Community Management
104 blog entries in this category
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One of the advantages of running your own community is that you get to control the branding. Branding is important as it defines and re-enforces your customer's experience. Branding also promotes recognition, it sets you apart from your competition and it provides motivation and direction for your staff. Invision Community has many built in tools to change the look and feel of the community. If you are a savvy coder, you can dive right into the HTML and CSS templates to create truly un- 38,186 views
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Once again, we hand over the reigns of our blog to client and friend to Invision Community Joel for another client view of our community suite. Today @Joel R tackles Activity Streams, and how to make them "your awesome". Activity Streams is one of the best new features of Invision Community 4 with more flexibility and options than ever before. It can be an amazing and easy way to dive into interesting and new content, constantly feed new content to your users, and uncover different- 3,969 views
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Today, we're handing over our blog to long time client and friend to Invision Community, Joel R. @Joel R is often found hanging out in our community offering his insight and wisdom when he's not harassing the team in Slack. Over to Joel. Invision Community releases a variety of blockbuster features in every major update, which usually hits once a year. You may think those updates are not enough (it’s never enough!), but I wanted to spend some time talking about how to survey and- 6,777 views
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It's 2 am, and my bleary red eyes are fighting sleep. My thumbs are still glued to the Playstation controller as I try and persuade my on-screen avatar to complete the level. If I manage it, I've won another trophy. Many of us have been there. Investing a considerable amount of time into a game just to get to the next level, win a trophy or better yet, complete the entire game. I still remember the thrill of finishing Metal Gear Solid. I had become a recluse and lost track of time. Eac- 10,863 views
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Work smarter, not harder is a motto we hear a lot of in our modern age. This is of course great advice. Invision Community's Admin CP is packed full of tools and settings to help you configure your community to your needs. In this short video I show you how you can work smarter in the Admin CP. Dashboard Blocks I show you how create a dashboard perfect for your needs. The dashboard is perfect to show a snapshot of what is happening with your community. Search Bar The sear- 6,238 views
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We often get asked how to create a portal-like home page for a community. A homepage has many benefits including: Showing your best content first By using the "Our Picks" blocks, you can display your best content first. This content sets the tone for the site and will encourage engagement across your site. Display multiple areas of the suite Each application has its own feed blocks that can be used to display content on the home page. If your members use Gallery heavily, then- 39,016 views
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A positive community is a wonderful thing. It's fun to read and almost irresistible to join. You instantly feel welcomed and quickly make new friends. Carefully managed communities tend to be respectful. Individuals may occasionally argue and disagree, but these are short term incidences that do not affect the community. Is this by chance or by design? Your role as a community leader will make all the difference in how your members react to each other. Your community boundaries wi- 39,204 views
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Pages is one our most flexible applications. We use Pages on this site for our news blog, our release list and our bug tracker. We also use it internally to track customer suggestions, knowledge base articles and more. The most common use for Pages is as a simple articles database. With its built in templates, you can create interesting and engaging pages in just a few minutes. This is how we have it configured for this news blog. In this entry, we'll be looking at something a lit- 7,283 views
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Do you have a community but are looking to move to a more modern and feature rich platform? There's a lot of ways Invision Community can breathe new life into your community. With our engagement features, advanced promotion features and mobile ready responsive themes, your members are going to love the changes. Invision Community can power your entire site, from the content management front end right through to your download areas and shopping carts. Imagine not having to juggle a- 5,965 views
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You've no doubt heard about GDPR by now. It's a very hot topic in many circles. Lots of experts are weighing in on the best approach to take before the May 25th deadline. Which reminds me of my favorite joke: "Do you know a great GDPR expert?” Yes, I do! “Could you send me his email address” No, I'm afraid not. I wrote about how Invision Community can help with your GDPR compliance back in December. I've seen a lot of posts and topics on GDPR in our community since- 33,167 views
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If you've already got a Wordpress website, and have recently added an Invision Community, you might want to show recent posts or topics right on your Wordpress site. You might think this involves complex programming and custom themes, but thanks to some Pages magic, it's a very simple task that you can do in under 5 minutes. This very short video walks you through the process. If you'd prefer a written step by step, then head over to our help guides. As you can see,- 41,461 views
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To monetize, or not to monetize, that is the question that preoccopies our administrators! Ok, I'm no Shakespeare, but a vital question community owners are faced with at some point is: can we and should we make some money from our community? Let's first look at the "should we?" Absolutely! You don't need to frustrate your users or risk goodwill by starting monetization. Running a community comes with tangible costs in terms of paying for the monthly cloud plans or license and hostin- 11,111 views
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We were recently asked if it's possible to color code tags - the customer in question used tags as statuses on topics, and so wanted 'resolved' to be green, and so on. Despite being a great idea, this isn't something that is currently possible 'out of the box' - although we'll add it to our internal feature idea list to follow up on later! But just because it isn't built in, that doesn't mean it isn't possible! In fact, with a little CSS, this is quite easy to achieve now. Writi
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There are many different reasons to build a community. It might be based on your business or a hobby. It may be to talk about your favourite sports team. Whatever the content, the key to success is to engage your community. We've been helping successful communities for over 15 years. During that time, we've picked up a handful of tips that we are going to share with you today. Pick one to try this week and let us know how you get on. Welcome every single member A great way to ma- 9,518 views
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When I started creating communities close to two decades ago, getting new members was easy. All you had to do was put up a script, create some "Chat here" forums and email your friends. It didn't take long for word to spread and you had a healthy forum buzzing with conversation. Now, it's different. The internet is a crowded space. No matter what your niche, you will be competing with other businesses for visitors. You need a solid strategy to succeed, and I want to help you. Befo- 4,680 views
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Are you a member of a busy Facebook Group? Do you find it overwhelming trying to sort through all the posts to find something posted the day before? Are you now missing new posts and only seeing them a few days later? Facebook Groups are tempting to use as they are free to set up but is this the best decision for the future of your business? At the beginning with just a handful of members, things may fun fine. But fast forward to where your group becomes busy with thousands of members- 9,565 views
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Despite your best efforts, is engagement a problem for your community? You have your site promotion running well and you are seeing plenty of traffic but it doesn't convert into comments, posts or reactions? Invision Community is a powerful platform that offers layers of complexity for the many sites it powers. When you are struggling to convert page views into comments, it's worth taking a step back and evaluating your site from a new user's point of view. We'll take you through our 6- 6,736 views
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We all know what a pain spam can be. We deal with it daily in our inboxes often relying on clever software to filter it out for us. Even worse, some spam is so well disguised that it can fool you into thinking it is a genuine message. You've put in the hard work with your community. You've used the built in social promotion tools and SEO features to get it noticed. Now that it's indexing well with Google, you've become a target. Invision Community has several tools in its arsenal to de- 5,622 views
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Making security considerations a key part of your community setup and maintenance can save you from many future headaches. You've worked hard to get your community moving. Don't make yourself an easy target and undo that work. Here’s our current advice to our customers. 1. Enable HTTPS HTTPS is fast becoming the standard way to serve websites. In 2016, more than 50% of web requests were served under HTTPS for the first time. Chrome and Firefox now explicitly warn users on- 4,551 views
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Unlike a regular website, where you write content for each page, target keywords and optimize text, a forum community's content is predominantly written by users. They don't know or care about your site's SEO and just want to interact with other users or find answers to their questions. To keep your community moving forward, Invision Community implements many best-practice SEO techniques and approaches for you automatically, without you needing to lift a finger. Even still, there are a- 9,312 views
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Whatever the purpose of a community - be it customer support, fan engagement, interest-based groups and so on - there's usually a need for site staff to communicate important information to users. Of course, in some cases this information is best suited to a site announcement, which by design has a lot of visibility and authority. But it's important that day to day staff posts stand out too. As we'll discuss in future articles, a key part of engagement is that users see your organization'- 5,927 views
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Whether you run an existing community or are taking tentative first steps into setting up an online community forum around your brand, an important choice you need to make is between social networks like Facebook or having a community you own and control. Let's take a look at the benefits of an owned community versus a Facebook group - as well as how you can still use Facebook (and other social media platforms) to your advantage. You own your data The biggest point to consid- 17,819 views
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One of the bigger decisions a community manager has to make as a community grows is whether to employ proactive or reactive moderation (or a combination of both). This isn’t always a conscious decision; sometimes forum moderation features are toggled without giving much explicit thought to the style of moderation desired and the pros and cons of doing so. It’s worth taking a moment to consider the reasons behind each type, and come to a justification for one or the other. Firstly, let’s dis- 12,825 views
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Google has recently been stressing that sites should use secure connections (served via HTTPS) whenever possible. They have recently also started warning sites that collect password on non-secure pages and will also be updating Google Chrome to warn users when a password is being entered on a non-secure page. You can read more information at Google and a good article on Ars Technica. There are two ways on IPS Community Suite to avoid these alerts. Keep in mind that doing nothing will not ca
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