I'm often asked, how many people do you need to successfully moderate an Ideas community? The answer is obviously depend on the size of your community but here is some guidance to get you started.

Executive Sponsor: Having an strong Executive Sponsor is critical to the success of an Ideas community because it often represents a significant cultural shift. The Executive Sponsor will help define the goals of the community and appoint a team to lead the initiative. They'll provide the feedback to the project team and rally the support of employees and other executives.

Project Manager: The project manager creates the playbook and guides the team through the implementation process. They'll create dashboards, conduct monthly or quarterly review of new ideas, and coordinate follow up. This individual might also be responsible for training business owners how to best leverage the community. In the first 30 days this might be a full time job, but over time it should be a shared resource.

Product Marketing: This individual helps coordinates product marketing efforts around the community to help drive participation. They might also be responsible for communicating wins (ideas that are being delivered) through a blog or the Ideas in Action app. This can be a shared resource.

Moderators: These individuals are in charge of maintaining data quality and ensuring a healthy conversation. There is no magic number but if you tasked your moderator with reading every post, I'd guess a moderator could get through 200-500 new comments/ideas a day. While that might seem like a lot, most won't posts require any action. Because users are logged in the conversation is typically pretty healthy and often doesn't require moderation. So to figure out how many moderators you need, estimate your daily volume and divide by 200. My guess is the for the vast majority of companies moderation is probably a part time job.

Ambassadors: If you read the BusinessWeek article, it sighted that Starbucks has 48 specifically trained employees who act as hosts of the discussions. As Chris Bruzzo says, "These are the people at a dinner party who make sure everyone is having a good time." These individuals probably aren't full time moderators, but rather product managers from all different areas of the business who can respond to customers, ask questions, and put ideas into action. This might represent 5% of of their job, similar to time spent running focus groups or surveys. I often suggest that you have at least one Ambassador for each of category on your site.

UPDATE: Also See... Moderating an Ideas Community 8/20/2008