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Learning is a social activity. Be it any age, field, industry, interest, or anything - as beings of intellect and curiosity, we learn best in the company of others. An irrefutably innate quality that we share. But in a tech-dominated world, learning has become isolated. Professionals and kids alike face the challenges of not being able to deconstruct certain concepts or have a tangible approach to be able to do so. What makes it worse is the inability to ask someone or consult someone immediately if you’re learning in a closed environment.
But with the advent of online communities, there are platforms that allow people to communicate as if they were right next to each other. And Ed-tech companies are giving rise to cohort-based learning communities that leverage community platforms to bring people together. This gives birth to community-based learning which leads to profound experiences that are supported by courses, tutorials, guidance, discussions, and knowledge-sharing. With online Edtech communities, you can sit in the comfort of your home and still open the door to shared learning that is powered and inspired by communities. It’s a win-win.
This will undoubtedly lead to a boom in Ed-tech and professional communities, further leading to growth and multi-dimensional community-based learning. As more people become a part of learning communities, although it’s the desirable outcome, it produces a new challenge for Edtech community builders to be able to manage and keep the same level of value-driven learning afloat.
The most vibrant aspect of being a part of a learning community is that you can communicate anywhere. This means the members don’t necessarily just stick to a single platform for interactions because learning transcends that. It’s multi-dimensional. But this also makes it difficult for an Edtech community manager to be able to reach out to them individually. And shifting between platforms just to communicate and get your message across is not a very productive use of their time.
Threado lets you engage with members wherever they are with Outreach. Connect with them on Slack, Discord, Discourse, Twitter, Github, or just use emails instead. And our email capabilities come without the hassle of having to upload CSVs every time you send one and you simply have to use filters to define recipients. There’s always the option to upload a CSV if need be.
What this does is it strips away the manual process of engaging with your members with different tools and gives you everything in a single powerful tool from a single tab on your browser. It’s that easy.
As your Edtech community scales, there has to be a system in place that isn’t restricted by manual dependencies. If you have a hundred members joining your community every day, you can’t spend all of your time simply welcoming and getting them accustomed to the community. Even if you do, it’s not a very good use of your time. Additionally, there are so many other things to worry about - how many members are drifting away, are the discussions adding value or not, are you constantly acknowledging your champions or not, and hundreds of other things that require your attention.
Threado’s automation lets you create elaborate workflows that have been designed specifically for automating community-building tasks like onboarding, activation, engagement, surveys, understanding member interests, acknowledging top contributors, and more.
Ed-tech communities that use Threado as their community’s operating system have implemented various use cases that have now not only saved hours of work for them but also helped drive more value and engagement in the community.
The first touch is a great opportunity for the community team to learn about the needs of newcomers and help them connect with other members of the community. But onboarding is a tedious manual process, especially when you have new members joining in every day. And being in an EdTech space, it’s essential to give new members a helpful guide to easily navigate and comprehend the intricacies of your Etech community.
A good example of an effective workflow can be something like this -
Here’s a simple yet elaborate onboarding workflow you can make with Threado -
How is this workflow setup?
Since automation has been designed for communities, you can create more intricate workflows that are condition-based. Send more personalized messages based on these conditions and drive more engagement with these messages.
The condition essentially allows you to check if a member has posted a message/reaction or not. You can apply this condition after an initial nudge to see if that member has taken any action in the community which can be credited to your message directly. If they have, engage them with messages that can offer more value and if they haven’t, nudge them again to try and interact in the community. This way, you can split the same workflow to incorporate more personalized messages that are relevant to members.
How is this workflow setup?
Especially in an EdTech community, there’s quite a bit of diversity. People are looking for resources and others who are relevant to their interests. There’s no better way to understand a community member than to ask for their preferences and share information with them that’s useful.
Threado allows you to automatically conduct elaborate surveys and record the responses which you can later use as a filter to target members accordingly. For example, you can nudge members towards signing up for courses and ask them if they’ve enrolled for it or if they need any help. Or better yet, you can even ask them what they’d be interested in and share relevant training material or targeted courses.
This can be a great way to tailor your interactions and offer more value with each message. Resultantly, the more value a community member finds, the more likely are they to become active contributors and even advocates of your community.
Here’s an example of a survey-based workflow that you could setup -
How is this workflow setup?
When you create intricate workflows that function on their own, it shouldn’t be another task for you to identify members who’ve been enrolled in that workflow. You can use tags in workflows to automatically categorize members. This works best in combination with conditions so members can be tagged when they match a condition.
A good use case of how to use tags effectively is to check to see if members have posted in the community and tag them accordingly as “active” or “dormant” users. Use this tag separately to send outreach campaigns or setup automations to send targeted messages.
Here’s an example of a workflow you can setup to tag members based on conditions -
How is this workflow setup?
When you tag members, the eventual goal should be to use those tags as a trigger condition to make the most efficient use of them.
A good example of this could be using surveys to check if a certain ‘ask’ has been completed by members. These members could be those who have been tagged based on their interests and now you want to see if they’ve completed a certain course, meeting, training, etc.
Here’s what the workflow might look like -
How is this workflow setup?
NPS surveys can be an effective way to get member feedback without being very intrusive. People might not always have the time or the willingness to fill out a form or even type out a message but an NPS survey is quick and is an instant representation of how your community members feel.
A good use case for an NPS survey can be right after finishing a course to understand what members think of it. You can directly use the template to conduct an NPS survey.
How is this workflow setup?
As an Edtech community, it becomes essential to provide members with relevant information and not generalize things. The more targeted your approach is, the more value you offer to members. But to personalize interactions, you need to understand your community member’s interests first.
Setup a workflow to understand member interests and tag them accordingly to create peer groups based on those tags.
You can simply use the ‘Understand member interests’ template from the automation dashboard and set this up. Here’s what the workflow would look like -
How is this workflow setup?
What you can do with automation is limitless if you make good use of a combination of filters. Target members based on activity levels, platform, participation, specific channels, and more.
A good use case that comes forward with this is targeting members who were active but recently became inactive in the community.
How is this workflow setup?
As we mentioned earlier, Threado is a multidimensional product that understands the needs of community builders. We also understand that people who are part of a community, especially in an industry like Edtech, are not only restricted to a platform or a single mode of communication.
Outreach by Threado enables you as a community builder to reach out to members through email campaigns and engage with members wherever they are. And you can do this without the hassle of uploading CSVs of mailing lists and simply use filters to define your recipients.
Emails can drive more attention toward your community initiatives so it makes sense to promote essential workshops through Outreach and get more members to attend or at least even be aware of them.
You can use one of the email outreach templates under the ‘Events’ category. Otherwise, you can always draft an email from scratch using the visual builder in just a few minutes.
Here’s how you can send it out in 3 simple steps -
1. First, you have to setup your email outreach - add sender details, use filters to define custom recipients, and give a good subject line.
2. Now, add your content. If you’ve selected a template, you can edit the existing content and customize it for your community/event.
3. The final step is to review the outreach email. You can send test emails and go back to edit anything if need be. Next, you can send the email now or schedule it for later.
One of the most common yet effective use cases of outreach is to send weekly newsletters or weekly community updates. This is even more critical for Edtech communities because all members should constantly be updated regarding all cohort-based courses, training, upcoming events, resources, and more. A weekly email update gives all members a structured detail so they don’t miss out on the essentials.
Here’s how you can easily set it up -
Outreach capabilities also extend to Slack and you can use it for posting messages in channels or also send them as DMs to members.
A fun use case is to post icebreaker questions to channels and let members interact with one another to ease interactions. However, if you want to keep the conversation relevant, you can send quizzes or discussion topics for people to share their insights and interact.
In fact, we have a template specifically for this -
1. On the outreach dashboard, use the ‘Fun conversation prompts’ template under the ‘Engagement’ category.
2. After you define the sender, set the message to be sent to a channel and choose from the drop-down which channel(s) you want to send it to.
3. Add your message and then send/schedule it to the selected channels in your Slack community.
It’s great to be in a habit of constantly checking up on your members and ensuring that they’re doing good. Small efforts can go a long way when it comes to community building and prioritizing member feedback can go a long way in keeping your community valuable.
Here’s how you can setup a simple outreach DM -
1. Create a new message on the outreach dashboard and select Slack.
2. Setup the outreach by defining the sender and selecting Direct Message as the mode to send the message. Then, you will have to define the recipients using filters. You can send it to all members or also create cohorts by targeting inactive or active members or with other filters.
3. Next, write your message and make sure it has a personal touch to it.
4. Review the outreach and send/schedule it.
Threado’s token-based scoring system gives you the option to gamify your community and reward members. Members get rewarded with tokens based on their level of activity, these tokens determine an aggregate score for them, and the score can be customized to categorize members in varying levels of activity. There are levels 1, 2, and 3 and you can personalize the score required to move to the next level.
This a great way to know who are top contributors in your community, the champions, the average users, and finally the inactive or less active users. Use level as a filter to target members accordingly and reward members with the highest scores.
Here’s how you can customize and use the scoring system.
1. On the Members dashboard, you can Configure Levels for your community.
2. You can define the number of tokens to be awarded for actions. On the other tab, you can segment users based on their scores.
3. On the main dashboard, you’ll see the scores - Help, Engage, Encourage, and Total - for each member along with their Level of activity.
You can access all the messages from the community in a single place from the Activities dashboard.
Not just that, reply to messages directly from the dashboard without having to go back to your community platform.
Filter based on platform, status of the message i.e. questions, messages with no replies, etc., and specific channels in the community. Threado uses an ML-based identifier to categorize messages that are questions or have been posed as questions to give you accurate data. Use these features to always stay on top of your community and never miss a message.
How you interact with your Edtech community plays an integral role in shaping the progress of members engaging with cohort-based courses and events. Hence, it makes sense to have a way for you to identify members of your community to create custom cohorts and take action accordingly.
Threado allows you to use a combination of filters to offer flexibility in customizing member cohorts based on various parameters. For example - filter members who were active in the last month but became inactive in the last week. These are recent dormant users who you can activate by sending personalized DMs.
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