Hi @KellyBebenek (and others willing to pitch in), do you currently have a workaround in place, eg. a Google Form? 

We don’t most of our groups, we just have to assume they are being honest when joining.  

For beta group - we have them just apply via a form then we manual add them to group. 

As we grow our community to include all of our 140k+ users I won’t be able to manage the beta process with our 20+ groups.  

I attended a Disco workshop (another Community software vendor) and they offered this assessment for all of their groups/pod.  It was also a great way to get feedback from your customer on what they want out of community group.

What I’m curious about, is how to deal with users that fill in the form, but don’t fit the group. How do you envision dealing with this? Any thoughts based on your current experience?

In my vision for enhancing the group membership process, we would maintain the three existing types of groups: Public, Private, and Hidden. For Private and Hidden groups, a preliminary assessment or application step will be introduced, requiring potential members to fill out a brief questionnaire consisting of 3-4 questions. This will aid us in gathering valuable insights about our user base.

The application process can result in one of the following four scenarios:

1. Automatic Approval with Welcome Notification: After applying, members are automatically added to the group and receive an automated welcome notification. The goal here is not to restrict entry but to gather additional information about what members hope to gain from the group.

2. Manual Approval with Welcome Notification: In this case, applications undergo manual review. Once approved, members receive an automated welcome notification. This scenario is useful for groups that have specific entry prerequisites such as certain experience levels or roles.

3. Manual Decline with Notification: Applications are manually reviewed and, if they don't meet the group’s minimum requirements, the applicant will receive an automated notification informing them that they are not eligible to join.

4. Auto Join: They receive a link and automatically join when they click on link with no additional steps required by member or community managers (this is another product idea I’ve created)

If the information they provide could live on the User Card in Control in a new section under Login and Profile Fields.  This information would need to be exportable so we can correlate it.  

By implementing these changes, we can refine the membership process while collecting more targeted information about our community members.

For additonal context, I have a closed customer community and we only have customers complete a user name as part of the registration process to create a frictionless enrollment process.  Being able to collect information like motivation and goals for joining group. 

Thanks so much for sharing @KellyBebenek! This is very insightful.