Best Of
#TipTuesday: Default Category Following & Notification Preferences
Last year Vanilla released Default Category Following and Default Notification Preferences. Let’s review why you should enable both features.
Setting Default Category Following for new members in your community can help streamline user engagements and encourage participation. By doing so, users are automatically subscribed to receive updates from specific categories, ensuring they stay informed about topics without needing to manually subscribe. This can enhance their experience by providing relevant content and update your members on important information.
In addition to category following, you can also enable Default Notification Preferences. Setting Default Notification Preferences in your community ensures that members receive important notifications via email or pop-ups. This convenience encourages consistent engagement by keeping members informed about relevant updates, discussions and activities within your community. This feature ensures that they stay informed and increases their involvement.
How many default settings should you enable? Determining the optimal number of default followed categories for your members depends on your community’s goals. If your community covers many topics and interests enabling all categories might trigger too many notifications and overwhelm users, it might be better to allow members to opt into following categories based on their interests. You will want all your members to follow essential categories such as “Announcements” or “Get Started Guide”, so these are great categories to set as default following. To foster interactions, consider incorporating an “introduce yourself” discussion within the “Getting Started” category. This way, whenever a new user joins, all members receive a notification, enabling them to extend a warm welcome.
When configuring Default Notification Preferences, it is tempting to enable all pop-ups and emails. While it may seem beneficial to keep members informed about all activities, it's important to consider the potential for notification overload. Instead, consider setting a moderate number of default notifications preferences and create a balance between keeping users informed and too many emails. By default, Vanilla sets out-of-the-box best practice default notification preferences, so make sure to review and adjust the settings to what makes sense for your community.
Ensure your community provides clear guidance on how members can personalize their notification settings according to their individual preferences and engagement level. Consider adding a Call-To-Action widget on your homepage encouraging members to update their notification preferences. This empowers members to customize their experience, receiving updates tailored to their needs, promoting a positive member experience without feeling overwhelmed.
Check out these articles to help you set Default Category Following and Default Notification Preferences.
Need help creating a “Get Started Guide”? Take a look at Justin’s #TipTuesday.
If you haven’t seen our last #tiptuesday post, check it out here! More tips, examples, and Higher Logic Vanilla product highlights will be shared every Tuesday 😊
Customer Showcase March 2024: Stefanie from D2L Brightspace Community
Hi I’m Stefanie Baldwin, Team Lead for the D2L Brightspace Community. The D2L Brightspace Community relaunched on the Vanilla Platform just over one year ago and continues its evolution as a large and vibrant space that includes:
- An integrated Learning Ecosystem, Brightspace
- Communities of Practice
- Events
- Ideation
- Discussions
- Product and Community Roadmaps
- and a whole lot more!
Members
D2L Brightspace Community serves folks who are inspired and inspiring others through Online, and Blended Learning using D2L’s Brightspace. Members connect and post for a variety of reasons that reflect the places where they teach and learn (vertical) and their role (persona) within that space.
Ex. A Faculty member from a university may access Community to learn how to create lecture materials that are accessible to assistive technologies like screen readers.
Voice of the Customer
Community plays an important role in operationalizing customer feedback.
So how do we strategically learn from the voices of our customers in Community?
Find out about the Vanilla Tools D2L uses, and how these support D2L’s community strategy to partner and grow with Community members.
Vanilla Features
🏷️Discussion Tagging
Including Discussion Tags has been a very important strategic choice in Community to highlight Brightspace Tools (products) Community members speak about most frequently each month.
Tagging questions facilitates:
👍🏿 Better and faster answers
👍🏿 Data driven decision making by tracking which tools are asked about the most for a given time period!
👍🏿 Greater understanding of opportunity and challenge for each product.
Product teams can track incoming questions for each product using the unique url associated with a tag.
That unique url autopopulates with the most recently asked questions appearing at the top of the page for each tag.
👍🏿Real time FAQs!
Members can review the most recently asked questions about a tool they’re interested in and get the most up to date answers
📊 Analytics
Thanks to a recent Analytics Update in Vanilla Community it’s possible to automate what used to be a more time-consuming administrative task: reporting on the frequency of tags per month.
This tracking helps to prioritize efforts to create new customer onboarding material, documentation updates, and webinar/event planning.
That means the voices of D2L Brightspace customers guide the direction of new Community based services!
🔎APIs and Qualitative Data
- The Vanilla API can be used to GET discussions that include a tag that’s of a particular interest for a specific time period.
This data is analyzed by Community, Support and Product Teams todefine and apply qualitative codes to identify future opportunities for a particular product. - Knowledge Management & Internal Engagement
Role based permissions to ensure staff members have access to resources that encourage and involve them in Voice of Customer programming.
📖This includes the use of Vanilla Knowledge Bases where staff work on new documentation inspired by Community Member questions.
🎮Staff Leaderboard
The Staff Leaderboard tracks staff engagement with Community tools and services. This tracking helps to describe the impact of individuals and teams in spaces like discussions and groups in Community and measure the future opportunity for our speed to answer questions, and increase engagement across other Subject Matter Expert areas.
Realizing ROI
- The Brightspace Learning Center demonstrates a variety of D2L Brightspace Tools in Action! UTM Links can be used to track lead generation offered by our Learning Center, Newsletters and Events- offering a new way to describe these areas of Community value generation
- The D2L Brightspace Community plays an important Support Function. Using metrics like number of “accepted answers” per months is another way to describe the value in terms of support case deflections.
Staying In Touch
Connecting here in Vanilla Success Community has been such a 💎WONDERFUL💎 way to keep learning and to connect with other Community Leaders!
I'd love to hear more about:
- what each of you are doing in your own Communities
- what new automations with Zapier you're building, or
- API pro-tips you may have!
There's so much I'd love to share about Groups and Learning Center Programming including the Customer Showcase posts you'll find in D2L Brightspace Community!
Please don't be a stranger- I'd love to connect and chat more!