Hump Day: do you use the Clubs feature?

[Square Wheels]

Nope, I honesty have no idea why I would use them.  Seems like I just need a forum for a particular topic.

[Arcade King]

Great idea but no we don't use it. It's hard enough with sites like Facebook taking traffic and discussion away from the main forum.

[LiquidFractal]

I constantly use Clubs and absolutely rely on them for my business, as I create separate spaces for work with different clients - I think they're one of the greatest recent innovations in the Invision suite. 🙂

In terms of improvements: I hate to sound like I'm promoting something against a third-party developer, but I think a core incorporation of at least some of the functionality in the Improved Clubs Enhancements app should happen.  There's lots of potential for growth in the Clubs concept!

 

[IveLeft...]

10 minutes ago, LiquidFractal said:

as I create separate spaces for work with different clients

@LiquidFractal Sounds interesting - could you elaborate a bit on how/what etc ?

Edited February 28, 2022 by Muddy Boots

[LiquidFractal]

35 minutes ago, Muddy Boots said:

@LiquidFractal Sounds interesting - could you elaborate a bit on how/what etc ?

Sure!  I currently use Clubs (renamed "Spaces") for two broad branches of clientele: students and clients for whom I write documentation.

For my students, I create private "Learning Spaces" with forums, a blog, and a media gallery.  Because I discuss works of fiction and films with my students, this works very well as they can post essay topics and general questions and we can have online conversations about them between tutoring sessions (which is a big selling point).  Moreover, they are required to work with films, so posting still shots in a media gallery allows us to have detailed discussions about how shots are framed, what metalanguage can be used to analyse the moment, and so forth.

I'm also ramping up group tutoring options, and Clubs/Spaces are a natural for that  All of my tutoring is online, so I don't know where I'd be without either Clubs or the Invision platform in general. 🙂

For my documentation clients, I use a Download center to hold versions of the projects we're working on.  I don't use forums quite as often for many of these clients (as they prefer to work on Teams), but we do occasionally use them.  Moreover, this allows me to group information on different clients in one place, and as a freelancer the Downloads component allows me to retain my ownership over the content I create until payment is received.

I've also hosted academic reading groups who focus on specific philosophers or concepts, and, like tutoring, the Spaces come in very handy for holding conversations in between reading group meetings.  I've also used them for philosophy courses I've given in the past here at the Melbourne School for Continental Philosophy as a useful complement.

Edited February 28, 2022 by LiquidFractal

[Cannabis Connect]

If there is one major take-away that I have learned from my 10 years of experience as a user of Professional's Networked Community (PNC) platforms... It's that the ability to spin off, or spawn, a group or sub-groups is a feature that few social media sites possess, nor do well, if they do have the capability. IPS has done quite well with their quick provisioning functionality. Perhaps one minor suggestion is to be thinking about the next generation of these "Club" pseudonyms:

I educate new users by directing them to Communities-of-interest or Communities-of-Practice. Under these two basic community segments we can harness cohorts such as the following based on your site's business and community growth objectives:

Industry Cluster - Businesses collaborate using similar or common business models which are determined by an NAICS or SIC code. This allows them to share industry benchmarking data.

Executive Think Tanks (ETTs)

Special Interest Groups (SIGs)

Bird's-of-a-feather (BOFs)

Thanks for your interest in IPS "Clubs" feature!

Phil

Edited March 2, 2022 by Cannabis Connect

[StuartSafe]

On 2/28/2022 at 3:29 PM, opentype said:

It’s a setting for each member group. 

Thanks @opentype I was looking at the wrong thing, found it eventually

[Emediate]

On 1/7/2022 at 7:31 AM, Michael R said:

I moved several of my specific forums to clubs. Folks loved it at first but I rarely see anyone participating in clubs anymore. I am not sure why.

This was my experience too. The members didn't get it. They couldn't understand the advantage of a club, when we could just have another or seperate sub-forum. There was a disconnect between the main forums and the clubs.

In the end we reverted back to traditional sub-forums for more niche topics/areas of interest and disabled clubs.

I wanted to like, I really did.

[Michael R]

On 3/11/2022 at 5:22 PM, Emediate said:

This was my experience too. The members didn't get it. They couldn't understand the advantage of a club, when we could just have another or seperate sub-forum. There was a disconnect between the main forums and the clubs.

In the end we reverted back to traditional sub-forums for more niche topics/areas of interest and disabled clubs.

I wanted to like, I really did.

People have been using my forums as a template for their Facebook groups. They literally used the same names and descriptions from my forums. So I decided to turn those forums into Clubs on my site. But they never used it.

I set up members as Club admins, set up their logo and cover page, wrote their about pages, and invited members. But it went nowhere. All people want to do is post pictures of themselves and collect Likes. ugghhh

[Robert Angle]

On 3/11/2022 at 5:22 PM, Emediate said:

This was my experience too. The members didn't get it. They couldn't understand the advantage of a club, when we could just have another or seperate sub-forum. There was a disconnect between the main forums and the clubs.

In the end we reverted back to traditional sub-forums for more niche topics/areas of interest and disabled clubs.

I wanted to like, I really did.

 

This has been our experience too. We enabled Clubs when it first came out. Initially there was a lot of buzz and several members created their own Clubs, but then it petered out. We disabled Club Forums from appearing on the main index page because with so many it ended up being a ton of clutter, so we feature them on a subsequent page and in sidebar blocks as well as with a prominent link in the masthead but by and large they are dead.

We're in the process of removing the deadest of dead Clubs. When we see what is left, we're probably going to convert them to subforums and just turn the Clubs feature Off.

 

 

 

Edited July 4, 2022 by Robert Angle
spelling

[Davyc]

On 3/12/2022 at 10:48 PM, Michael R said:

All people want to do is post pictures of themselves and collect Likes. ugghhh

This is the mindset of the SM crowd - I just don't get it either, it's banality gone mad.  But it is what it is.

I've just started to use the Clubs feature again but I've modified the look as it wasn't really appealing.

My site is currently offline as I'm making some major adjustments to it, but this is what a club looks like:

Directory:

And when in the club:

It's basically three template changes and a lot of CSS, but they look a lot cleaner.

[Daniel F]

From my own experience it depends on the setup.

There's probably no usage if you're ONLY using forums, but once you use also other content types, it can really help a lot to "categorize" all the different stuff.

I'm also not a fan of allowing people to create their own clubs, instead they can request one which is a just a custom form with a title, description and "internal explanation" field and  it's an administrator/moderator privilege, to control this which really helps to avoid the mess.

 

[Pescao6]

Just got around to start using it for closed forums.
So far so good, easier to work with than changing members' groups.