Force subscriptions to all forums/blogs in the community to new users

[adriana4u]

Hello everyone,

Hope you're all well.

I am contacting you to know whether we have any way to make subscriptions automatic for all new users. So, to not be subscribed, they would have to go to their settings and change this. We are planning for all new users, not to the users who might have already their settings ready. 

If possible, of course I would like to ask what you think of this approach?

Thank you so much in advance and have a good week!

[Fellsteruk]

Hey,

my advice would be don’t however I suspect you could do it with a custom scrip upon registration. 

subscription to all forums would mean every user will get a notification for each new topic or post reply regardless if they care or interested. That will get thin and fast. 

id suggest you labour the benefits of subscribing to users and get them to sub themselves, you could maybe do some gamification to drive it up. 

[adriana4u]

Hello @Fellsteruk,

First thank you so much for taking the time to reply!

I understand, it can be a bit complicated if we do so. But what about just blogs? Because we want to increase our blog views, the articles seem to not be opened as frequent as forum discussions. 

Do you have any idea other than this of how we could increase blog views?

[Fellsteruk]

I guess you could do that but will a subscription translate to a view and if it does is it a meaningful view  aka engaged with content. 

What does a view mean to you and your business, what’s the end goal/purpose? 

One suggestion, rather than forced subscription how about better signposting of your blog content in all the areas of high traffic so that users can discover the content on their own terms. 

one example would be adding it to your home page, on my community our latest blog is surfaced on our homepage m along with top TKB, this way the info is always fresh and dynamic you could also add to the forum and board pages you can see my homepage promo here community.talktalk.co.uk

[keckhoff]

If I'm understanding correctly, are you trying to subscribe your members to ALL of the groups in your community or just the ones they join? If you want to subscribe them to all that would be custom work and I would echo @Fellsteruk's comments below of not going with that approach unless you have like one or two groups.

If you are trying to subscribe members to just groups they join, there is an option in the admin settings under Users>Notification Defaults.

 

[JasonHill]

Hi @adriana4u,

I think automatically subscribing newcomers is unlikely to be appreciated by members. 

I think you could achieve a similar outcome of promoting all your blogs using a regular newsletter. We send a monthly newsletter to our community members via Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Obviously the newsletter has a prominent unsubscribe option so members can opt-out if they wish.

Jason

[jennyweigle]

Hi @adriana4u! You posed a great question here, and I want to echo the comments everyone made before me. It's considered against best practices to automatically subscribe members to a specific blog. Some people say it's akin to subscribing users to an email list without them knowing (ugh...don't you just hate it when people do that to you?!). 

I would encourage you to utilize many calls-to-action to promote the blog and encourage people to sign up for it! Here's a few ideas on how you could do that: 

• In your welcome email to new members, say something like "Now that you're a member, complete these simple steps to get the full community experience!" And then list 3-5 steps, with this particular call-to-action being one of them, and include the link to make it easy for the member. 
• Create a custom component with this call-to-action and add that component to the category and thread pages. 
• In any additional emails that go out to members, add a section for this call-to-action. 

Hope that helps! 

[mhock]

@adriana4u 

I would echo others on subscribing to all.  I just had a peer that launched on another platform where this is the DEFAULT setting.  Her super users revolted and she lost half of her activity.

I will say I found your post because we are looking at the possibility of auto subscribing people to our Known Issues and Workaround board so I am happy you posted.  Great to see the discussion. 

[adriana4u]

Hello everyone,

Thank you so much for being so responsive and actually get involved on this discussion because it has helped to rethink some of the structure and get some ideas. 

Definitely understood that subscribing everyone to a blog won't be a good idea and we won't do it, but there's some ideas here that are quite amazing and would love to hear any other thoughts you might have on how to get more people invested on blogs. Because they are invested in discussions however, when it comes to blogs, they don't seem so attracted to it. 

Thank you so much!