Anyone experimenting with vertical-specific customer experiences?

Hello! I have created custom groups for verticals like Healthcare, Cyber Security, Education ect. Internally, we have moderators that focus on those areas to help push discussions or answer complex questions. They try and meet quarterly, virtually, to build a “community” experience. 

I have also worked at large scale organizations that have custom permissions based on come via login. Those custom permissions “unlock” areas of the community where individuals have access to additional content boards and TKBs based on their vertical. 

Both techniques can work well. People have to find the group to join which can be the largest issue. You also dont have to “gate” the information if you dont want to. A lot of orgs gate the content however to reduce search clutter for those looking for content.

Best of luck in creating your new areas and happy to help provide additional context.

My long reply got picked up for spam. Hoping it comes through soon and you can find something valuable in there for you.

​@Kaveri Mekerira you may want to take a look here.

Using the custom role or segments you can change what widget are visible to what group of users. 

Similarly custom pages, community categories and groups can all be role specific.

We are embarking on a similar strategy ourselves now. We are including the Custom Role in the SSO login process to help control the process.

​@Kaveri Mekerira We haven’t specifically done different verticals, but we have very cleanly delineated product lines, and sometimes we need clear boundaries between users of one versus the other. The widget visibility permissions that ​@Alistair FIeld mentioned have been very helpful for this. Among other things, we use this to present a custom home page search banner for each LOB, depending on the permissions of the user, which helps the site feel unique to them. 

In addition to forums (communities) focused on specific verticals, I would also recommend taking advantage of Groups. From an engagement perspective, they offer a great way to allow community members to specialize and focus on more niche topics and conversations—plus you can create a program to allow members to lead individual groups and facilitate engagement.