Membership Group - Best Practices

Make individual contact with each members as they sign-up and demonstrate the simplicity of how they might use the site effectively

I think it would be great if managers got more ability to tailor their groupsite to meet the needs of their group members, both in terms of turning off or on certain functionality and in being given an area to explain the purpose of a particular group site.

1)Turning on/off Fields
For a professional site, might we be able to turn off the social profile or at least turn off some sections in the social profile that are not relevant to the group? For example, the basic information under my profile asks if I"m interested in men or women, what my relationship status is, and what I'm looking for. While I know a member may choose to ignore this info, the end result is that the professional site begins to look like a dating site. As a manager, I'd like to be able to turn off or turn on some of these fields. Likewise, while a member can move various fields around in a professional profile, the manager cannot. For example, depending on the group, some fields might be better earlier than others. At the moment, the manager has no ability to help the member by organizing that for them.

2) Help from Manger
To that point, it would be helpful if the manager was given the ability to better explain the site to new members. There is no "About this site" that managers can use to explain how new group members can use their groupsite to their best advantage or what they should be considering when setting up their professional profiles. Manger-created sample bios for a particular groupsite, for example, may help.

I agree with Eliazbeth's outstanding suggestions!

All of the above advice/suggestions have been noted. I agree with both points regarding additional manager control over which profiles can be displayed and manager help. Expect to see new manager controls that enable managers to auto default profile type to professional profile only for professional groups or social profile only for social groups.

How manager help is implemented is a debatable and provides a different challenge. At present, managers have multiple tools available to them. The challenge that we face is most help/information is general. A great example is our introduction to Groupsites video. We've considered automatically embedding the video into a discussion that gets automatically created whenever a new Groupsite is created. Below is the video that I'm referring to... (note: the below video can be embedded into any area of the Groupsite that accepts text entry).

Our challenge is that the above video explains CollectiveX versus the group itself. Many Groupsite managers want to keep CollectiveX in the background and their community in the forefront, therefore, are not interested in having us help them by showing example videos that included footage of other sample Groupsites.

Are we over stepping our bounds by automatically including this video or one like it into a auto-created discussion called "How to get the most from this community?" Or are there other approaches that could work better.

Everyone's thoughts/suggestions are appreciated.

The good thing about a generic video is that as the features of Cx expand, the video can be updated. Updating "help" content on my site has been a bit of a pain. I'd support an automatic forum that had instructional content showing how to use CollectiveX - particularly if the forum pointed members to the managers if they wanted group specific information.

The video will greatly benefit new members to any group, as well as save the manager time and effort explaining how to use effectively CollectiveX. It is great to have learning resource accessible 24/7 for initial information as well as keeping current on all the outstanding features of Collective X.

I am looking forward to having the video accessible asap. :-)

Guys,

The "Introducing Groupsites" video that I embedded above now comes standard when creating a new Groupsite. It is automatically included as the first topic "How to get the most from this Groupsite" contained in the General Discussions forum within every new Groupsite.

Hopefully this will provide the basic "how-to" that you are requesting for your members.

As far as the customizing "social profile" elements. Here is how (social/professional) profiles currently work. When creating a new Groupsite, it is up to each manager to decide what profile type is primary (social or professional). If professional is chosen by the Group's manager upon setup, then each member is required to to enable their professional profile... but can also elect to enable their social profile as well. By default, both profiles are turned on for each new member, although the member has the ability to display only their professional profile. At present, 90+% of the time, the new member just leaves both profiles enabled. What we've decided to do... is enable managers to set the default profile for each new member to "professional only." This will keep groups that want to be professional only, just that.

We decided to add the above control because of your feedback - we do recognize the need for many professional groups to remain professional only. The questions that we ask for social profiles are legitimate questions that are used by the many social oriented groups on CollectiveX.

I hope this helps, feedback is always welcome.

Thanks so much Clarence for adding the video to the Discussion tab. This will be a great asset to managers who are building capacity of group members to get the most out of the CollectiveX experience. Also, thanks for adding the option to allow only "professional" profiles. Those of us who work in educational settings are often blocked from using applications that are social which are blocked by filtering software that we must have to comply with e-rate benefits.

Clarence, great news on professional profile update as well as the video update. Thank you for being so responsive.

I can't seem to find that functionality for enabling professional profile only. Has it been added into the manager options and if so, where? It only seems to be available to individual members at the moment.

Thanks very much,
Elizabeth

Give us a few days to add the "Professional Profile" only default setting - set by the group's manager. If all goes well, you'll see it early in the week. It will be located in the Manager / Group Settings area under the Groupsite Information link.

I wanted to bring to your attention that we recently added a control to the Manager / Groups Settings area under the Groupsite Information link... that empowers managers to change the default setting for new members to: "Default new members to [professional profile] only" or [social profile] only in the case of social groups.

See screen grab below:

!http://www.collectivex.com/uploads/files/20814/Picture_8.png!

Elizabeth... hopefully this solves your problem.

i'd like to add the "welcome email" feature as well - Perhaps it could contain a few links to key parts of the site as well as the introductory video that collectiveX have