What This Role Is
Every year, tens of thousands of Chinese students and their families make one of the highest-stakes decisions of their lives: where to go to university abroad. They are navigating visa timelines, insurance policies, accommodation logistics, tuition transfers, and career planning — often for the first time, often in a language that is not their own, often with no one nearby who has done it before. The WeChat group they join, and the person on the other end of it, is frequently the most trusted source they have.
That is not a community management problem. That is a trust infrastructure problem. And it is exactly what this role exists to build.
Cialfo's student and parent community sits at approximately 4,500 members across 30 WeChat groups today. The target is 10,000. But scale is not the point — what matters is whether the families in those groups feel genuinely guided, whether their questions get answered by someone who understands what they are actually asking, and whether the right service finds them at the right moment. Airport pickup when they land. Insurance before they leave. Tuition payment before the deadline. Career planning before they graduate.
The Community Operations & Strategic Partnerships Associate is the person who makes that happen. Day to day, you will be the voice, the guide, and the connector — running the communities, listening for what families need, and distributing qualified leads to the partner vendors who can actually help them. This is not a content scheduling role. It is a high-trust, high-attention, outcome-driven role for someone who genuinely understands what international students and their parents are going through.
You will report directly to Snow Fu and work alongside a small, focused team. The communities you manage today will be different — bigger, more active, and better served — because you were the person running them.
What Makes This Role Different
Most community management roles are about content cadence and engagement metrics. This one is about outcomes. The families in these communities are not passive followers — they are making real decisions with real financial and emotional stakes. When you identify that a parent is anxious about their child's arrival logistics, you are not tagging a lead. You are connecting a family to the help they need before something goes wrong.
The role sits at the intersection of community, customer service, and commercial operations. You will manage the WeChat Cashback programme with the accuracy of a finance function, run one-on-one conversations with the empathy of a counselor, and distribute leads to partner vendors with the precision of an operations team. Very few roles require all three. This one does, and that is what makes it genuinely interesting.
Cialfo sits inside Manifest Global — a group that operates across Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, and Kaaiser, connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. The communities you build here are not a standalone function. They are a direct channel into the families and students that the entire Manifest ecosystem exists to serve.
What You Own
Daily community operations
- Run approximately 30 WeChat groups with genuine daily presence — answering questions, facilitating conversations, and making every member feel that someone is actually there
- Manage one-on-one conversations with parents and students at scale, identifying needs and pain points before they become problems
- Respond to inquiries within a few hours, maintaining the responsiveness that earns community trust
- Manage the WeChat Cashback programme with full accuracy — manual verification of every package-to-WeChat-ID mapping, no exceptions
- Use WeCom (Tencent's corporate WeChat with embedded AI) to handle routine queries efficiently while reserving your attention for the conversations that require a human
Lead generation and partner distribution
- Identify qualified needs within the community and distribute 100+ leads per month to partner vendors across airport pickup, insurance, tuition payment, and career planning services
- Guide community members toward the right service at the right time — not a referral, a genuine recommendation from someone who knows their situation
- Track partner conversions and work toward $20,000 USD in monthly sales booking revenue across the partner ecosystem
- Maintain the quality of lead distribution so that partners receive the right context, not just a contact
Content and campaign execution
- Plan and execute community campaigns and content with AI-assisted writing support — Snow Fu owns the strategic content direction, you own the execution
- Contribute approximately 15 hours a week to marketing content support across the broader team
- Expand community presence to Xiaohongshu and other platforms as the strategy develops
- Surface community insights — what families are asking, what is confusing them, what they are looking for — and bring that intelligence back into the team
What Success Looks Like
The markers below reflect where Cialfo's community operations are today. The community will have grown, new platforms will be in scope, and the partner relationships will have evolved by the time you are fully in the seat. We will define the specifics together. These are directional, not fixed.
That said, the shape of success in this role is clear.
You will start by building a complete understanding of the community as it exists — who the members are, what they are anxious about, which conversations are producing qualified leads and which are producing noise, and where the immediate opportunities to deepen trust and improve service sit. You will have a point of view on what to change and what to protect.
From there, the communities will feel different. Members who were passive will be active. Parents who had a question and did not ask it will be asking. Leads that were being missed will be identified and distributed. The partner vendors will notice that the leads they receive are better — more context, better timing, higher conversion.
Over time, the community will have grown toward 10,000 members, the monthly lead and revenue targets will be consistently met, and the platform will have expanded beyond WeChat. More importantly, the families in the community will have a genuinely better experience of navigating their child's international education — and that will be because of the work you did in this role.
What You Bring
You have studied abroad yourself — in the UK, the US, or somewhere else — and you carry that experience with you in the way you work. You understand, at a personal level, what it feels like to be a student navigating an unfamiliar system. You understand what it means when a parent messages at 11pm because they cannot figure out how to transfer tuition. That is not a ticket to be processed. It is a family's anxiety made visible, and you know how to respond to it.
You have genuine customer service experience — not call centre scripts, but real human-to-human service in situations where the person on the other end needed something from you and you found a way to give it to them. You have worked in a sales or lead generation context and you know what it means to identify a need and move it toward a solution. You have run a community before — online, in-person, formal or informal — and you know what it actually takes to keep people engaged and cared for over time.
You are fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Not conversational — fluent. Reading, writing, and the kind of typing speed that lets you hold ten conversations simultaneously without anyone feeling like they are waiting. Your English is strong enough to work across an international team and produce professional written communications.
You are meticulous in the specific way that financial accuracy requires. The WeChat Cashback programme involves manual verification of every single transaction. One error has consequences for a real person. That kind of work requires someone who does not find precision exhausting — it requires someone who finds it important.
You are comfortable working in an environment where the targets are clear and the accountability is real. 100 leads a month and $20,000 in partner bookings are not suggestions. You are energised by knowing exactly what success looks like, and you are resilient enough to keep working toward it when the week has been hard.
You are available in an Asian time zone and comfortable with the reality that parents and students do not confine their questions to business hours. Some evening and weekend responsiveness is part of this role, and you approach that not as an imposition but as part of what it means to genuinely serve the community you are responsible for.
Why Manifest
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility — connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system that changes that. $80M raised. Still early.
For this role specifically: the communities you build are not a support function. They are a direct channel into the families making the decisions that the entire Manifest ecosystem exists to support. Every parent who feels genuinely guided through the process is a student placed better. Every qualified lead distributed to the right partner is a service delivered to someone who needed it. The person who does this work well from this seat is doing some of the most human — and commercially consequential — work in the group.
Cialfo is part of Manifest Global — a multi-brand group building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries.
