Allow members to view a Community Directory

Hello @adam.ballhaussen thanks a lot for this idea. Could you give some examples of user where end users are trying to find another member? What are they trying to acheive?

Hi @Marion Frecaut, happy to share some examples! Here are a few use cases where a sort of “member directory” could come in handy:

1. Docebo employees looking for customers - while we’re able to utilize the SF integration to find contacts with community members, it would be great for our employees to be able to search directly for their own customers who are members in the community. Additionally, it can sometimes help them to search for members with specific profile information that might pertain to a question they have or group they’re looking to form.
2. Docebo customers looking for other customers - it’s common for our customers to want to find others like them. I could see it being really beneficial for them to filter by different criteria to find users similar to them, or to simply search by name/company/region/etc. This will help strengthen connections within our community and help members network with one another.

We have built out our About sections on member profiles quite a bit. We ask a lot of important questions that help us understand who our customers are, how they use our product, what they’re interested in, where they are, etc. It would be great if you could build a search/filter option that would allow you to search/filter for these fields in inSided!

Please let me know if you have any further questions about the idea

Thanks a lot for sharing this detailed feedback :)

We have similar use cases to @adam.ballhaussen. 

Here’s our POV: 

Our first priority for our Community is connect customers and experts to each other. Content, conversations, and events are way to do that … but not our ultimate goal. We’re event-reliant right now, because nothing beats live connections, but we’d like to become less event reliant. 

This was a major factor in our evaluation of platforms, but most in the market don’t do this well. The one that does it the best didn’t have some of the table stakes items we needed, so Insided was our best option. What we like about what Insided offers is a lot of flexibility in building out user profiles, direct messaging ability, etc. Adding a way to more easily search and find others in the community would unlock a tremendous amount of value for fostering connections and relationships *on the community. 

With specific communities like the ones most of us run, there would be tremendous value in enabling easier member discovery, as it’d be a significant step towards the “Linkedin in for [niche community]” vision that is often pitched to me by customers, colleagues, and stakeholders. We have the profiles, we have the messaging … we just need a simpler way to search and find people. 

Agree this would be helpful and love the idea of having a way to find and connect, but would also want to be cognizant of privacy and make sure we take a privacy-first approach with this.

We shouldn’t expose details of community members lightly and for some, would want to be cognizant of implications such as spammers grabbing lists, competitors seeking out names of customers, etc. 
 

And to effectively use filtering some fields would require better data controls — for example “North Carolina” or “NC” or “nc” could get messy. 

I would also like to advocate for this. One of our community’s core pillars is networking, and the ability for members to be able to opt-in to a networking directory would be powerful. In particular if they could choose from a series of fields like location, organization, sector (important that these are drop down selectors rather than free text entry)

I’ve had 2 more requests for this feature since my last post - really need this one! One of our members did say that they would like the ability to opt-in to this directory during registration and in their profile settings.

+++++ @adam.ballhaussen 

We are going to use Meetsy for this and networking but concerned that we are confusing our members by introducing another platform.

I see Hubspot’s Community is offering this - here is a great example of what we would need: 

https://thespot.hubspot.com/explore-members?utm_campaign=The%20Spot&utm_medium=email&utm_content=314998066&utm_source=hs_automation

@Marion Frecaut any update on where this idea is in your roadmap?

cc: @Jacinda Espinosa