Has anyone invited their Partners to Community? Looking for inspiration!

Hi @ryanne.perry - Our community has partners, customers, employees and registered guests. Each user is assigned the corresponding role in our CRM and our SSO brings it over to the matching role in InSided. From there they see the categories we’ve defined for the different roles. For example:

Partners: General discussion categories, partner discussion categories, partner news and announcements, site discussions, partner newsletters, knowledge base, product downloads, etc.

Customers: General discussion categories, news and announcements, site discussions, customer newsletters, knowledge base, product downloads, etc.

Employees: All access with exception being moderator only sections

Registered guests: General discussion categories, news and announcements, site discussions, open newsletters, etc.

Our community was setup this way from the beginning a couple years ago. It seems to work well though our general discussion areas have more traction than the partner only areas.

You are welcome to check out our community at community.acumatica.com. If you want a closer look, feel free to let me know and I can setup a webshare to go over with you.

Regards,

Chris

Partners are very much a part of our community as well (B2B Tech industry) and account for 50% of our active users and drive a ton of engagement via replies and answers. 

Similar tow hat Chris shared, we use our CRM (salesforce) to bring over a custom role (via Zapier) to segment customers vs staff vs partners. However, we’re not yet doing anything significant to segment the experience. 

From my POV, Partners are very valuable if you have the right guardrails and community culture (refrain from marketing/selling), as the “what’s in it for me?” proposition of contributing aligns more to their business goals: company awareness and perception, relationships with customers, visibility in the market, inbound leads, etc. With that alignment, you get more buy-in from individuals’ managers and executive sponsorship of their time to contribute to the community.

(Whereas with customers, you sometimes hit the roadblock of management perceiving community contributions as not contributing to their company’s success, and so are less likely to support, encourage, incentivize customer contributors achieving status and recognition on a community or taking the time to write articles, present on events, serve in superuser or advocacy roles, etc.)

Thank you @Chris Hackett and @DannyPancratz for your insights and time here! It definitely feels like a Partner Community separate from our customers right now to test is the right way to go. You’ve both given me some things to think about as far as approach.