There’s no perfect approach to community building but over the years community builders have welcomed with open arms the idea that something as potent as communities shouldn’t be reduced to templatized ways of functioning. From conversations to events and everything in between, communities ooze diversity, which is why you can’t have generic strategies that people eventually end up ignoring.
Since community-led growth has been popularized by businesses as an important growth strategy, the need for goals, insights, and data will continue to grow for measuring the ROI of communities. This will also dictate how mainstream community-led growth becomes, especially for SaaS or software companies. And when companies gradually scale, the communities will scale with them.
But the idea of community management is quite different from the eyes of a community manager. Although the approach to community building still remains human, there are certain things that a community builder is answerable for/needs to ensure that it works smoothly even when the community scales. And these things are heavily driven by numbers, data, and automation.
When you have a larger community to manage, it can be really easy to miss out on important things. These things can often be critical and maybe even a deal-breaker for community members. Not just that, but being constantly aware of your community’s needs can lead to -
A community that functions in accordance with what the members need is already halfway there in terms of becoming an engine of growth and sustainability.
However, you as a community builder cannot be omnipresent. It might still be possible if you have a small community, but larger communities with hundreds of discussions cannot always be stayed on top of. And you can’t always be scouring through our community to know what’s going on - it’s not practical. You have hundreds of other things to take care of. Important things. Coming up with engagement strategies, planning & hosting events, experimenting with new ways to scale, and a bunch of other critical aspects of community building that a manager should focus on.
Since the beginning, we’ve wanted to focus on building a product that caters not just to the decision-makers but more importantly to those who are down in the trenches, experiencing first-hand what community building is truly all about. The ability to automate workflows has helped hundreds of community builders offer more value while saving hours of manual work.
With the addition of Team Alerts, you as a community manager can essentially choose to get notified for the things that are important to you.
Threado gives you a complete view of your community which makes it easier to understand data points and leverage those insights to take actions to setup alerts that are precise and impactful.
Let’s look at a simple use case at how you can get started with Team Alerts. Let’s setup an Alert to get notified when someone asks a question in the community.
Integrate your community platform.
Navigate to the Automations dashboard on Threado and create a new workflow. Let’s name it “Alerts for questions”.
After you’ve created a workflow, you need to define the trigger condition based on which members will enter this workflow. There are essentially 3 ways in which you can setup a trigger condition -
Since we’re setting up an Alert, we’ll select Message posted as the trigger condition.
Now, select “Is question” as the entry condition so all messages that are questions will be identified and entered into this workflow.
Select “Get Slack alert” as the action block after you’ve set the condition.
Now, select which workspace you’d like to receive the Alert on. It’s recommended that you connect your Internal Slack workspace which is better for collaboration and transparency for your team and yourself.
You can also define a custom alert message using custom fields like username, message, channel name, and more.
Setting this up becomes even easier using templates. We’ve picked some of the most common use cases for community builders and made it even easier to setup workflows with templates. All you have to do is select a template of your choice, click on “Use Template” and the workflow will be replicated on your workspace.
These templates are entirely customizable and are only there to make things easy for you!
Community is definitely an important part of our future, but we can’t build something amazing without the right tools. With Team Alerts, the aim is not just to give you and your team the ability to cut through the noise and get notified for what’s important to you, but also to take action as well directly through automation and personalized message to make sure you leverage all of Threado. Together, all this could function as an orchestrated machine that helps you serve, grow, and scale your community.