In large, mature communities or communities with multiple use-cases (e.g., communities that have multiple product lines or personas) users can often feel overwhelmed by the amount of content, and may find it difficult to find answers to their questions or discover relevant material over time.
To help mitigate these challenges, the Interests & Suggested Content feature helps make content discovery a more targeted and automated process by allowing:
- your organization to curate community content to users based on their interests
- and community managers to suggest important organizational content to all users.
This is achieved by creating and customizing Interests.
How it works
Interests are the foundation of this feature, and they can be targeted to users in two ways:
- Set as a Default Interest to target all users (this is how community managers can suggest key content to their users)
- or by mapping custom profile fields to one or more Categories or Tags. With this method, if a user selects the custom profile field value you define in the Interest, Vanilla will suggest content associated to the chosen Categories or Tags.
Suggested content is displayed in the corresponding Suggested Content widget, which you can add to any of your custom page layouts.
⭐️ EXAMPLE
We want to suggest content to users in our community who are interested in one of our products, Product XYZ.
- To achieve this, we created a custom profile field called Products you're interested in that displays as a dropdown on user profiles. This dropdown lists all of our products.
- We also created an Interest tied to this custom profile field and to the Product XYZ Category in our community.
- If a user selects Product XYZ from the Products you're interested in dropdown, all Suggested Content widgets we've added to our pages will suggest the Product XYZ Category to them.
Enable Interests & Suggested Content
Reach out to Vanilla Support to request this feature be enabled for your community.
Create an Interest
- Click the Add Interest button, located at the upper right.
- In the dialog, give your Interest an appropriate name (Interest names must be unique). An API name will automatically be added based on your text but it can be updated.
📝 NOTE: The API name cannot be changed after the Interest is saved.
- Next, decide how to target this Interest to your users.
- To make it available to all users, check the Default Interest - Target All Users box. This is recommended for high-level content that is appropriate for every user in your community, such as important announcements.
- To target more granularly, select one or more Profile Fields. In our case, we selected our Pets custom profile field, so the Pets field appeared below, allowing us to then specify which pets to target.
📝 NOTE: Only custom profile fields that are single checkbox, single-select dropdown, multi-select dropdown, or numeric dropdown are selectable.
⚠️ IMPORTANT: If you pick multiple profile fields, like Pets (Dog, Cat) and Country (USA, Canada) a user must select an option from both profile fields to receive the associated suggested content. For example, choosing Dog + USA or Cat + Canada works but Bird + Canada would not, because "Bird" is not configured for the Interest. In this example, then, a user must have either a Cat or Dog AND they must be in either the USA or Canada.
- Define the content to suggest to users meeting the criteria you defined in Step 3. Vanilla can suggest content belonging to specific Categories or Tags.
- Associate the Interest to one or more Categories. Your available Categories are listed in the dropdown based on your Category order on the Settings > Discussions > Categories page. You can also search for Categories by typing in the field, with matching Categories being displayed as you type.
- Associate the Interest to one or more Tags. Your available Tags are pulled from the Settings > Discussions> Tagging page, and you can search for Tags by typing in the field, with matching Tags being displayed as you type.
- When finished, click Save to create the Interest.
In our example, we created an Interest that maps our Pets custom profile field to a Category and two Tags. Users who select Dog and/or Cat from the Pets dropdown will be targeted as follows:
- Vanilla will suggest the Best Practices Category for these users to Follow.
- Vanilla will suggest content tagged with the Sense of Community or Book Recommendations Tags.
This suggested content will automatically display in any Suggested Content widgets we've added to our page layouts.
Edit and delete Interests
Located to the right of each Interest are their respective pencil (edit) and trashcan (delete) icons.
- You can edit all aspects of an Interest (except for its API Name), as discussed in the Create an Interest section above.
- Click the trashcan icon to delete an Interest, followed by OK in the confirmation popup. 📝 NOTE: You cannot delete Interests currently in use.
Filter your Interests
On the right side of the Interests & Suggested Content page are several filters you can use to more easily locate specific Interests.
You can filter your Interests by:
- Interest names
- Specific profile fields (multi-select)
- Associated Tags (multi-select)
- Associated Categories (multi-select)
- Showing only default Interests
- Excluding default Interests
📝 NOTE: Using multiple filters functions as an AND statement, meaning only Interests matching all filters will display.
Click Clear All to remove all applied filters and view the full list.
How can users view Suggested Content?
There are two places suggested content is accessible to your users:
- Your communities Discussions page
- The Suggested Content widget
Suggested Content widget
Perhaps the best way to surface suggested content is by adding the Suggested Content widget to one or more of your custom page layouts. Because you can add this widget to as many pages as you like, it makes it easy to keep suggested content top-of-mind and easily accessible.
These widgets will suggest content to each user based on their profile field selections, and suggest content to all users related to any Default Interests you've created.
Suggested content on the Discussions page
The other area this content can be browsed is on your community's Discussions page, accessible from the navigation bar.
From here, users can select Suggested Content from the Categories dropdown to filter the discussions to only content matching the Categories and Tags associated to the users Interests.
