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Content and Internal Stakeholders
What internal stakeholders typically have strong content potential? How are you engaging with them to build a content cadence to help bring value to your customers?
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Email Digest 🌟 Now a CORE Feature!
Big news as of Release 2024.011 🥁 Vanilla's Email Digest Feature is now available for everyone! We've spent the last few months beta testing this feature, and making adjustments based on YOUR feedback. Vanilla's Email Digest offers several different options depending on the scenario you choose: Users following categories…
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Internal staff & training
Hi there! Does anyone have a best practice for how they designate roles & responsibilities within their own community? For example: #1 . Assigning internal staff to specific questions/posts? This staff member responds to [x] type of questions/posts This staff member responds to [x] type of questions/posts #2. Cadence &…
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Example community engagement policies and SLAs
Hey everyone, I'm wondering if folks have any example community engagement policies or SLAs they can share? We're in the process of setting these standards for our team but it'd be great to have examples to reference. Questions related to policies or workflows make sense for our internal team to respond to asap however…
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Silos and Data
Hey folks, I wrote about breaking down silos just over a year ago. In that post, I was specifically talking about a product team. I mentioned how important it is to bring facts and data to help other teams understand the importance of the community. Now, one of my customers wants to use their data to break down silos…
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#TipTuesday: Encouraging Quality Engagement
We pose and respond to queries in the belief that the magic of a conversation will produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Quality engagement from our members is the holy grail of community managers. Everything stems from that – ROI, sales, brand loyalty, ticket reduction, etc. When members are largely…
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#TipTuesday: Creating a Valuable Office Hours Experience
Today’s Tip Tuesday is all about creating value for your audience through Office Hours. Office Hours are a great way to bring your members together to: Network with each other Learn product or industry best practices Share wins or roadblocks with peers Done well, these can become a valuable addition to your event content…
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How are you rewarding members that Vote on Ideas?
Hi Vanilla Community! Looking for some creative solutions here… how do you reward your members when they Vote on or create new Ideas? In our Community we use the Up Vote buttons on regular discussion/question posts as well, which means there's no easy way to see in our metrics who has voted specifically on Idea type of…
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🧭 How Community can improve your Customer Experience 🎯
At some point, many of us have come across the saying, "it takes a village," a phrase used in various contexts from raising children to establishing a business. Essentially, it emphasizes the collaborative effort required for certain tasks. In the realm of software, we often discuss user-centric design and the creation of…
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Polls - How do you use them?
The title pretty much speaks for itself, but I am curious about the various ways y'all use them. Are they fun or serious? Do you use them as a form of ideation? Do they spark discussions? If you don't use them right now, do you have any creative ideas for them?
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#TipTuesday - Fueling User-Generated Content in Your Community
In the dynamic landscape of the digital era, organizations are constantly seeking ways to grow and enhance their online communities. A key driver of success in this realm is the cultivation of user-generated content (UGC). Harnessing the power of your community members to create and share content not only fosters…
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We're spilling our secrets for reviving online communities and driving engagement
Join us tomorrow for a webinar with ChurnZero at 2pm ET! @Shauna will share: Simple ways to get your team engaged in the community How to align and rally the business behind the community Tactical strategies on how to revive the community (Here's the first secret, community building is a marathon, not a sprint!)
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Online Communities vs. Forums vs. Knowledge Bases: What’s the Difference?
In the digital age, our ability to connect with others and access information has been revolutionized by the increase in platforms and software designed to foster engagement. It’s not uncommon to see the term “online community” applied to various similar, but still very distinguishable technology solutions, including…
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Featured Collections are live in the Success Community!
Hey everyone! 🙋♀️ Happy Wednesday! You might notice the homepage and discussions page are suddenly looking a little extra spiffy! 🎨 That's because we've added two new widgets - Featured Collections and a Leaderboard. I'm incredibly excited about using Vanilla's new Featured Collections – it's a great way to showcase…
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Weekly or Monthly Roundups - Who's doing them for their communities or their staff?
I've been chatting with a lot of folks about our new Email Digest feature lately and a topic that often comes up is the difference between an Email Digest and a Roundup. My take on this is that the Email Digest is something automatic that brings in the best posts from categories that a particular user follows and cares…
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What are you doing to drive staff engagement internally? 👩💻
One of the things that comes up time and time again in my conversations with community builders is how to get staff members more involved. I've found that these 3 key things work for me: Thinking about what’s in it for them & communicating value Personal, 1:1 relationships Specific, clear asks 📣 Thinking about what’s in it…
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Engaging executives in community
Hi all, one perennial challenge we grapple with is how to engage executives in community. Online community spaces and content tend to be really well geared for product users, but we are looking for new ways to engage the leaders of those teams (our “economic buyers,” if you will..). These folks usually split their focus…
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When's the last time you walked a mile in your users' shoes? 👠🩴👞
So often, we look at the community from our admin views, and forget to check out what our members are actually seeing — how does that shoe fit? Is it comfy and sturdy, ready to set your users off on the right foot 🤭 (I can't miss a good pun like that, come on!) for their community journey, or are there some awkward parts…
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What's the best way to manage an AMA in Vanilla?
Hi all - we are interested in planning an AMA event within our community which would only be open to a select group of super-users. I was wondering if anyone had some best practices on how best to manage this in Vanilla, as I can imagine the lack of threaded comments (as in Reddit) could quickly make things complicated.…
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How are you welcoming your users?
Hey everyone! 👋 When setting up a new community (or refreshing an existing one!) one of the things I always like to review is the member journey including the emails they get. This tends to be an interesting topic of discussion, and I was curious what this community thought about it and what you all were doing to welcome…