How do you promote your important announcements on Community?

julia

Hi there! I'm looking to learn from fellow community managers:
What are your best practices for making important announcements stand out in your community?

Whether it's product updates, policy changes, or promoting biggest event of the year, how do you ensure your members see and engage with the announcement? (Aiming to be the first thing that they see when logging in).

Do you use:

• Banner messages or pop-ups?
• Pinned posts or featured discussions?
• Or something else entirely?

Would love to hear what’s worked (or not worked!) for you. Please share your tips, examples, or even screenshots if you have them! 🙌😁 TIA!

Rav Singh

Announcements were a bit tricky for us due to the number of software and categories we have. If we posted an announcement in the main discussion category for a product, members would need to follow the discussion category to receive notification of it, this would result in receiving email notifications for all new discussions rather than just announcements. This wasn't ideal and there was a lot of push back from members on this.

I've now set up separate dedicated announcement categories and used a widget to show the top announcements within the main discussion category for the product. So even though the announcements themselves aren't posted within the discussion category, they still appear in it. Example below.

In itself the above isn't all that great, but the key that ties it all together is our custom profile fields and pairing it with the Profile Field ➡️ Follow Category automation rule.

Now that we have this active, any members who have designated their specific Reckon software product using the custom profile field on registration, automatically follows the respective announcement category for their product. This means they automatically receive an email notification each time an announcement is posted for their product.

It works really well and we've seen positive engagement and page views occurring from it. The only aspect that could do with some improvement is the email notifications themselves, right now they're just the generic 'Rav posted a new discussion' notification. I'd love to be able to customise these a bit more on a per category level to make them more relevant to announcements.