Looking for ideas on the best setup for a temporary stories sharing event

Hey ​@jvdc 

This is something we’ve been utilising more and more within our platform over the last year. 

One set up could be, you open a public article on your platform inviting interested users to participate. 

Then, you could create a ‘hidden group’ (which is invite only) for those interested. This group space could then be your ‘safe’ space for like minded users to express themselves as they wish without the worry it’s public for the wider community?

We’ve been doing this as a means of utilising our platform with our wider business, creating these hidden invite only groups to facilitate direct B2C beta trialing, research and feedback methodologies. 

Hope that makes sense and is anyway helpful to what you were potentially looking for?

Hey ​@BradleyOVO thanks! We want to keep it quite open for anyone to share so at first I thought the private group option was not a good one, but I like the idea of “safe space”

We have done a couple of AMA style events where we set up a public category for people to post questions for our product managers. We locked the category for new posts after it was over but left it available for people to view.

It worked really well, but I'd suggest recruiting a few super users in advance to post during the event. Having some activity right away helps get the discussion started and makes it more likely that others will participate.

We have a fairly small Community (under 10k members), so what we’ve done in this situations is dedicate a single Topic thread to it. We’ll post an announcement elsewhere, launch the thread, and invite people to post in that specific topic. For us, that has kept everything nicely consolidated without have to build anything new. Especially now with threaded replies, that allows people to interact around specific replies without each one needing to be a separate topic.