Best Of

On a weekly basis we triage all Q&A without a best answer marked. This is done using CSVs uploaded into a mega spreadsheet. Depending on the last response we take different actions:

• Flag any that are waiting for additional help to our Support Team
• Ask the author if the query is still open if they haven't responded to follow up questions
• Ask the author to mark a best answer

After 6 weeks from the authors last comment, if they haven't responded to us we either close the thread or if there is a definite best answer we mark this ourselves.

So far the volume has been manageable and we've seen a lot of value for the business, customers, and other Community members from triaging them. We're starting to think about how we can tweak the process as we begin to scale. We've recently procured zapier so will explore if we can use this once Q&A status is an available trigger (I think it should be coming very soon).

In terms of Qualtrics, we have a survey that's always available for members to fill out. We've just about got an ideal sample size (it's taken about a year). It pops up for members every month and then is always available from a slider on the side of all pages:

On our roadmap for this year we're going to start looking at CSAT as well, one of the touchpoints will be after a best answer has been marked, this data will also feed into our deflection metrics.

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 😊 

Hey Vanilla Community!

My name is Genevieve. I'm based in the UK and I am one of the Community Managers for Smartsheet, a SAAS collaborative work management platform. 

While our site is publicly crawlable, members wanting to post or react to posts need to sign in with Smartsheet (SSO login only) in order to participate. We're not yet on Layout Editor but hope to make this update THIS MONTH! 

We started our Community in 2015, migrating to Vanilla in 2019, and as of today we have over 86,000 registered members. We've grown significantly in the last two years, in both membership and activity with nearly 19,000 posts shared last quarter alone while expanding opportunities for members to connect with one another.  Beginning as a support only site, we now feature a mix of support Q&A content and engagement content (announcements, product ideas, events, social groups, networking, etc). 

My role focuses on the support side of the business, but I collaborate with our fantastic Marketing team that work on engagement. They run the Customer Programs and Gamification I'll get into below. 

Customer Programs

The collaboration with Marketing is essential to the health of our Community; this year we levelled-up our Rank program and saw a direct impact (decrease) on the number of questions left over 24 hours without a response. Their work with our members has reduced our support moderator workload significantly!

Ranks & Rewards

We redefined our ranks, changed the naming system, and made noise about it with announcements. The top ranks receive tangible rewards:

• Private group for networking with their peers in the same rank
• Ability to create tags
• Discounted training courses
• Physical swag!
  

Community Champions

Celebrating the best of the best.

Any member can get to the highest rank based on points and activity, but this program rewards the top contributors who generate technically accurate responses and actively help others while exemplifying Smartsheet's values.  Benefits include:

• Private group for networking with other Champions
• Advocacy opportunities 
• Feedback channels directly to our Community team and the Product team 
• Sneak peeks at updates to the forum 
• And again… physical swag! 

These members tend to be the ones highlighted in our Member Spotlights and are identified with an exclusive Badge.

Gamification

Question of the Month

Every month we post a Question of the Month.

Anyone who participates receives a badge, and the three responses that receive the most reactions get an extra special Top Answer badge.

We had over 200 answers for November's question!

Why do this?

• Introduces members to the badge and point system
• Encourages "lurkers" to sign in and see how easy it is to post a comment or ask their question
• Creates a positive environment with the quantity of "Awesome" reactions
• Prompts discussions on topics our internal teams are interested in. 

Browse all Badges

Since we migrated our Community, we had a lot of old, legacy badges that kept being requested when members navigated to our url/badges page. To solve for this, we've created our own custom page to host all our active badges. (Yes, we created this using a Smartsheet dashboard.)

We added this new URL to the Quick Links menu and in the text body of every badge for extra visibility. 

• One easy place to view all active badges
• New members can easily see criteria for Community badges and it encourages them to get involved
• Domino effect: receiving one badge prompts the user to click on a link to see what else they can gain 
• Old badges made less visible/accessible without removing them from profiles

My Favourite Pocket for Deflection

There aren't enough characters in a post to describe all of our pockets, so I will highlight my favourite one: a Category level pocket that drives answers to questions and increases our deflection rate. 

In the side panel in each category we surface 3 unanswered questions from that same category.

This applies on all category pages, including when you're looking at a single post.

Why?

• Reduces clicks: it's easy for our top contributors to jump from answering one question to the next without needing to navigate to the "Unanswered" list. 
• Content visibility: it encourages new members to share their knowledge if they  see a question and recognize, "hey! I know the answer to that…"

The experience is different if you're a logged out user, a guest, landing on the site to look for answers. 

For this role we have a mirrored pocket that shows the most recent 3 questions with accepted answers, specific to that category. 

Since we're a publicly crawl-able site, a lot of our traffic comes from Google and lands on an individual post as the first entry point into Community. The goal here is to surface similar questions with confirmed solutions to make it as easy as possible for our customers to find accurate answers as they browse.

My Favourite API hack 

As of this November, there's a NEW API endpoint to bump posts!

Why I'm so excited: 

• We receive around 50 questions per day. 
• The Unanswered Questions list is sorted newest to oldest, meaning the older a post gets, the less visibility it receives.
• Our top contributors answer questions from Page 1 and work their way down this list.
• This often results in new questions receiving fast responses and older questions becoming stale, as they're hidden on page 3 or 4. 

With this new API endpoint, we can get an array of all Unanswered Questions, loop through this list to see if any are 2+ days old, and automatically bump those to the TOP of the list. This makes sure the oldest posts are seen first!

API tip for non-developers

Vanilla's back-end Dashboard makes the API quite easy to use, even if you're not a developer (I'm not!). Using the API is a great way to export data in a CSV file (check out Val's post about this for reference).

Here are two example calls I make regularly that you may find helpful for your own reporting. You can actually copy/paste the URLs I have below into your browser bar - just change some of the details.

Get top-viewed posts in a specific timeframe

https://YOUR_URL.com/api/v2/analytics/leaderboard.csv?board=top-viewed-discussions&limit=10&start=2023-11-01&end=2023-11-30

Note: you can increase the number of posts by adjusting the number after "limit":

https://YOUR_URL.com/api/v2/analytics/leaderboard.csv?board=top-viewed-discussions&limit=50&start=2023-11-01&end=2023-11-30

Get a CSV file for a count of posts with each Idea Status

https://YOUR_URL.com/api/v2/tags.csv?type=Status&page=1&limit=20

I haven't delved into our Product Ideas category, but for context, we have over 2,000 active ideas so it's a space we need to keep track of - the API has been essential in helping review ideation content. 

If you made it this far…what API solutions have you found essential? And thanks for reading! 

Cheers,
Genevieve

Hey there newbie!

So you’ve inherited a HL Vanilla Community and don’t know where to start? We know this process can be overwhelming so we wanted to help start you out on the right path.

The most important way to set yourself up for success is to join our Success Community, which you’ve already done (since you’re reading this 🤓) - great job!

In order to help you get started, we've gathered some key content here to help you learn the essentials. This list should help you understand the basics and feel more confident to hit the ground running with your new community.

🎥 Get Familiar 🎥

Front End Basics

Front End Advanced

Vanilla Search

Moderation Overview

🌎 Important Areas of our Community 🌎

Get Help

Upcoming Events & Office Hours

💡 Strategy Tips 💡

What are you doing to drive staff engagement internally?

When's the last time you walked a mile in your users' shoes? 👠🩴👞

🎬 Next Actions 🎬

Search the Community

Ask a Question

Attend a Connect Session

Whether you’re a community professional, this is your full-time job, or if this is the part time gig at your full-time job, we have resources for you. Once you've completed the items on this list, drop us a comment to earn yourself a sweet badge and graduate from the Apprentice role 🧙.

Also be sure to let us know what you're planning on tackling first on this new adventure!