Guides

Rather than have people check Orbit each day to see what is happening in the community, you can set up Slack notifications so that your team can notified about the community directly in the company Slack workspace. This makes it easy for non-Orbit users and even non-community teams to stay in tune with community happenings.

In this guide, I will walk how a few different teams might benefit from Orbit’s Slack notifications, and how you can set them up.

There are so many things a community team might want to be notified about, but the most important thing is to stay focused. One way to do this is by creating different Slack notification channels for different initiatives (i.e. for specific events, programs, etc). You can also create different Slack channels for different team members so that people can choose what they want to be notified about.

We don’t want to be too prescriptive in how you should set up notifications for your team, but here are some ideas we’ve gathered from our users about useful community notifications

The Sales team may find community notifications useful for understanding the community engagement levels of prospects. This can help Sales have a better timed conversation when prospects are actually interested in learning more from the team.

For Sales, we recommend creating a prospects member tag in your Orbit workspace and tagging all members that Sales wants to follow with this tag. You can find members to tag by searching for specific names, using the filters on the members tab, or creating a workflow that will automatically tag members that meet certain criteria.

Then, figure out which key activities the sales team wants to follow. Ideas for activities to follow includes:

Now you have enough info to set up your notifications. Follow below for the step-by-stepy:

Staying in touch with community activity of product users is a great way for the Product Team to understand user sentiment towards new features, identify beta testers, find people to interview, and more.

To start creating useful notifications for the product team, it’s helpful to first tag all product users in the community with a product user tag. You can identify these members by filtering for those with a product event or by importing a CSV of product users (that includes the product user tag) into Orbit.

Next, determine which key activities the product team wants to follow. Ideas of activities they might care about include:

Now that you’ve identified the activities you want to get notified about, follow the instructions below:

There are so many other teams that can benefit from community notifications, including but not limited to Customer Success, Support, and Engineering.

Here some of the ways each of those teams might benefit from Orbit’s Slack notifications

The approaches I’ve explore here are just one way to get notified about the community. As always, talking directly with the teams you want to help is the easiest way to find the monitoring style that works for them. I hope this guide helps you help others make community an integral part of their work process.