Upcoming HLV Connect: Open Session Reminder

Thank you to everyone who joined both of our sessions yesterday, we had some great conversations!

📽 Recording

https://higherlogic.zoom.us/rec/share/h_6TqqARbEgLDIMbASZHdf27u3LHEsCaPP9xWiwrY2dSfesxciTeX-W5j-Ug7xo1.fj50qfp8NqOrVcTb 

Passcode: JuK9#?xh

🎉 Shoutouts

This session seemed to fly by, we had some great questions and advice:

We started by talking about how you can get colleagues from other teams involved and excited about your community. @Meganmathy shared the incredible enthusiasm in her company and all of the ways she builds on this, including regular presentations and weekly reports. Since their community is a customer benefit, this has even led to her sales team requesting she add community presentations to their sales process.

There was lots of interest in the idea of internal weekly reports to we dug a little deeper into that as well.

@Julie Lowe shared how she's also hosting internal enablement sessions to build the enthusiasm around their new Vanilla community. They make sure to tailor those sessions to the specific team in order to show the value the community is bringing to them specifically. We especially loved her thoughts on how her colleagues are not the ones helping her by being involved, but rather the community is helping them by making them more informed about their customers. Additionally they leverage an internal recognition system to call out colleagues who add value to their community, which has seen great returns.

@Lauren_H shared how she's also creating a monthly Community Bulletin, as well as hosting community round tables with her colleagues.

@Shauna brought up the idea of tailoring your community to have staff specific CTAs or quicklinks, which @Julie Lowe is already leveraging but others were also interested in.

@wcalsh explained how they're taking more of a divide and conquer type of approach by assigning a SME to each of their products, who is then in charge of answering any questions concerning that product on the community. This is built into their job responsibilities so they have the bandwidth to spend a lot of time in the community.

This brought up questions of how to best delegate actions that need to be taken in the community. We went over the best ways to assign questions (both to colleagues and customers) as well as how long you should leave a question open for customers to answer before having Staff members jump in. We also went into other tools (like Slack) and how you can integrate them to help make this easier for your colleagues.

@saramaloney explained how they also have SMEs for different categories, but since they have few for each topic she finds they sometimes suffer from the "bystander affect" and how she handles that.

Sara also brought up two good questions that we chatted through: how to handle user accounts for past employees (@LiselotteP helped advise on this one!), and how are others encouraging their users to follow certain categories. @wcalsh shared a great idea that they use to host Newbie Office Hours every couple of months to walk new users around the community and encourage them to follow categories that are best suited to them.

Thanks again to everyone for their input and helping to make this a great Vanilla Connect Session!