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#TipTuesday: The API isn’t just for developers 💡
Community Managers can use Vanilla’s API for everyday tasks too, and you can test requests directly from your Dashboard without writing any code. Head to Settings → API Integrations → API v2, choose an endpoint, and use Try It to see the results right in your community. This can be useful when you need to: Look up…
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#TipTuesday: Use Category Descriptions Like Tiny Tour Guides
Happy #TipTuesday Everyone, Category descriptions are easy to overlook. They sit quietly under a category name, usually only a sentence or two long, and because of that they can feel like “set it and forget it” text. But those little descriptions can do a lot of heavy lifting. Think of them as tiny tour guides for your…
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CMA Academy - Community Strategy Fundamentals Discussion
After completing the Community Strategy Fundamentals module in the Community Manager Academy, take a moment to respond to the following questions: 1. What was your biggest insight from this module? What changed the way you think about community strategy? 2. Which worksheet or activity had the greatest impact on your…
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#TipTuesday: Make Member Conversations a Regular Habit
I was well into my career as a community builder before I realized the value of intentionally setting aside time to talk directly with members — by phone, Zoom, or even in person when possible. It’s easy to get caught up in moderation queues, analytics, and content calendars. But some of the best community insights come…
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#TipTuesday - Brand-driven Ideation programs: the not so scary alternative
Ideation programs can be intimidating, and many community teams shy away from implementing them. Sometimes, it's because they feel they won't get buy-in from the Product team, or they think the initial support will eventually fade away. Especially in large communities, teams may also fear receiving a high volume of ideas…
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#TipTuesday: Stop the Scroll - Spotlight Content with Featured Collections
Welcome back for another edition of #TipTuesday. Let's stop the scroll!! Featured Collections are your secret weapon to keeping eyes focused on what's important to your users. Instead of letting valuable resources get buried, you can spotlight key discussions, articles, or resources right where members will see them first.…
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What part of your community are you most focused on right now?
At Higher Logic, we just introduced the COMPASE Framework—a model to help community teams align strategy with impact across seven functions: Connection 🤝 Operations 🛠 Marketing 📣 Product Feedback 💬 Acquisition 📈 Strategy & Retention 📊 Education 📚 🔍 Which of these are you currently prioritizing—and why? Are you doubling…
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How do you manage interval vs external announcements in your community?
I'm curious to hear how you all manage announcements that are specific to your users vs announcements that are open to the public? Here is our use case: We have one category that we've used mainly for announcements. Members are not able to post there except our staff, mods, and admins. Now that we are working towards…
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Will you be at CMX Summit?
CMX Summit, a big community manager conference, is coming up May 1-2 in Redwood City, California. I've been to CMX Summits in the past and have always found them useful, so I am looking forward to attending this year. If you will be going, I would enjoy meeting you to talk about common interests. To sweeten the pot, I will…
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#TipTuesday: Defining Your Community's "One Thing"
As a community manager, you’re often asked to have your members do a lot of different things. Q&A, feedback, ideation, testing, use cases, customer stories - the list goes on and on. Before you know it, your community home page ends up looking like Times Square complete with billboards and flashing lights. This quickly…
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What is the difference between "Questions solved" and "Answers accepted"?
Good day Community, I launched my new community last week and am creating analytics to understand my membership activity and community health. I am working with the Q&A tab in Analytics and seeking the definitions for the following please: Questions answered Questions solved Answers added Answers accepted Thank you for…
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Custom Table Help - Discussion Posts w/ No Comments
I created a custom table with the aim of finding all discussion posts without a comment. No matter how I configure this table, it still returns some posts that do, in fact, have comments (despite saying the comment count is 0). What am I doing wrong? For instance, this discussion post appears in the report - it says it has…
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Are you using multiple Slack channels to inform internal teams?
Good day all, I am getting ready to go live with my new community and would like to ensure internal teams are notified of community content they need to address. For example, different channels for: Support Specific blog authors Moderators of specific categories I realize Vanilla sends email notifications, but we are a…
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Focused Analytics
Hey all! So, we know that analytics are a crucial part of community management, but it can be an area that many community managers struggle with. I know that I have a standard set of analytics I look at weekly, monthly, and yearly: Total Members - how is growth doing? Active Members - how many members are logging in and…
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Customer Steering Committee
Who partners with your customers and specifically organizes them into a "committee" of sorts to help direct and represent the voice of your larger community? How do you organize this group? What responsibilities do you expect from them? How do you partner to customize the community experience for the community at large?
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Share Your Community Onboarding Stories!
Onboarding is one of those foundational components of great adoption. It is the purposeful introduction of new (and existing!) members to opportunities and information that can be a lifelong journey. What are some tactics you are using in your onboarding strategy? Are there any strategies you are struggling to implement?…
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Where can I find documentation about built-in metrics and community metrics?
Good morning community - I would like to learn more about built-in metrics and measuring community health. I would like to build upon this discussion, but could not find anything in Documentation. Would you please point me to the correct article or documentation that outlines what is available and what I can measure in my…
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What do you include in your engagement strategy plan?
"Hope is not a strategy" - Rick Page This quote is often on my mind when it comes to community. If you have been community managing for any length of time, you know that engagement doesn't just happen because you have a community platform set up (yes, even with that AMAZING layout you have created!) Instead, you have to…
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How do you showcase content?
Content is one of the key drivers for return visits to customer communities, but if you have the world's best content and your customers cannot find it easily, it becomes a lot of good stuff without impact. Having your site built in a way that allows your customers to find what they are looking for (and even some they…
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What to do with deactivated users?
Hi community, I'm looking for tips on how to manage user profiles and their content once they have to be deleted. Due to all those acronyms related to privacy regulations around the world, we are required to remove former customers and their data from our database after a while. That same process should extend to the…
