A full, comprehensive guide of the fundamentals you need to get started with creating your first Returning.AI community. If you’re at a loss on how to optimize your community, this is the course for you!
TOPICS
🪪 Setting up Roles and Channels
Start With the Building Blocks of Any Community
The first step is to get your community talking. By understanding Roles and Channels’ role in your community, you can create multiple communication avenues that facilitate different forms of conversation.
This course will help you understand Roles and Channels and how they can be combined to create unique communication spaces that fit your community’s various needs.
Let’s get started.
Understanding Different Types of Channels
Returning.AI utilizes 6 different channel types that help you keep conversations interesting.
The 4 Basic Text Channel Types are as follows:
- Open Channels: For basic text-based communication
- Whisper Channels: An anonymous channel where community members cannot see each other’s messages, only those sent from assigned team members.
- Announcement Channels: A restricted, one-way communication channel.
- Direct Message (DM Channels): Allocate a select few team members with whom community members can engage in direct, private conversations.
The 2 Multimedia Channels are as follows;
- Audio Channels: A hub for real-time audio interaction.
- Video Channels: Video calls, complete with screen sharing, enabling vivid visual communication and collaborative work.
Using a mix of different channels within your community can help you broaden its functionality. The way your channels are set up controls the types of conversations that can be had between community members and team members.
For example, a Direct Message channel can be utilized as a customer support channel. Community members would gain direct access to your team members, and you would control access to these channels and who they speak to.
A Whisper channel is an excellent way to keep things anonymous, suitable for conducting discussions and Q&As in a space where community members can be more open without fear of their messages being seen by others.
Creating multiple ways for your community members to communicate with one another and with you is the first step in ensuring your community serves a core purpose—facilitating Active Communication.
Embedding External Content within Your Community
Often, your community is not the only touchpoint between your clients and your business. Alongside accessing your community, clients retrieve information from your website, book appointments with Calendly, and view lessons on YouTube on the side.
The problem with having various pieces of your business hosted on separate platforms is the trouble your clients have accessing them.
By enabling iFrame embedding on select channels (Text, Whisper, and Announcement channels), you’ll be able to integrate all your external content within your community. This will not only make information easily available in one centralized location but also keep your clients’ attention centered on your community.
iFrames Chatrooms can also be toggled on so that the conversation continues even on content-embedded channels!
Here are just some examples of content that you can embed within your community
- Websites
- Booking, Appointment Sites (e.g. Calendly)
- Videos (E.g. Youtube Playlists, Loom)
- Browser Games
- Surveys & Forms
Roles for Community Organization and Access Control
Now that you understand how channels work, let’s jump into community roles.
Roles help you control certain user actions and member access to different channels within your community.
Roles are individual labels that can be allocated to members of your community. They are an easy way to organize your members into organized groups to which you can assign various permissions.
Creating roles such as; Customer support, Moderator, Community Manager, etc. for your team not only helps community members quickly identify each team member’s responsibilities within the community, but it also helps you easily control posting permissions to your various channels.
For example, we recommend allocating team members with a Customer Support role as messengers on a Direct Message (DM) channel. This ensures that only they can receive messages from community members, preventing an influx of customer inquiries from flooding your entire team.
Creating a Tiered Access System to Drive Incentive
Another way you could leverage the access controls that roles give you is by creating a tiered role system in which permissions get more exclusive the higher one goes. By gating off access to specific channels, you’ll create an incentive for your members to want to achieve higher tiers within your community, which drives up engagement.
Here’s a quick example of what that could look like for your community.
- Create multiple roles that would reflect a tier-up system (e.g., Bronze Tier, Silver Tier, Gold Tier, VIP)
- Create multiple channels containing special perks and/or services you would like to distribute to your community members (e.g., Online Courses, Limited Vouchers, 1-to-1 Support).
- Privatize your channels. Decide what rewards each group should have access to, and adjust your privacy settings accordingly. (e.g., Online Courses are only accessible to Gold Tier users or Higher, and 1-to-1 Support is only accessible by VIP users)
This system incentivizes community members to rise through the ranks to gain access to more exclusive perks and services. Depending on the nature of your business, how they advance through the tiers can take multiple forms.
- Connect your community with your client platform with our Login API, allowing for roles to be assigned and upgraded according to platform activity (e.g., No. of purchases, deposit amount)
- Make use of Returning.AI’s Role Assignments to automatically assign roles to members whenever they achieve specific XP requirements.
Related Courses
Advanced Gamification and Automation
Automate rewards, run custom competitions, and integrate gamification into your community.
Boosting Social Media Engagement
Learn to utilize Returning.AI’s social media integrations to grow your social media presence.
Creating Tiered Membership Levels
Create a membership-system by learning to use private channels and configure role access.
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