What is a community?
A community is a subgroup within your organization that can act independently or as a part of the parent organization. Think of communities as departments, each with its own unique way of doing things, but all working together towards a common sustainability goal. Your organization can have any number of communities, and currently, there are no limits on how many you can create.
With Communities, your organization can:
Create small, niche groups based on region, department, subject matter, etc.
Assign a community admin to build unique experiences specific to that community’s interests and goals.
Track global and local impact results to monitor each community’s progress to better the world.
What can a community do?
Assign community-specific administrators to configure new, personalized experiences for a subset of your organization’s members.
Create and deploy additional challenges independently of the parent organization.
Community challenges are only available to members who join the community.
Edit content independently of the parent organization.
For example, if a community admin adds a YouTube video to an action, only community members will see the added video.
Access impact analytics and reports for community-only challenges.
Each community will have its own analytics page and reports for community-only challenges they’ve run.
Note: While community analytics roll up to the parent organization’s analytics, at this time, organization-wide reporting does not include a breakdown of how much each community contributed to overall impact metrics.
If you create a sub-community within an organization, its members can still see the actions and participate in the challenges created by the parent organization. However, keep in mind that members need to join the parent organization first before they can join a sub-community. This is important to note if you plan on creating a community for vendors, partners or any other group.
The Role of Community Administrators
When a sub-group is created in the organization, the administrator assigns community administrators. These community admins have the ability to modify content and view data only for their respective community or communities if they are managing more than one.
Community administrators can:
Invite members to join the community
Or bulk map members to a community
Invite members to join community challenges
Manage community members
Configure and deploy challenges
Edit content for actions
See community analytics
See community challenge reports
Create and schedule in-app and push notifications to motivate members
It is important to note that community administrators do not have permission to edit content or view data for the parent organization or any other communities they are not managing.
Community visibility levels and join requirements options
Admins have a few options as to how a community is discovered by organization members. For some communities, you'll want everyone to see and join, while others may be hidden or available by invitation only.
Public: The community will appear under the “Suggested Communities” view. Members can search for the community, and all members can join the community.
Limited: The community can only be found when members search for it or if members have a link to join the community. It will not appear under the “Suggested Communities” view.
Hidden: The community can only be found with a direct link. Therefore, it is not searchable and is hidden from the “Suggested Communities” view.
Password protected: You can add another layer of exclusivity by requiring interested members to enter a password to join the community. Be sure to share the password in your communication with members.