Upcoming HLV Connect: Open Session Reminder

hannahhowle

Hi everyone,

I'm looking forward to hosting next week's Vanilla Connect Session alongside @JSaghbini and @Shauna. This will be an open session, so we're opening the floor up to you to share unique community configurations, highlight noteworthy accomplishments, and ask questions to to other community users.

Please remember to RSVP to the event below and share it with your fellow community team members.

https://success.vanillaforums.com/events/34-hlv-connect-open-session

Looking forward to seeing you on March 28th at 2:00pm ET!

Best,

Hannah

hannahhowle

Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in today's Vanilla Connect session. If you missed it, you can access the recording here (passcode: 4bfjej&W). I wanted to recap some of the things we discussed today:

Ranks

@Rav Singh and @jlefebre kicked us off today by sharing their community Ranks. @Rav Singh is manually assigning ranks to users based on their product expertise to build credibility in their community. @jlefebre shared how they've colored their ranks to help communicate to their users where they stand in the rank structure, with the top ranks being "red hot"!

@KFreedman shared her experience with community ranks - starting with easily attainable criteria for beginning ranks and increasing the difficulty of attaining each subsequent rank.

@LiselotteP also pointed out the importance of identifying Employees via Ranks. And @KFreedman reminded us not to forget about former employees, or "Alumni" as they call them.

‼️Ranks will recalculate after a Rank is edited. If your Rank emails are enabled, this will trigger an email about this rank changes to any users who qualify. Please remember to test your rank changes in staging before applying your changes to production. ‼️

Super Users

Ranks and point distribution are a great way to identify Super Users. @KFreedman leverages her Super Users for feedback on product updates or changes within the community itself.

Reactions & Badges

@saramaloney shared how she was creative in renaming her Reactions based on the icon that displays in the reactions toolbar under discussion posts. The lightbulb became "Insightful", the smile became "Thanks for Sharing" and the heart became "Helpful Tip". Sara also shared their future plans to create Badges that users can request to self-identify what type of user they are.

Hosting an "Ask Me Anything" - A lot of our attendees today have experience hosting AMA's. Here's what they shared:

@KFreedman and @HollyR have previous experience creating a thread where users could ask their questions. Then, experts created new threads for each of those questions with their responses.

We also discussed using Groups for AMA discussions, which can be moved to their respective categories following the session.

To pre-moderate or not to pre-moderate AMA topics... We took a poll and determined that majority of the time, our attendees are not vetting topics before a live AMA. However, in cases of a highly technical, sensitive topics or non-employee presenters, there are use cases to pre-moderate the questions beforehand.

Polls

This lead us into the topic of how our attendees are using polls on their sites today. @Rav Singh is using polls for community related feedback. @HollyR also plans to use a poll for feedback on their community after they've been live for 90 days.

@LiselotteP has taken polling a step further, with an integrated survey asking users if they found what they were looking for in the community. This has helped them developed case deflection rates from their community.

Attendees, please feel free to share anything else I missed or keep the conversation going in this thread. And remember to register for our next Vanilla Connect Session on Theming:

https://success.vanillaforums.com/events/35-hlv-connect-theming

saramaloney

@hannahhowle These are some comprehensive notes, thank you!!