#TipTuesday - Encouraging Internal Stakeholder Engagement

Heather Wendt

Well, it is a bit late, but it is still Tuesday!

Today I wanted to talk a bit about how to encourage internal stakeholders to engage with your customer community.

1. Create a staff-only leaderboard - showcase those staff members who are impacting the value of your community through a board that focuses on employee roles. Set view permissions to staff roles only.
   1. Include shoutouts to top staff contributors in team meetings and town halls
   2. Send a personal message to those on the leaderboard thanking them for their contributions and sharing any anecdotes about the impact
   3. Send a note to their supervisor with a highlight of their impact
      
2. Create a Can you help? section for unanswered questions visible to staff only
   1. Make it easier for your internal teams to see questions that need a bit of attention
   2. Be sure to include a subtitle that makes it clear it is not a public facing widget
   3. Use the Question widget
      
      
3. Use Vanilla's new 'Escalation Rules' (Community Management Dashboard) to automate notifications about unanswered questions
   
   1. There are a number of trigger options focused on posts (sentiment, points, reports, activity, votes)
      
   2. Actions can be focused on integrations or can be sent to individuals (notifications should be set to email for any team members who are going to be a part of the process - support, product, CSM, etc.) by assigning a moderator
      

Communities provide more value when you include other team members, but make it easy and purposeful to maximize their impact.

KrisKing

Great post Heather, I love the fact that posts with no activity or comments can now be escalated or placed in collections for internal intervention, as we do with this community.

It's going to simplify the lives of many community managers and ensure everyone is heard.