When Blake asked me to write about how our community manages our groups, I was not sure what to write about. We have had groups for so long at Oracle Cerner that we assumed everyone else does ...
Updated 2 years ago
Version 7.0
Blog Post
StanGromer happy to answer your questions!
- How do you moderate the groups? - We require anyone requesting a group to do moderation of said group. Our team is relatively small in comparison to our community and we rely heavily on our group owners to manage their groups.
- What’s the largest group hubs you have? What’s the average? - Our largest group has ~8700 members and we have several others in the 6 and 7K range.
- How do users find the group hubs? Do you do any recommendations of sorts to drive the right folks to the right groups? - This was a problem in the past. When we migrated to Khoros we created a Suggested Groups page. When a member completes their profile and populates a Function and Product Offering field we then display a listing of groups to them based on those selections. It has helped some but we have quite a few members who haven't updated their profile so there's a gap. We have plans to integrate with Salesforce to auto-populate those fields later this year though.
- How do you decide when it’s time to close down a group if it isn’t going anywhere? We try and do semi-annual reviews, or at the very least annual reviews, of the community to see if there are groups with no activity in the last 12 months. If there are we archive them. We just have an Archive category that we move everything to for right now. Since we purged a lot of data prior to our migration there aren't a ton yet so in another year we will need to clean up the archive as well.
- What happens when a group owner ghosts the group? Ideally there is more than one group owner so that doesn't happen. However, it is a thing unfortunately. We find when this happens the group is likely not being utilized anyways and typically gets archived when we do our reviews.
- How are you measuring success with the groups? This is a hard one right now as we are still working on our analytics. In the past have looked at participation (# of posts, unanswered questions, etc.)
- What’s your archive/delete process look like for old group hubs? Do you delete the nodes and content when done with them? - The same as above, we have an Archive category we utilize to move stuff to.
- Any cool technical customizations you’ve done to make life easier or improving the experience within hubs? - We have created some custom content components for our group hubs and added a tabbed layout. I'll add a screenshot in a separate comment to show you.
- Are you using email invites or private message invites for hubs? If you’ve tried email, what results have you seen over messaging? - I just enabled the email feature last week so I don't have a lot of feedback on that. Historically the group owners have invited by username (private message) or if there is a large amount we have done an import via the admin console.
- how big is the team supporting Groups? - Our development team is me, 5 developers, and a project manager.
- When Khoros has functionality broken like not being able to invite over 1000+ users for months into a hub, how do you work around those bugs/limitations with such a large user base? (If it impacts you at all?) - See above regarding invitations.
Our Group Info tab has an announcements widget and a formatted text widget for group owners to provide any information they need to display about the group up front.
The Resources tab provides product-specific information the group owners can link out to. The resources can be edited and there is a list of icons the owners can select from to use based on the resource they want to display.
The Reporting tab only displays to group owners and generates basic information about the group. This is a snapshot view while we continue to build out our more in-depth reports in Power Bi.