How did you approach mapping out your community structure?

Great question, ​@Gaby! We recently migrated our community of 150,000+ members from Khoros to Gainsight. Here are a few thoughts (that may or may not be helpful):

• Don’t try to replicate exactly what you have today. As you likely already know, none of the community tools have a 1:1 offering. They’re all different, so nothing is possible exactly how it was before. So part of it you’ll have to shift out of necessity, no matter what. The other part is what you CAN do, with some creativity!
• Dream a bit. I recommend is taking a hard look at your current community and deciding what works, what could be improved, what can be eliminated, what should be added, etc. Essentially, this is your opportunity to push boundaries and deliver the next best version of your community. Step it up a notch and deliver something fresh and exciting to your community members! It’s like moving into a new house. You can to pick which furniture should go in which room - and which pieces just aren’t needed anymore. 
• Get UX Design (or the like) involved early. I started figuring out what would work for us on paper (literally a Word doc), then I walked through it with our UX designer. He used Miro to lay it all out, and we went from there. Coming up with a breadcrumb structure can be hecka hard if you don’t have a tool that allows for something like this. Our UX designer also pointed out best practices, and what to avoid, early on. It was key to have their team on board before trying to build. 
• Don’t assume something can be done. I admittedly made this mistake. I can have a calendar for a certain group only on their specific page, right? Nope! If you have a specific need, clarify that it can work with Gainsight before you build. Otherwise, you’ll have surprises. Plus, Gainsight wants to know your creative use cases so they can adjust accordingly. 

I hope this was helpful! Best of luck!!!

I ran into this problem and had to rebuild everything days prior to going live. You can only have users subscribe via a community forum. We wanted to use the KB but couldn’t given those limitations.

Personally, I used Miro, which is probably similar to Lucid. I mapped out what my ideal community would look like, without even thinking about the platform. Here’s a little screenshot of part of it:

So I’m designing workflows, not navigation or pages. The Automation boxes point to outside processes to connect the community to other resources. Other connections outside the community box point to other teams (what we can do for them and what they need to provide to us).

Then I started to cut it back according to what Gainsight could do and what I would have to customize. For example, they don’t have a Community Champions tool as such, but I could use rankings or roles. They don’t have a Jobs Board page, but I can make a jobs forum that only certain roles can post to.

In the end, I think we got about 70% of what I designed in the initial pass. Since then, I’ve probably got another 10% - plus extra functionality that I didn’t envisage at the time. So this should definitely be a living document that will grow/change over time.

It’s not what you asked, but I’ll mention that the biggest problem we had was in migrating content. We revamped categories, sub-categories, and tags to make it better organized, but our old system didn’t map too well with the Gainsight one, and a lot of things went missing or ended up in the wrong place. Pay a lot of attention to the forms you get from Gainsight and if you have the chance, do some QC on your existing setup before migrating. The better your source data is, the better the migration outcome.

Good luck!

Mark