One of my observations from a year of using inSided is the gaps the platform has with automation. Many activities are still largely manual, often require you to work with data sets from exports, or manually select users and reach out one-by-one and don’t help community managers scale their efforts. I’d like to see inSided invest in more community automation. Some examples:
Onboarding
You can send a welcome email (per system emails) but little outside that. While we’ve gone off and built an evergreen onboarding via email, there is nothing that allows you to trigger a series of messages to onboard new members and make them feel welcomed and supported. There’s also no easy way to @ mention new members that have joined and pull them back to the community (highly manual today).
Engagement and re-engagement
This is such a critical issue, but there is little in the platform to help here today. Whether that’s encouraging members to engage some or more in the community, making it easier to shout out and @ mention top contributors and new members that have joined, prompting members for feedback, effectively targeting members to take in events and/or resources, identifying and nurturing lurkers into contributors, or even supporting and encouraging active members to become champions. On the re-engagement side, nudging and re-activiating dormant members, or encouraging top contributors who have become inactive to get re-engaged. While you can “hack” some of this, it’s far from efficient.
Surveying
While you can do posts and link out to a survey or run third-party tools to collect feedback (as we do in our community), there’s no great ways to gather feedback from members — whether channel specific or to understand member interests and needs.
