Upcoming HLV Connect: Open Session Reminder

Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in this weeks Vanilla Connect session. If you missed it, you can access the recording here:

https://higherlogic.zoom.us/rec/share/SlgBtqVudJEd7PRU7Rs_-a6vWbWDA0hAQXTmycpLB0sxOp0JRlSrfrxd9k9KA3Sc.WZFueiHGmn_9wusM

Passcode: V7$w47dw

There was a great amount of participation and areas covered during this session. Some of those topics and discussions included:

Content Management Strategies and How to get internal buy-in

@Heather Wendt shared her expirience in launching a volunteer community program. Some best practices that she outlined included:

• Having a well-constructed welcome email to new members to ensure that they were aware of the resources that were available to them within the community.
• Sharing out real life examples of what others are doing within the industry.
• Leveraging content that may already be being generated by other teams and repurposing it in a discussion like structure within the community.

@GingerAnderson shared the benefits of going beyond providing tips/tricks content wise when leveraging their own platform, but also showcasing unique and fun ways that are taking place among their members. Loved this idea from a content strategy perspective!

@Shauna shared strategies that worked for our own Vanilla community when seeding content:

• Ensuring the ask is very clear and direct from a content perspective (i.e. I need you to provide a post for TipTuesday on our community two weeks from now).
• Avoiding bystander syndrome by reaching out individually to the person that you are requesting content from rather than presenting a generic ask in a large group scenario.
• Getting collective buy in across multiple departments to lessen the burden on each individual. This also ensures that a variety of content can be generated that caters to the overall user base within the community.

Re-engagement Strategies for non-active users

@wcalsh shared that their team pulls a report of users that have not been active within the community on a quarterly basis and sends a personalized re-engagement email, letting them know what is new and exciting within their community.

A new feature offered in Vanilla can further assist with this by allowing the ability to filter and export user lists based on specific parameters. Our very own @Kirstie Macfarlane provides insight on this.

For example filtering members who have not visited the community in 90 days can be done with this new feature.

AI Tools and what to be aware of from a community perspective

With the topic of AI being present across various industries, it was interesting to get insight to how community members had experienced or leveraged it to date.

@LiselotteP discussed her expirience with ChatGpt through working with her moderators who at sometimes had been leveraging it to some degree. She found that ChatGpt has a very specific way of writing a response to questions and noted that it can make a conversation with users very robotic. Furthermore, the sentences were too long with the same words being used multiple times. The actual information that the user needed became more diluted among a lot of the fluff that ChatGpt provided in the response.

@Shauna experienced when leveraging ChatGpt, a vast amount of the answers that were being auto generated from ChatGpt had been dated or inaccurate. This can provide inaccurate information to users and ultimately a poor member expirience and thus should be considered if looking to leverage it within community. As AI evolves, it will be interesting to see its potential improvements and items to keep tabs on as it applies to its use in community.

We are very much looking forward to our next Vanilla Connect session and hope to see many of you there!