Hey inSided folks.
Do any of you have private groups set up? I’d love your input on this topic.
We have several enterprise accounts that my company service. Some have expressed interest in using our community, that we launched 3 months ago, to connect their own employees with each other to help guide them through a large onboarding project for my company’s software, and help get their questions answered.
I’m building a pros and cons list as I need to evaluate the opportunities and risks involved: i.e. Opportunity: Increased ticket deflection
Risk: A large number of users may only share in their private group and not to the wider audience
Would love to hear if you also use private groups and how it’s working out.
Thanks
Setting up and moderating private groups
Userlevel 3
+1
Userlevel 3
+2
Hi
Very interesting topic. 
This is something I have also championed as a CSM in a previous life. I will add that while we do not currently do this, as w emerge more into Gainsight and get more multi-product accounts I think it is definitely worth exploring, so have it on my radar. 
For sure it will be more successful if there is an individual from the customer who is bought into the community and willing to champion its use.
The Benefits I see are:
- A single location for all communication with Clients
- By keeping all content in one place that is customer specific, it maintains legacy conversations and materials.
- For large clients with multiple teams engaged, it can help keep those teams in contact with respect to your product / service
- Engage internal champions who can help with self-service / case deflection
- Encourages Community engagement and activity, they need to log in to view any information
- CSM/Support can also be members and be notified when topics/questions are opened
The drawbacks:
- Could cause a sub community (combatted with curation and encouragement to create public content when NOT sensitive to company)
- Customer sensitive information could be shared in non private setting (good user education on what goes where needs to be addressed)
- Just become another avenue for support rather than an enablement channel
Just a few of my ideas, but happy if someone else would chip in.
Userlevel 7
+4
Hi
I love that you are considering groups. I’ve been dabbling myself into groups since the past few months on our community side 
We do have a few private groups on our community, and these are very specific to a product related discussion that we want to have with some selected members.
I also had a learning not too many months ago where we saw the opportunity for a private group to turn into a public group as the topic of interest started positively having more scope for larger community benefit.
Few questions that I tend to double-check before launching private groups are:
- How does the lifespan of this group look like? And by that I mean, is it being created only to serve one purpose and then would it shut down? Or are you looking to continue to grow it further long-term? If it’s the latter, the con you mentioned plays a much larger role. In that case, you could internally think of using these useful content that appears within these groups and publishing a generic FAQ of sorts for the larger benefit of the open community space.
- Who has the ownership? I noticed you mentioned about helping getting questions answered. Will this be done by your team or by the enterprise accounts? The ownership plays a major role in guiding the engagement and benefit you want to drive from it as well.
- It might also help to double check and see if it’s really required to have multiple private groups if they all are going to serve the same purpose? I understand they are different companies and it’s the employees who are going to be interacting with each other, but is there a way to make this more cohesive under one group if possible, if it’s serving the same purpose?
Just some starter thoughts from me - I’d love to hear more from others!
Also, I just shared some thoughts on nurturing groups literally like a few mins ago, if that helps in any way! 
Userlevel 3
+1
How does the lifespan of this group look like?
As we’re going to be tackling onboarding in these private groups/categories, then you’re right, we should be looking to create as much generic content as we can so that it can be visible to all and used again and again.
Who has the ownership?
Great point. This will need to be agreed with each enterprise customer.
It might also help to double check and see if it’s really required to have multiple private groups if they all are going to serve the same purpose?
Yes, we will need one sub-category per enterprise account for the purpose of sharing sensitive information.
Thank you both for this. It’s so helpful to sense check these things and consider all avenues. 
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