Best Of

Hi @marygreencnyinfor - thank you for your question! I'm sure that some of the amazing community managers here will have some great insights but I wanted to share some ideas based on our experience.

Scaling community across 50+ products is an exciting challenge — and one we’re seeing more organizations encounter as community becomes a strategic part of the customer experience. There’s no single “right” model, but the companies that do this well tend to share a few common practices:

1. Build a Centralized Framework — Then Localize It

Instead of treating each product community as a one-off, create a consistent, scalable framework that all product areas can follow. This usually includes:

• Standardized community guidelines and moderation practices
• A repeatable onboarding and launch process for new spaces
• Clear expectations for product teams (e.g., ownership, SME participation, cadence of updates)
• Shared templates for FAQs, announcements, and recurring content

This keeps quality high while still letting each product customize discussions, naming, and engagement strategies for their audience.

2. Organize Around Themes, Not Just Product Lines

With 50+ products, you’ll likely have overlap in user needs, workflows, and use cases. Many companies find success by grouping spaces into:

• Solution categories
• Audience roles (admin, developer, end-user, partner)
• Lifecycle stages (onboarding, advanced usage)

This helps prevent a sprawling, fragmented experience and encourages cross-product learning.

3. Create a Cross-Functional “Community Council”

At scale, community stops being “owned” by one team — it becomes a shared initiative. Mature organizations create a structure that:

• Includes representatives from each major product line
• Establishes communication loops with product, CX, support, and marketing
• Aligns community priorities with company-level initiatives
• Ensures each team understands their role in maintaining active, healthy spaces

This spreads ownership and prevents community from becoming a bottleneck.

💡 Use tools like Automation Rules to escalate posts to the appropriate team members without adding to your workload.

4. Invest in Strong Internal Enablement

Your internal teams need to know how to participate effectively. Common enablement resources include:

• Playbooks for responding in community vs. support channels
• Best-practice training for product SMEs
• Quarterly office hours for community contributors
• Role-based guidance on when and how to post

Companies that scale well treat internal enablement like an ongoing program, not a one-time initiative.

💡 Create a staff only Category or KB where you can collect SOPs and answer any internal questions.

💡 Use a Question widget to highlight an unanswered posts for your staff to help with:

5. Let Data Drive Your Scaling Plan

When you’re managing dozens of spaces, data helps you decide where to focus. Consider tracking:

• Engagement trends (active members, posts, answers)
• Time to first response / time to accepted answer
• Search topics with no good results
• Which spaces attract contributors without additional prompting

This helps you identify which communities should be expanded, consolidated, or redesigned.

6. Phase Your Growth Intentionally

Even if you’re past the “bite-sized” stage, you don’t need to launch everything at once. Many successful orgs scale like this:

1. Start with your highest-impact product groups.
2. Launch core community structures (Q&A, discussions, knowledge areas).
3. Establish ownership with product and other internal teams.
4. Collect insights and apply the playbook to the next set of products.

This phased approach ensures consistency without overwhelming internal teams.

7. Plan for Ongoing Governance

Finally, long-term success comes from visibility and governance. Companies that manage scale well often:

• Publish quarterly community health reports
• Revisit structure annually to consolidate or expand spaces
• Maintain product lifecycle flags (e.g., “sunset,” “legacy,” “new release”)
• Keep a centralized inventory of all community spaces and owners

This ensures everything stays aligned as products evolve.

I hope this helps, please let us know if you would like more details for any areas!

Yes! 🙂

As long as you haven't approved/rejected the user yet, you could use the API to get all of the requests and the text along with it. I do this currently with one of our groups.

The URL would look like this:

https://YOUR-URL.com/api/v2/groups/groupnumber/applicants.csv?page=1&limit=100

• Replace the "YOUR-URL" with your Community URL
• Replace the "groupnumber" with the number that appears in the URL after "group/" when you click on the group.

This will download a CSV file with up to 100 group access requests and their "Reason".

That said, once they've been Approved or Rejected I'm not sure there's any way to see this information anymore. I hope this helps!

Genevieve

Reactions turn quiet readers into active participants with one click to say “this helped,” “insightful,” or “🎉 awesome!” Without even typing a reply, members can elevate the best content, guide others to answers, and fuel your engagement flywheel.

Why use Reactions

Think of Reactions as your community’s high‑five. They lower the barrier to engagement so more people participate with one tap for even the lurkers.

They also help the community self‑curate: high‑scoring posts surface on Best Of, so newcomers find the good stuff faster. Posts will rack up views, leading to becoming the canonical answer the next time the question pops up. That’s Reactions quietly doing heavy lifting in the background.

And because Reactions can award points, they plug right into your badges and long‑term recognition strategy for contributors.

Best‑practice setup

• Keep it simple: enable 1–4 clear Reactions so the choice is fast and consistent. Decision fatigue is real.
• Encourage positive signals (Like, Insightful, Celebrate) and use negative ones sparingly. Document the when/why so they aren’t misused.
• Activate the special Promote Reaction for trusted Roles; it gives +5 points and spotlights can’t‑miss content on Best Of.
• Tune visibility: show “who reacted” as a popup or a row of avatars, or hide entirely by choosing what fits your culture and scale.

Pro tip: Pair these settings with a short “How we React here” snippet in your guidelines so members know what each Reaction means in context.

Quick how‑to: enable and fine‑tune

• Go to Dashboard → Settings → Posts → Reactions to toggle specific types and edit names, descriptions, and how many points users earn.
• Open Advanced settings to choose “who reacted” display (popup vs. avatars), set Best Of order (date vs. score), and adjust promote/bury thresholds.
• Confirm Role permissions so the right people can use positive/negative/curation Reactions (e.g., Garden > Curation > Manage for Promote).

Try this today: pick your core 3–4 Reactions, set Promote Threshold to match your community’s traffic, and add a short note to your posting guidelines explaining what each Reaction means.

Make them on‑brand: customize icons

A small visual tweak goes a long way. There are two places to update Reaction visuals, depending on where the icon appears:

• Posts and comments: Appearance → Branding & Assets → Manage Icons; search “reaction” and replace defaults with your SVGs for the reaction bar.
• Profile tallies: Settings → Posts → Reactions → Edit a Reaction → upload an SVG to change how that Reaction appears on user profiles.

Tip: Use simple, high‑contrast SVGs with a proper viewBox for crisp rendering across sizes and themes.

A few thoughtful choices here will compound: faster answers, clearer curation, and a brand‑consistent experience that’s genuinely fun to use. Know that your content is making an impact even if readers don't have a moment to write up a post. Every click matters!

In today's #TipTuesday I would like to focus our attention on something no one is talking about these days: AI. Wait, what? You have heard about it?

I've been designing and building web-based software for a long time. As in, there was only one "CSI" when I started. A long time ago. I'm talking "Gladiator", "Cast Away", "Oops I did it again". Remember when websites had "Y2K Compatible" banners on them to reassure you? I did those.

So, I don't need to tell you that I have seen more than one "new thing" come out. Yes, I was a little skeptical about AI. But having sipped a tiny bit of the potion I have come to see that it only enhances my, already considerable, talent (humblebrag). It is freeing me from the technical minutia, and time constraints, and allowing me to be creative. It's not gunning for my job, it's gunning for my success.

If you're a community manager, you understand Community — not just the platforms that they run on. Your super-power is facilitating conversations and getting eyeballs to go where they should, not mucking around with software. You have ideas that you would love to execute but lack the time and technical resources to do them. Your time (and resource) has come. Let's use AI to build a simple HTML widget in Vanilla, just for fun.

I created this in a few minutes using Claude.ai but I'm sure any AI software will do the same job. I'm lazy, so instead of typing, I talk to it. For Claude, on MacOS, I double click on the cntrl key. And then it's just talking:

Hi Claude, I want to build an HTML widget for my Vanilla community that is simply HTML and text. I want there to be three blocks of text in this order:

Even though this is the first text in this box

you will read this first

and you will read this second.

"Even though this is the first text in this box" is actually the highest placed block on the page, "You will read this first" is the second block on the page, followed by "and you will read this second" is the third block. And the CSS is designed to make the "You will read this first" visually more prominent and the "Even though this is the first text in this box" is visually less striking and is, therefore, the last thing a reader's eye is drawn to.

Claude does its thing and gives me some generic HTML and CSS. And then I add:

Terrific, now can you capture colors and fonts, background colors, from our community banner and make the contrasts even more striking? Can the You will read this first be in all caps, centered on more than one line? Can the last line be right aligned?

and I upload this screen shot:

(I'm always polite to the robots. For when they take over the world…)

Then, badabing badaboom Claude creates the HTML and CSS:

I then copy the CSS into a CustomHTML Widget on my site:

Then the HTML:

And voila:

So here's your challenge: take your first step this week and build a custom widget. Try my prompts but with the screen shot from your site. Get more creative than I have in this demo - add a link to something meaningful, ask AI to give it a background image, use your imagination. Remember, you can create custom widgets that only you can see while you're experimenting, or work on your staging site if you have one. The key is to just jump in and get your feet wet. The community managers who embrace AI as a collaboration tool today will be the ones setting the new standard for what's possible tomorrow.