How do you manage internal users within your community

Alex Dunne

Hi Vanilla Success Community!

I have a question - we have a private community for our customers that is essentially managed by a team of one (me). We're hoping to start involving more internal stakeholders in the community (such as reps from CS, product, support etc.) but we're very conscious of maintaining a particular tone of voice and messaging. As such, I'm working with my manager to develop a program of "Community Champions" - i.e. those people within our company who interact with the community, answer questions, start discussions with customers etc. Has anyone done something similar? Do you have any tips you'd be willing to share?

Thanks in advance,

Alex

Shauna

Hey @Alex Dunne --

I can tell you a couple things that we've done internally to drive staff engagement:

• Training and internal docs on things like maintaining that particular tone of voice and empowering those employees to feel comfortable posting / undertaking moderation actions etc
• Integrating the community with our chat tools (slack) and dedicating a channel to new applicants and posts -- I love this because we can tag colleagues into the conversation
• Opening an internal only category for those staff Community Champions to give them a private place to discuss
• Including a staff member from key departments so that you always have someone to tag in to speak to their areas of expertise or find the answer/next step within their department

Hope this helps!

(PS - I noticed that you posted this in the ask the community section, which tends to be more support questions, this might be more appropriate for the managing communities section/get more traction there? Would you like me to move it on over?)

Alex Dunne

That would be great, thanks Shauna!