Nah, I don’t think it’s necessary. I think your advocates program does better when it’s a separate group with separate goals. The nice thing about having it in the same space is that they can earn points for multiple actions (regular activity and specific advocate quests), but then you risk annoying your other members with a point system they can’t access. We just didn’t want to pay for two platforms who do a lot of the same things.
I honestly wonder if we’ve made a mistake with our “jack of all trades, master or none” platforms. We need a good blogging tool, a good forum, a good knowledgebase, and a badass search feature that can cover them all, when members/visitors want to. I get feedback all the time that what we have is just “too much.” They want something scaled back - and maybe they want to go to certain areas for certain things. IE if I wanted to read a blog, I’d go to the blog. This make me (and my community) old and grouchy now?
The real benefit of the all-in-one is the analytics. It’s pretty crucial to see a customer (or member) and see their activity in the forums, case creation, downloads, etc. But that’s the benefit for us - maybe not enough benefit for them.
This is a whole other debate - is all-in-one still the goal?