Weekly or Monthly Roundups - Who's doing them for their communities or their staff?

Shauna

I've been chatting with a lot of folks about our new Email Digest feature lately and a topic that often comes up is the difference between an Email Digest and a Roundup.

My take on this is that the Email Digest is something automatic that brings in the best posts from categories that a particular user follows and cares about in an automated (aka scalable way). A human created roundup on the other hand I think of as a place that community managers can bring content together based on more subjective variables like:

• a common theme
• posts that didn't get traction initially and didn't make it into digest but have value
• #ThrowbackThursday type content
• events
• celebrating awesome members of your community (top ranks, etc)

I also like to send out staff roundups that might contain things like top staff members in terms of points/answers, unanswered questions, and great posts that staff might be able to use in their conversations with customers.

I find that a roundup is also a great place to add a bit of personality and gives me an excuse to spend way too much time on giphy….

What do you think? Do you do roundups for your community or to engage your staff? How do you curate content? Do you do points based or content based shoutouts?

MSE_James

We send an email to all staff every weekday morning highlighting five threads / discussions from the community. This is a mixture of things that are directly relevant to the work of other teams in MSE, and things that highlight the incredible range of topics covered on our forum, as well as posts that make us smile.

We get great feedback from colleagues in other parts of the business who really enjoy the snapshots of forum life we share.

SamanthaIsin

Personally, I've never heard of any delineation between a round-up and a digest 😂 We do a weekly post in a category of our community that all our users are auto-subscribed to. That post includes all of the latest knowledge base articles, the latest discussion posts, the latest badge winners, a member spotlight, and any product updates. It sounds like a lot, but we don't get a lot of activity/content so it's actually not. Right now.

This goes to all our community members, including staff who are members and we've seen a lot of success from it both in qualitative feedback and upticks in traffic/engagement centered around the days we send the newsletters.

The digest solution recently released by Vanilla simply doesn't work for us because A) Generally, our members aren't the kind of people who take the actions to subscribe to categories and B) We can't customize the content that appears in it.