Driving Engagement in a Private Community

NJW0316

Hi all! We just launched our community last week. I realize it will take some time to really get rolling, but I'm curious if you all have any recommendations or suggestions on how to drive engagement with your customers.

We have a channel model, so we work closely with Partners and Clients alike. So, we can lean on our Partners for some marketing as well, but something joint probably makes the most sense.

What are your thoughts?

borme

Hello! Although we haven't fully launched yet, our community beta test has been going smoothly, largely thanks to our Steering Committee. We’ve carefully selected six dedicated clients or advocates of our product to drive engagement. Whenever I encounter an unanswered question, I reach out to them to answer. Additionally, they play a key role in managing any negativity and setting a positive tone within the community.

Our beta test spans six weeks, with a new set of tasks released each week to encourage testers to explore the community's features. Testers eagerly anticipate these tasks, and at the end of each week, we post a survey for them to provide feedback on the community's functionality.

Hope this helps!

NJW0316

Thank you @borme- I appreciate the insight! So, is your community a task driven community for QA or something like that? We may need to adopt some kind of action-oriented engagement approach to supplement some of what we are doing today.

BrendanP

Public communities have the benefit of allowing members to see some content prior to joining.

Some options you could also consider:

• Create some content that is viewable to Guests while the majority is private.
• There is an addon called 'private discussions' that hides most of the thread and shows a certain number of characters of the original post to non-logged in members.
  • Click a discussion here: https://community.nanit.com/

If you really want it to remain 100% private, you need to do a good job of promoting it to the prospective members and make it as easy as possible for them to find. Link in your app/product/website/email signatures/company communications. Do a blog post, do some social, audit a typical user journey and see where they might come across it.

NJW0316

Love the advice! Thank you, @BrendanP

borme

There's an aspect of our community that's task oriented. A lot of beta is that way. I would say the main drivers are a discussion for getting answers and a discussion for sharing ideas. Those will be open to all members. We have a private discussion for our Steering Committee and one for our Beta Group.

borme

We'd love to also grow into having a place for members to be involved in beta tests that our company product team holds.

JCLong

Hello,

We have a private community only accessible to our clients and colleagues so driving clients to the site is definitely more of a challenge. We created a colleague corner area for our internal-only content and have begun to see a lot of engagement there. Our goal is for that area to prove valuable to our internal audience to convert them to regular users so they are able to advocate for and talk up the benefits of the community to clients and drive them to the site. We also have a lot of roadshows planned with internal teams - especially client-facing teams - to show them the site, the value for them and their clients and give them talking points so they feel confident in those conversations.

Heather Wendt

Hi all! Some great tips here! Some additional thinks I found to be very helpful in my private community was to make sure the community was part of onboarding for new customers, having a digest that went to everyone (coming soon on Vanilla…yay!), getting internal team help (support, CSMs, sales, etc.) to raise awareness and drive people to the community, and making sure the value was there through content and discussions…I was able to move from 91 total posts in 90 days (most done by staff) to making the community one of the top reasons our members renewed with us.