooms had nothing to do with terrorism. It was the sheer lack of preparation these community leaders had been given for the roles they were expected to fill. Training for the people working at the community level of games (the social level, where players actually spend their time) was wildly inconsistent, and mostly nonexistent. These conversations lit the first spark of what would eventually become the DLC Leadership Program. Right idea, wrong time.

I found myself in these conversations once again in 2025. I was talking it through with a colleague when it hit me that nearly two years had passed and nothing had changed — the gap was exactly where I'd left it. So I did what any researcher would do… I went looking for more data. In September 2025, I surveyed 25 community managers and moderators in games to find out what the job actually demands. The answer? Far more than moderation and far far more than anyone is training them for.

• More than half had already faced a situation in their community they felt unprepared to handle.

• 82% had received no training in finding support for themselves.

• And while they rate their influence on community culture at 4.7 out of 5, they rate how valued they feel by their organizations at just 3.5.

It’s a profession doing critical, complex work (mostly alone) and it’s burning people out.

If you want to dig into the data, the full report is here (charts and all). And I wrote up what it all means, and what we built in response, in a fuller breakdown here.

But here’s the short version of what we did with it.

At some point, documenting a problem stops being enough. You have to try to fix it. So, I did... try (although, am arguably succeeding?).

I’ll be honest about how long it took, because the unglamorous part is worth saying out loud. The DLC Leadership Program was more than three years in the making. Not because the idea was particularly complicated. I mean, “train people to do their job and they’ll be better prepared to be able to do it effectively” is not a new idea. But, because finding the right home, the right partners, and frankly the right moment for something like this was genuinely hard. As you can imagine, finding funding for educational initiatives is, to put it gently, deeply unsexy work. The hard part was finding the people who believed training community leaders was worth investing in before there was a single graduate to point to.

But, I found them. And then I partnered up with Dr. Kelli Dunlap (which if you know her, you know that is always a great idea) and over the last eight months, I’ve had the incredible privilege of co-developing this program with her with the generous support of our founding partner, Shine a Light Gaming. We launched our pilot cohort in May and we’ve just closed it.

The full impact data is coming soon. But I’ll say this much now - every signal we have tells us we got it right. Leaders are learning. The training they’ve been asking for (evidence-based, practical, accessible) finally exists. And we didn't build it alone. Experts like Victoria Tran (Innersloth), Matt Soeth (Thriving in Games Group), Henry Adams (Resolver), Celia Hodent (ethicalgames.org), Ashley Blake (vrCave) and Maria Tamellini (GamerSafer) and partner organizations including Christchurch Call. They all lent their time and expertise to shape and teach it. That's what makes it something rare: training made for this community, by this community.

That’s the part I’m proudest of. Not that we built a program but that we built the one people actually needed - grounded in what they told us (yay science!) and taught by the people doing the work. It is a true community of practice.

If you want to see what we made or you lead a community yourself and want to check out the program and join the community, here’s where to go.

👉 Explore the program and join the waitlist → dlcleadership.org