Community Manager

Kickstarter is the leading crowdfunding platform for creative projects across film, games, music, art, design, and technology. Since our founding in 2009, our mission to help bring creative projects to life has been powered by the people behind the work.

Together, we’ve helped creators around the world launch creative projects that have generated billions of dollars in pledges. That same commitment extends inward. Rooted in shared values, Kickstarter invests in the growth and success of our team, treating employees as whole people and empowering them with the autonomy and space to participate in decisions that shape their work and our company.

Kickstarter is seeking an experienced Community Manager to join our Marketing team. This role sits at the heart of how Kickstarter shows up and is perceived across the places our community talks: social, Reddit, Discord, review sites, forums, and the corners of the internet where creators and backers compare notes. Reporting to the Director, Brand and Communications, the Community Manager will listen, respond, and engage, and will work closely with cross-functional teams to route what they hear to the people who can act on it.

As the owner of Kickstarter’s community presence and reputation, they serve as our early-warning system when sentiment shifts or a problem starts to spread. This is not a “schedule posts and check metrics” role. The ideal candidate is already deep in these communities, knows the norms of each one, and gets a little twitchy when a thread starts to turn.

The salary for this role in the United States is $115,905.50.

In This Role, You Will:

Reputation Management and Monitoring

• Monitor brand mentions, sentiment, and emerging narratives across social, Reddit, Discord, review sites, forums, and the broader web, in real time.

• Spot early signals of reputational risk (a viral complaint, a controversial project, a misunderstanding of our policies), assess severity, and lead the response, partnering with Communications, Trust & Safety, Legal, and leadership on sensitive or high-stakes moments.

• Design and own the escalation framework with Communications, Trust & Safety, Support, Product, Legal, and leadership, including severity tiers, owners, and response timelines.

• Build, own, and continuously refine response playbooks for common scenarios (project controversies, creator disputes, outages, policy changes, and press-driven moments), and run post-incident reviews to improve them.

• Define how we measure community sentiment and reputation, and deliver regular reporting to senior stakeholders that connects trends to business and mission impact, with clear recommendations.

Community Engagement

• Show up as Kickstarter in public conversations, in a voice that is human, direct, and well-informed.

• Participate credibly in Reddit and Discord communities, following each community’s rules and culture rather than treating them as broadcast channels.

• Correct misinformation helpfully, de-escalate heated threads, and know when not to respond.

• Support creators and backers by pointing them to the right resources, and handing off to Support when an issue needs a ticket.

• Celebrate creator milestones and engage with backers and make Kickstarter feel present and human beyond our owned social channels.

• Set voice, tone, and engagement guidelines for Kickstarter’s presence in community spaces, and coach teammates who engage on the company’s behalf.

Feedback Loop

• Own a community feedback program that turns unstructured community input into prioritized, evidence-backed insights for Product, Design, Policy, Support, and Creator Success, and track what gets acted on.

• Maintain a living picture of the top recurring pain points, feature requests, and trust issues, with examples.

• Close the loop publicly when we ship something the community asked for.

• Build and run a creator and backer advocacy program, identifying enthusiastic community members for testimonials, campaigns, and storytelling.

Programs and Operations

• Own the strategy and operation of Kickstarter-owned community spaces (e.g., Discord, creator forums), including moderation guidelines, tooling, and volunteer or mod programs.

• Align Social, Comms, and our creator-facing teams on campaigns, launches, and announcements so community context is built in from the start.

• Select, manage, and optimize our social listening and community tooling, including vendor evaluation and measurement.

• Track emerging creator communities, cultural trends, competitor conversations, new platforms and community behaviors.

• Translate community insights into recommendations that inform marketing, acquisition, and product priorities.

About You

• You have 4+ years in community management, social media, reputation management, or a related role, ideally at a platform, marketplace, or consumer tech company.

• You have deep, demonstrable fluency in Reddit and Discord, as a longtime participant and not just a brand account. You know what a good community looks like and what gets a brand banned or mocked.

• You have hands-on experience across the major social platforms (X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads), including how norms and audiences differ on each.

• You have experience monitoring and managing sentiment on review and feedback sites (e.g., Trustpilot, App Store and Google Play reviews, Hacker News, and niche forums).

• You have strong judgment under pressure and ambiguity: you can tell a vocal minority from a real problem and a mistake from a crisis, and you make clear recommendations or calls without waiting to be told what to do.

• You are an excellent writer. You can be warm, plain-spoken, and precise, and you can adapt tone to the platform and the moment.

• You have experience with social listening and community tools (e.g., Sprout Social, Brandwatch, Sprinklr, Meltwater, Mention, or similar).

• You have experience building processes and aligning cross-functional partners, and you communicate clearly and credibly with executives, Legal, and Trust & Safety when stakes are high.

• You have a track record of owning a community, reputation, or voice-of-customer program end to end, with measurable results.

• You are familiar with crowdfunding, creator economy, or maker communities (games, comics, film, music, design, publishing, tech).

• You are familiar with platform-specific communities like BoardGameGeek, Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, or creator-focused Discords.

• You have experience handling public-facing communications during controversies or policy changes.

• You have data skills: you are comfortable building dashboards or pulling insights from large volumes of unstructured text.