Example community engagement policies and SLAs

ktse

Hey everyone, I'm wondering if folks have any example community engagement policies or SLAs they can share? We're in the process of setting these standards for our team but it'd be great to have examples to reference.

Questions related to policies or workflows make sense for our internal team to respond to asap however there are some questions that we'd prefer to give other community members the chance to respond to first.

Any suggestions or help is appreciated!

Kirstie Macfarlane

Hey @ktse - thanks for your question!

I think this answer will vary a lot depending on the community type. A Support type community may prefer a shorter time to response for any user questions, requiring staff to step in more often.

A number I've seen fairly often is 24 hours, so if another user doesn't answer by then a moderator can jump in to help.

We use Zapier to connect our community to Slack, so we have a channel where we get alerts when new discussions are posted. This simplifies the moderation process for our team who can grab (👀) a discussion or loop in a colleague who may be better able to help.

You may also want to look at different SLAs for different categories. For example we have a "Get Help" category, which we will want to respond to faster than some other categories.

Interested to see what others have to say!

ktse

Thanks Kirstie! We have set up zapier so we get notifications to Slack as well. Hopefully this will help us keep an eye on all of the categories without the email notifications. Thank you!

PiperWilson

There's something else to mention regarding SLAs. When a community is newer, you may want to have a shorter SLA and then extend that as community members become more active.

The danger of responding too quickly is that members will get used to being spoonfed answers from staff and won't respond because they don't have to or feel like they have anything to contribute.