Invision Community 5: Finding community experts

[Matt]

Long ago, back in the dark ages, forums used the number of posts a member made and how long ago they joined to demonstrate trust and experience.

Is simply posting a lot and being a member for a long time the best way to know which community members are experts?

And is there a better way?

We think so.

 

 

What makes an expert, and why are they important?

Community experts are the keystones to any thriving community. You probably recognise a handful in your community. They tend to be active regularly, are often the first to try and help others with their questions and help set a positive example within the community.

Wouldn't it be great if newer community members could discover who these super users were a little easier? These members trying to find their feet in a new community could follow trustworthy individuals, absorb the positive tone of the community, and even get help a little quicker.

In the past, forums have shown trust and experience through basic metrics like post count and the years since they joined. However, these metrics only show that the individual has been around a long time and posts a lot. It doesn't show that they are potential role models or helpful and trustworthy.

Community Experts with Invision Community 5

Invision Community 5 identifies these experts through metrics such as the number of solutions they have, the volume of 'helpful' votes on their replies, the speed of answers and more.

Each forum will have its own experts, so if you have a very broad community, someone who is very helpful in a particular area will show as an expert in that area only.

When a member has been picked as an expert, they'll receive an email thanking them, and they can then opt-in to be shown as an expert along with a regular notification or email with any unanswered questions in forums they are experts in.

I'm absolutely killing it in the Test Forum

Every few months, the experts are recalculated to reflect the organic way communities grow and change. After all, there's little point in showing that a non-active member is an expert. It might even encourage new community experts to keep up the great work and remain active longer.

Community experts have a badge shown with their posts, along with the option to follow them. Encouraging new members to follow trusted community members should be a core part of any community strategy.

Settings and control

Of course, not everyone should be labelled as a community expert, and perhaps, in very rare circumstances, an existing community expert could have a bad day and not represent the community well.

Invision Community 5 gives you the ability to set which groups experts can be picked from and offers you the opportunity to block existing experts, ensuring they won't be selected again in the future.

Over to you

All communities have to be purposeful and provide value. That value may be in close friendships, or it may be in getting answers for problems you have. Either way, locating the most helpful members will help develop trust, provide guidance and increase knowledge within your community.

For transactional communities such as support-based communities, experts are vital in providing timely answers and demonstrating credibility and expertise to others.

As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Please let us know in the comments.

 

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[Cedric V]

Amazing. Invision keeps on surprising me with every update here. 🙂

Would love to see how this goes into practice on a live community. 

This approach will undoubtedly enhance the overall experience for community members. A general forum might not find this feature interesting, but more niche forums will. Newcomers will find it easier to identify the trustworthy members. Plus, having notifications for unanswered questions in specific areas of expertise is a fantastic way to encourage active engagement.

In my experience, response speed is critical for support-focused communities. But for more general interest communities, it might be the number of helpful votes or the quality of content provided.

[DawPi]

 

That's an amazing feature and will be one of my favorites! For sure!

[FanClub Mike]

Similarly to the Helpful button, I'm really looking forward to this change for a myriad of reasons. Brilliant thinking on having it work on a forum-by-forum basis. Since that's the case, would it work with club forums as well?

Thanks for everything! ❤️ 

[SeNioR-]

Settings:

User Profile 👀

[aXenDev]

Finally I found this "test 1" 😄

[Matt]

3 hours ago, aXenDev said:

Finally I found this "test 1" 😄

You win a cookie!

[Joel R]

Some thoughts: 

- Is there any concern about signing up a member as a community expert in multiple forums? For example, @opentype and @Nathan Explosion tend to be helpful not just in one forum, but in ... all forums.  Reputation tends to be universal for people.  Does this mean that I would (hypothetically) send them an invite to 10 different forums, and they would receive 10 different notifications and 10 emails every week on all the questions they could helpfully answer? Ideally, regardless of they activate for one forum or ten forums, the notifications will aggregate into one.  

- I'm assuming there are language strings associated with this, so I can see communities customize the title to things like Ambassador, Champion, Product Expert, Support Specialist, etc. 

- This was not designed as a special membergroup (but it kind of is! Almost like a secondary membergroups with special privileges!). The drawback is that you can't automate the pathway, when factors like time in the community, number of helpful posts, number of total posts, or completing a course are actually good signifiers and steps of success to community expertise.  Another drawback is that you can't have different variations of these.  We're assuming Community Experts will act and help in only one manner in our communities (aka to answer support topics). 

[Matt]

Quick answer as it’s late but you can select which groups are permissible to be experts. This means you can set up your group promotion rules to move candidates into a specific group and only allow that to be used. 

i have been mulling over the experts per forum and impact on the rest of the community. More thoughts tomorrow. 

Oh and yes, language strings are used. 

[Disruption]

I have to admit I’m super stoked to get my hands on this. Any ETA when we will see Invision 5?

[SeNioR-]

Agent Shark, I think Q1 2024 

Edited November 3, 2023 by SeNioR-

[Marc Stridgen]

1 hour ago, Agent Shark said:

I have to admit I’m super stoked to get my hands on this. Any ETA when we will see Invision 5?

It will be next year at some point. We do hope to have a preview of some sort by the end of this year though.

[Matt]

12 hours ago, Joel R said:

This was not designed as a special membergroup (but it kind of is! Almost like a secondary membergroups with special privileges!). The drawback is that you can't automate the pathway, when factors like time in the community, number of helpful posts, number of total posts, or completing a course are actually good signifiers and steps of success to community expertise.  Another drawback is that you can't have different variations of these.  We're assuming Community Experts will act and help in only one manner in our communities (aka to answer support topics). 

This feature was deliberately separate from group promotions and member groups because we wanted something special that sits along side those things. There are plenty of ways to reward time spent, posting volume and so on through group promotions and achievements.

The community expert featured here is focused around knowledge, accuracy and solutions, which may not be a fit for every type of community.

I also want to move away from things that are possible but need a lot of set up, thought, and management of multiple tools across the AdminCP into something more pre-built and working out of the box.

We have a lot of complex functionality but most of it goes completely unused because it needs a lot of thought and set-up to get the most from it.

Modern communities battle churn, so the longer the pathway towards being seen as trusted, the less likely anyone will remain long enough to complete it.

[TDBF]

13 hours ago, Matt said:

You win a cookie!

The obligatory developer testing code..... because Xdebug isn't good enough! 🤣

[David N.]

This looks like a great feature, I can't wait to have it live. 🙂 

About that sentence in the email: 

Shouldn't it be .... 

Community experts are calculated based on many metrics including etc... ?

[Joel R]

12 hours ago, Matt said:

Modern communities battle churn, so the longer the pathway towards being seen as trusted, the less likely anyone will remain long enough to complete it.

This is serious / not so serious - why not make everyone a Community Expert? Like, upon their first helpful post, they get an automatic invite. What's the actual harm in the long run, if the platform automatically removes / recalculates / kicks them out in a Game of Thrones shakedown? 

Conceptually in terms of a member lifecycle, if a user joins brand new (so there's no past history upon which to make a decision on their expertise), you need enough involvement - whether that is time, posts, engagement, helpfulness, whatever - to make an assessment anyways.  I see this feature allowing community managers to sidestep that assessment (since it's not automated or tied to group promotion) and potentially accelerate the user journey to expert.  How fast can you accelerate users to Expert? Why not accelerate users at their first sign of helpfulness? 

(Note to everyone: I'm not actually recommending this tactic in the real world. This is meant to be an extreme example. If all it takes is a badge and an email with two emojis to turn your users into experts, your community probably shouldn't be using experts anyways.) 

[Robert Angle]

4 hours ago, Joel R said:

why not make everyone a Community Expert? Like, upon their first helpful post, they get an automatic invite.... How fast can you accelerate users to Expert? Why not accelerate users at their first sign of helpfulness? 

You just confused the snot out of me, @Joel R lol 😄

This would be horrible in any of my communities. The last thing I need is a new member making one "helpful" post, and suddenly being crowned an expert, and then the rest of the time they are crazy or off their meds posting all sorts of wild stuff. 

Community Experts would naturally be seasoned individuals with a pattern of helpfulness.

On 11/2/2023 at 9:56 AM, Matt said:

Community experts are the keystones to any thriving community. You probably recognise a handful in your community. They tend to be active regularly, are often the first to try and help others with their questions and help set a positive example within the community.

I can think of who these individuals are on my communities already.

On 11/2/2023 at 9:56 AM, Matt said:

When a member has been picked as an expert, they'll receive an email thanking them, and they can then opt-in to be shown as an expert along with a regular notification or email with any unanswered questions in forums they are experts in.

Sounds like when certain metrics are met, the Admin or Staff is notified and then the person has to be invited. They can accept the offer to be a community expert or not (gleaned from the use of "opt-in", above).

[Brian Garcia]

On 11/3/2023 at 7:02 PM, Joel R said:

This is serious / not so serious - why not make everyone a Community Expert? Like, upon their first helpful post, they get an automatic invite. What's the actual harm in the long run, if the platform automatically removes / recalculates / kicks them out in a Game of Thrones shakedown? 

Conceptually in terms of a member lifecycle, if a user joins brand new (so there's no past history upon which to make a decision on their expertise), you need enough involvement - whether that is time, posts, engagement, helpfulness, whatever - to make an assessment anyways.  I see this feature allowing community managers to sidestep that assessment (since it's not automated or tied to group promotion) and potentially accelerate the user journey to expert.  How fast can you accelerate users to Expert? Why not accelerate users at their first sign of helpfulness? 

(Note to everyone: I'm not actually recommending this tactic in the real world. This is meant to be an extreme example. If all it takes is a badge and an email with two emojis to turn your users into experts, your community probably shouldn't be using experts anyways.) 

That's not how Facebook does it though.