ArcGIS Hub Premium provides powerful tools for collaborating with your community. You can use Hub Premium to both inform community members and get them involved. Work with stakeholders using custom built-in tools that encourage people to join and contribute to your Hub community.
This article is one in a series of three that collectively act as a guide for successfully managing your community organization. If you missed Part 1, you can catch up on Connecting your community with ArcGIS Hub Premium – best practices part 1. In this second article, we provide seven savvy tips for managing your community organization.
1. Add a community administrator
As part of activating your community organization, you will add an administrator. The best way to add a community administrator is to set up an account for them. This way, you can assign administrative privileges to the new account right away, instead of waiting for them to activate their account.
Update their role from Publisher to Administrator before giving them their account credentials (ArcGIS Online Organization >Members tab). Remember that Administrator is a role and not a user type. The same person can be an administrator for both the employee and the community organization but must have different login credentials for each organization. We recommend that you designate at least two community administrators. Learn how to add another community administrator.
2. Change default user settings if needed
Take a look at the default user settings for the community organization. Log in to the ArcGIS Online organization (as community administrator), go to the Settings tab, and select New member defaults. Change these settings to match the base level of privileges you anticipate community members will need.
- User type and role- we do not recommend changing the default user type or role. They are designed to align with the typical needs of Hub community members and community administrators, such as collaboration and access to content and apps.
- Credits- Members are allowed a certain number of credits. If members will not need to create content, you may want to change the default number of credits. Credits are set and used at the community organization level. Members do not have an individual limit so one member could use half of the organization’s total credits, for instance.
- Esri access- Access to my.esri.com (training resources) is available by default.
- Username format- Customize the default username format if needed. When adding members in bulk, you can also generate usernames that are more descriptive to differentiate community members involved with various sites, initiatives, or groups, or working as volunteers or contractors, or representing neighborhoods. You might also consider setting up categories for members as another way to organize the work of the community organization.
Read about how to configure new member defaults.
3. Add community members yourself
We recommend that you add community members yourself, rather than inviting them. This allows you or a group manager to immediately add the new member to a group and share content with them. All new community members are automatically added to the Community group (generated during activation). Do not change its properties or delete this group.
4. Add and customize sign up opportunities
To make community accounts available to the public, an organization can set up a public site or page that includes sign up options, so that anyone can create a community account. Create separate public landing pages for different issues. Add a Sign up card to the site or page layout with a compelling call to take action that is related to the topic of the site or page: “Share your ideas” or “Stay up to date” or “Volunteer.”
Include clear information with the sign up button such as project goals and how a community member could participate if they sign up. You can use more than one sign up button and include it on relevant pages attached to your site.
Answer common questions about community accounts right off the bat. Link this information from the text around the sign up button to help community members be prepared to contribute productively. Customize these frequently asked questions to fit your needs.
5. Decide how to seek participation
Sign up and other engagement options can be relatively open or closed (public or private) depending on the nature and purpose of your site. You can turn off the Follow button if you want a more focused or selective process for community member involvement. If you are using workspaces (beta), this setting is in the site workspace on the Followers pane (Settings tab).
You can also create initiatives and projects in your employee organization and add or invite specific community members to groups that are connected to these items. Note, it is not possible to prevent community members from creating duplicate accounts based on different email addresses.
6. Enhance the sign up experience
After the call to action, give community members another place to go to share information or learn more. This could include a link to a story, a map-based discussion board, or a Survey123 form. For example, a survey could collect contact information and details on availability to volunteer.
A Survey 123 form can be designed with webhooks to trigger a secondary action such as adding survey results to a spreadsheet or sorting members into groups. This also allows the community administrator to review incoming requests to join the organization, which may be helpful if you have specific needs, projects, or timelines.
For example, a public safety agency may use the community organization to provide identities and access to content that is not public. In such a scenario, they typically do not allow community accounts to be created by disabling community account creation.
The agency may develop a customized process for managing community access to learn about who is using content or to approve access. This may entail a sign up survey with an optional approval dashboard and automation tools to create the account.
7. Set up visitors for success
You can configure a Sign up card on a site or page layout to include a Sign in button for visitors who have an account but are not signed in. You can also set up this layout card for visitors who have an account and are already signed in. Consider including a welcome message, a link to content, or an external link.
Visitors can see that they’re signing in to a secure and official site, as the prompt adopts your organization’s logo (if added to the organization profile).
Provide key details at sign up and sign in such as an informative greeting and a community support contact. People can contact this person with any snags they may encounter. You can also add custom text when configuring the community sign up and sign in such as a sign up welcome message and required terms and conditions.
Learn from related resources
- Find details in the ArcGIS Hub Community web help
- Check out these Time-saving tips for managing members in ArcGIS Online
- Get inspired by these Hub Premium sites
- Learn more in the ArcGIS Hub: Collaborating and Engaging Your Community on Projects tech session
- Sign up for the ArcGIS Hub e-newsletter
This article is part of a series so be sure to read the others (linked below) that expand on best practices for managing the community organization with Hub Premium. Please post your comments or questions on Esri Community.
A special thanks goes to Harshi Dondapati (Product Management); Morgan Miller, Mackenzie O’Brien, and Payten Jarnagin (Professional Services); and Jeremiah Lindemann (Solutions team) for consulting on this article. The 10 tips for growing your Hub community base blog by Katie Thompson also provided ideas and inspiration.
Non-screenshot images are licensed from Adobe Stock.
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