Community launches can be stressful. However, you can reduce some of the stress if you plan the crucial steps of your community launch.
This article provides a checklist of things that you can either:
- do in advance of your launch day or
- be prepared for on launch day.
📝 NOTE: If you are an Admin user who is preparing to launch your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community, you should also review the "launch prep" article, Community Launch Prep Checklist, for information on the more-technical community settings.
Set your community visibility
Choose whether your community will be Private or Public. By default, communities are public.
đź“ť NOTE: Use the Enable Private Communities toggle in the Dashboard to set your community as private. To learn how, see Private Communities.
Choose your Homepage layout
- Recent Discussions
- Categories
- Knowledge Base
We recommend setting your Homepage to Recent Discussions for new communities. This encourages engagement and invites new users to join the conversation immediately.
Create your main Category structure
Creating categories is not so important for new communities. You should avoid creating too many categories. Keep it simple and let categories naturally evolve. Once there is significant content, moving content to new categories will be easy as new categories and subcategories are created organically.
Review your Roles & Permissions
Make sure that you have created the necessary roles and that they have the appropriate permissions enabled; verify that members do not have Admin/Mod permissions.
If necessary, set Categories and Groups as private and accessible to only certain users based on role.
You can enable Category Permissions to set custom permissions per category.Â
Review your member registration and sign-in process
The User Registration Settings (in Dashboard > Membership) is where you set which registration method is required for new users.
Test the registration and the sign-in process to create a new community account. If you are using SSO, test that the connection is working, as well as passing the necessary information via SSO. If you are passing role-based information via SSO, verify that it is working properly.
Create user-onboarding content
Write your Community Guidelines, a Welcome post, and any other instructional information that you would like users to review when they register for your community.
Review your Addons list
Make sure that you've reviewed the list of addons and have enabled the addons that you want available in your community.
✔️ TIP: Some addons don't necessarily have to be enabled for your launch, and can be enabled after your community has grown and its needs have changed.
The following is a list of addons that you should consider having enabled for your community launch.
- Advanced Search
- Akismet
- API v2 *
- Badges
- Keyword Blocker/ Civil Tongue
- Q&A *
- Reactions
- Salesforce
- Stop Forum Spam
- Subcommunities *
- SSO
- jsConnect
- OAuth *
- SAML *
- JWT (JSON Web Token) *
- Vanilla Analytics (Advanced Analytics) *
- Vanilla Statistics
- Webhooks *
- reCaptcha Support
- Zendesk
The following are addons that can be enabled after the launch.
- Groups & Events
- Ideation *
- Polls
- Ranks
- Reporting
- Role Titles
- Split/Merge
- Spoof
- Troll Management
- Warnings & Notes
đź“ť NOTE: * these addons are exclusive to Vanilla's Corporate and Enterprise plans.
Review your Gamification strategy
Think about badges and other engagement-based awards that you would like to implement. This strategy can be "in-progress" for the launch, but it's a good idea to reward your beta-testers for their time and feedback.
- Badges - reviewed and enabled
- Ranks - will you be offering Ranks from launch or will this be introduced at a later date?
Review your theme
- Have you chosen our out-of-the-box Foundation theme?
- Have you applied your branding within Theme Editor?
- Have you built your own custom theme through GitHub (Enterprise plan only) or have you commissioned the Vanilla Professional Services team to build your custom theme?
Set up spam controls
Enable the following available Spam addons and test how well they work with a baseline of your trusted users or internal team members. If valid content gets caught in spam traps, you can loosen the settings.
- Akismet
- Stop Forum Spam
- Spam/Abuse Reactions
- Warnings & Notes
- Troll Management
- Flood Controls
Verify your outgoing email address
Ensure that the email addresses that are set as your community Account Owner and Outgoing Email are not personal email addresses. These should be branded generic email addresses, such as hello@mysitename.com and community@mysitename.com.Â
Update your custom domain
Be sure to have your custom domain connected to your community and that your DNS records are correctly pointing to Vanilla. This will help with the branding of your community and with SEO because the community name will be part of your main root domain (website).Â
Test email notifications
Be sure to enable HTML emails and specify your brand colours in Settings > Appearance > Email in the Dashboard. Vanilla recommends that you:
- Send a test email to yourself or a colleague in order to verify your settings.
- Test the default email notifications that are listed in the Default Email Notifications section of Email Notifications.
- Review the notification preferences defaults for email and pop-up notifications and let your CSM know whether you want to update these defaults.
Testing
Testing is important! Even before you have your beta-testers or your internal teammates test the community, you should run a few tests to ensure that all of the above points have been addressed.
You may want to open your community in different browsers and be signed in as different users with differing roles.
- Run through your registration process.
- Create new user accounts; one for each role.
- Post! Create one of the following, if enabled in your community
- Discussion
- Comment
- Question
- Answer
- Idea
- Poll
- Group
- Event
- Review onboarding content, is it easily accessible and easy to read?
- Test all permission restrictions
- Can members view restricted Admin-only content/categories?
- Can members delete their own post?
- Can Admin/Mod edit other users’ posts?
- Update your profile image (if available), did you earn the Photogenic badge?
- As an Admin/Mod do you see a copy of this post in the Reported Post Queue?
- Navigate your new theme
- How is the user experience?
- Click on each category and click to open discussions.
- Are your fonts and colours branded?
- As a different member, can you Flag this post for Spam/Abuse
- As an Admin/Mod, do you see this post in the Spam/Moderation queue of the Dashboard? (5 Spam reactions needed/10 Abuse reactions needed by default)
- As an Admin/Mod do you see a copy of this post in the Reported Post Queue?
- Are there any surprises like misaligned content, hidden menus?
- Test your Search
- Try acting like a BAD member of the community
- Test the Gamification
- React to a post
- @mention someone in the community, did you earn the Name Dropper badge?
- As another member, can you report this post?
- Swear in a post, did it trigger the Keyword Blocker or Civil Tongue tool?
Wrap up
If you have completed all of the tasks that are listed in this article, your community is ready for launch and, more importantly, should lunch with minimal issues.
However...
...be prepared that things might not be perfect!
✔️ TIP: Try to consider all scenarios and start to think about your launch dates.
Promote your community
When you've set a date for your community launch, it's a good idea to make people aware of it. Remember:
- The more people who are aware of your community, the more people who join your community.
- The more people who join your community, the more successful your community will be.
The easiest way to promote your community is to leverage your existing online presence.Â
For example, if you have a website, here are a few ways you can promote the launch of your community:
- Promote it on your website and include a link to the community in your main navigation. The more launch fanfare and exposure, the faster you’ll grow your membership.
- Place ad tiles and banners on your website to let users know about the community.
- Add community content to existing newsletters and email marketing campaigns.
- Include the community information on transactional emails to your customers/prospective users, not just your email newsletter.
- Have your customer service agents and sales team tell customers and potential customers about your community. Have them include community information/links in their email signatures.
- Invite discussions on topics from your blog, and on social-media posts where it makes sense.
If your community forum is a stand-alone property, it may be more difficult to promote but it’s not impossible. Here are some ways you can help promote your community:
- Leverage any connections you have and invite them through a personal invitation.
- Encourage your beta testers and early adopters to spread the word. You can allow these early adopters to send emails out to invite new users and track this from their profile.
- Send an email to your marketing list.
- Sponsor events and increase your presence at industry events.
- Be engaged in other places where your community gathers, such as other social-media properties (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
- Create great shareable content that ensures that your community is easily found in search engines.
The launch
To have a successful soft launch, we recommend dividing it into three stages:
- preparing for the soft launch,
- the internal soft launch, and
- the public soft launch.
To learn more about these stages, see:
