Supporting Groups with current notification status

[Deleted User]
[Deleted User] Vanilla Sprout
in Talk Community #1

Hey all! We are at a point that we are starting to think about using groups. Given the current state of notifications for activities in groups, how are you managing groups currently? Do you send out a separate email newsletter? I'm leery to put something in Zapier (if I could) because of subscription permissions etc.

I know it is coming and people are voting and chatting about it again!

PS @Adrian can we have #notifications ???

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Comments

  • BrendanP
    BrendanP HLV Staff
    edited April 2022 #2

    Hey @Amanda Petersen, I have a bit of a different perspective to mention on the topic of social groups and notifications.

    I know there are a number of improvements related to notifications coming this year, and totally agree better group notifications would be preferred. That said, the same notifications that apply elsewhere in the community still apply inside the groups such as: notify when I am mentioned, notify me people comment on my discussions, notify me when people comment in a discussion I've participated in etc.

    The only difference is that in the past 6 months or so we introduced the improvements to Category Following which made it easier for users to get notified of all new discussions or posts within specific categories of their choosing.

    The issue I find with groups is that:

    1) The content also isn't in the recent discussions list so it's not as in your face for the average user.

    2) Members have to remember to go to the group to see the new content if they aren't triggered by one of the aforementioned default notification options. Often it's just a link in the site somewhere that says 'Groups' so it's not that prominent.

    The 2nd point is what I think is a deficiency in our product that is planned to be fixed with additional group-related widgets we have planned such as "My Groups" so a user could have an easy way to see the groups they belong to on the homepage of your community.

    I don't have anything personally to currently offer in terms of a workaround for the notifications but as a suggestion, I think if you can figure out some ways to make the groups themselves more prominent for the users and easier to discover they would more than likely have higher engagement. Some ideas could be to adjust your theme to promote them a bit more or integrate them into your product so that perhaps users of a specific demographic or industry see a link to their respective group when they're inside the Mural App.

  • Alex Dunne
    Alex Dunne Vanilla Ice Cream
    #3

    Hi @Amanda Petersen ,

    We've been using Groups for our beta testing communities and are running into some similar problems. So far, how we're mitigating it is by @ tagging all users in the group whenever we need to notify them of something to be sure that they get a notification. It's definitely not ideal in the long term and is only really workable right now because we have small user groups. I definitely see Groups and something we'll want to lean on heavily in future so I'm excited to see notifications roll out.

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