Our community feature allows you to add an interactive element to your overall MemberVault account, or to a specific product.
Please keep in mind that our community feature is in beta, which means that it's still very limited. This is not a final feature (meaning we have a long list of foundational improvements that we're actively adding), and when using a beta feature, you can expect to encounter occasional bugs.
If you aren't comfortable with minimal features and bugs, please wait to use this feature until it's farther along in development. We'll continue to update account owners as we add improvements to this feature.
Setting up a community only takes a few quick steps as outlined below.
How to Set Up a Community
Log into your MemberVault admin (not sure how to log in? look up your account here), and go to Content > Communities on the left hand menu.
Click the "Add Community" button and you'll see the below window.
Add the name of your community. This will currently show up at the top of your community page, so you can use the name of your product, the name of your business, etc.
For example, we have an un-gated community called Community Feedback, a Product specific community called All Access community (as it's attached to the All Access Membership product) and an inactive Example community that I created for these help docs. (see below screenshot)
Next choose the status of your community. If you're not ready to share your community with your audience, we recommend inactive. Just make sure to flip it back to active once you're ready to share it.
Now you're ready to choose whether your community will be ungated or associated with a product. (see below screenshot)
Choose ungated...if you'd like this to be an account wide community, or one that you can share with anyone that has access to your MemberVault. You can have multiple ungated communities. Content inside of ungated communities are visible, and SEO indexable.
Choose product specific...if you'd like this to be a gated community that lives inside one of your products. If you'd like to have one gated community that multiple products have access to, we recommend setting up a product specific to your community. See a walk thru of how to set that up here.
Next up, you need to set up the sidebar settings for your community.
You'll have the option to set a CTA (call to action) link, a CTA title and CTA content, plus a CTA image (not shown in the below screenshot).
Here are two examples of how the sidebar shows up, depending on whether you've chosen an ungated community or a product community.
UNGATED COMMUNITY SIDEBAR EXAMPLE:
In the above example inside our ungated community, we chose to ONLY have an image and it does not click out. You can see that live here. Keep in mind, you must be signed in to engage in this community. You can view everything without being signed in, but if you'd like to post, comment or like comments/posts, you'll need to sign in.
PRODUCT COMMUNITY SIDEBAR EXAMPLE:
In the above example inside our product community that is part of the All Access membership, we chose to ONLY have text and it does not click out.
So do not feel like you need to use all of the sidebar settings.
Below is how the ungated community sidebar setting looks like in the admin. We used the suggested dimensions of 486px by 486 px. Use this Canva template as a jumping off point.
And below is how the product community sidebar setting looks in the admin.
Once you have your community set up, now you need to know how to share it, how to access to create your first post and understand how notifications will work. This process will continue to evolve -- reminder, this feature is in beta, and is not complete.
You might also want to read - Can I use the community feature with my MemberVault plan?
Questions? Reach out to us at hello@membervault.co, within our Facebook group, The MV Collaborative, or via chat support within your admin account (not sure how to log in? look up your account here).