How to use Organizations in Orbit

As you grow your product community beyond a few highly engaged members, you’ll notice many new members joining from a handful of companies. Members from the same organization typically have similar goals and interests and can help you better define and steer community content and events. Organizations are powerful forces in your community because of the gravity they possess and the types of downstream opportunities they provide for teams like sales, marketing, partnerships, and more. They are also more likely to be paying members of your product.

The Organizations tab in Orbit makes it easy to keep track of members from the same company and build a company profile with unique website and social media accounts. It also helps you keep track of which members within a company you’ve interacted with, identify advocates, and provide context on where they work so you can effortlessly pick up conversations where you left off.

How Organizations work

Organizations are automatically created when you import a member just using an email address, company social media profile, or any other information linking them to an organization.

1️⃣ Organization profile

The Organization profile summarizes key information including organization type, industry, size, and estimated revenue along with a short description of who they are and links to social media accounts like LinkedIn and Twitter.

2️⃣ Member activities

The Member activities tab shows the latest activities conducted by community members in the organization. This helps you get up to speed on what’s happening within each organization and understand which members most recently engaged with your community.

3️⃣ Members

The Members tab is a list of all the community members in the organization. The halos around each member profile represent their Orbit level, a quick way to understand how engaged they are.  The “Presence” column shows the pattern of the member’s activity over the past 365 days. “Last Activity” tells you the last time they were active. Sort the “Last Activity” column by Most Recent or Least Recent to see which members have been seen the most recently, and which ones were seen first.

4️⃣ Member notes

The Member notes tab collates notes from members into a unified view across the organization.

5️⃣ Organizations API

The Organizations API enables you to grab organization data to use it in your scripts, reporting, or export it to other systems. You can:

• List all Organizations in a Workspace
• Get an Organization by ID
• List all the Members of an Organization
• List all the Activities performed by Members of an Organization

How to use Organizations

There are endless ways to use organizations, but I’ve gathered three examples to help get your creative juices flowing to help understand what is possible.

Personalize the member experience

Understand which companies are the most active in your community with detailed information on organization revenue, size, and industry. Build a spreadsheet using the Organizations API to slice and dice organizational information by members and activities to better understand what topics and events resonate most with different organizations. Use that information to create more targeted content that will impress, engage, and grow membership.

Qualify leads with community teams

Sales teams can use Organizations to understand which companies and members the community team has engaged to see which companies would benefit from a sell or upsell. Account Executives can read Member notes created by the Community Team in addition to their own discovery to identify points of contact and potential internal champions to start a warm conversation.‍

Tips for responsible sales outreach

Communities are inherently built on trust. If members do not believe their trust is respected by your company or is being used purely for sales purposes, you risk harming your community’s reputation. To responsibly engage community members, there are a couple of guidelines we recommend sales teams stick to:

• Sales teams should ask the community team for an introduction to a member.
• Sales should not email a member who has not taken steps on their own to contact sales without first consulting the community team.
• If members do not wish to be contacted, the community team can use a member tag like “Opt-Out” or leave a note in a member profile to ensure sales do not attempt to reach out.

Elevate Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy

Organizations can help companies build a more data-driven GTM strategy. Orbit can help identify organizations to partner with, co-market, or invite to speak at an event. Marketers can use Organizations to see which companies are active in the community and find detailed information about their operations including revenue, size, and industry for analysis. Product Marketers can use this information to build messaging, positioning, and personas.

Organizations are an excellent way to understand the key companies who are active in your community and surface different actions to take that will help add momentum to the flywheels in your community. To learn more sign up for Orbit for free and explore Organizations within your community or join one of our community events to learn how you can use Orbit to grow your community.