Hey all, hope everyone’s doing well?
I’m wondering if anyone out there is using a customer advocacy platform alongside their community, something like Influitive for example?
If so, how’s it going? Where are the boundaries, if any? Any traps to avoid?
cheers
Nick
Do you know the Blackbaud community? I believe they still use Influitive for advocates and small world labs for community. Holly Herbert just did a presentation on how the two programs play together. I don’t think they are in this space, but you can find them on the CMX FB.
We just ended our Influitive subscription to opt for a space in Jive. Jive definitely cannot do what Influitive can, and the program is really struggling. Can’t fully blame platform though, as we’ve lost some ownership of the program concept in general. Before we had it where challenges were all in Influitive, but they had the forum/messaging functionality turned off, so that all conversations stayed in community.
Do you think it only works when everything is on a single platform?
I’ve been really curious about this.
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?
Hey @Kristen_Gastaldo,
I’ve been debating this a lot too. I’m still not sure where I stand. I was looking at Influitive’s platform recently and thinking ‘yup, I can see how it makes sense to have a separate place for this’ - but it’s another habit that people will have to adopt, and I can see that being pretty hard. Very curious to learn how other people have dealt with this.
My feeling is most communities need to decide what their real goals are and pick a platform to match. Advocacy = Influitive (maybe) etc…
I’m not sure most have that today. All in one analytics is interesting. What do you do with those analytics?
This is part of my issue with it conceptually - Influitive is a GREAT platform for advocacy, however it is, as you say, another place to go and another habit people need to form. We have it set up so that it’s only accessible via our Community and the SSO from there and from a UI perspective we’re just trying to set things up so it’s as easy as possible to slip back and forth between the two - blurring the lines a little if you like.
We’ve literally just launched and whilst it doesn’t sit under my jurisdiction it’s going to be very interesting how the cross-pollination evolves. Obviously the launch it drove more people logging in - we had around another 225 log ins on day one and not much less than that on day 2 - I have already seen some of those people responding to the other content we have in the Community and a couple have posted for the first time - for me it’s about trying to capitalise on the extra traffic and show people what other value we can provide them.