Using community portal software can be the secret to a highly engaged community, and a highly engaged community offers many advantages to your institution.
Whether your community is internal or external, or whether you’re running a college or a company, you’ll need to have a place where your community can connect, interact, and network.
In this guide, we’ll outline what community portal software is, why it’s important, and we’ll outline some of the main advantages of using this software. Whatever kind of organization or community you manage, these benefits apply to your institution.
Find out how Aluminati can help you make the most of your alumni community.
What is Community Portal Software?
When institutions create strategic communities, these communities can take on different forms, such as student communities for universities, professional networks for companies, or even special information communities for business customers.
Whatever the case, these communities are where people can connect, engage with each other, and access relevant information.
Community portal software is what makes these communities possible. With the right community software solution in place, your members can join the community, connect with other online community members, and access your community content.
Online communities are created with a specific purpose, which is your institution. Within this, you could have various sub-communities. These could cover specific areas of interest or information that different members might be looking for. Your community portal provides a space for community members to search for these different topics that are of interest to them.
Community portal software is generally based around a member directory. This lists all members in the community and makes it easy for members to search for other people and make strategic connections.
6 Benenfits Of Community Portal Sotware
Creating an online community is vital for all kinds of institutions and organizations. However, the success of the community generally comes down to the community portal software used.
Here are some of the main benefits of using specialized community portal software. Use these benefits to help you understand what kind of software and features you should look out for when developing your community.
1. Create A Culture Of Digital Collaboration
Community portal software provides a digital space where people can share, collaborate, connect, and work together. By incorporating a community platform like this into your institution, you’re encouraging a collaborative culture share for people to interact in real-time.
This idea of collaboration can take many different forms and provide many unique benefits. Collaboration could include professional networking, it can enhance recruitment processes or could result in mentorships. Whatever the case, the main idea is that different people can discover the right connections, reach out to them, and be more enticed to stay engaged.
Community portal software with convenient member directories can assist with this idea of collaboration in a big way.
2. Gain A Deeper Understanding Of Your Community
Providing an online portal for your community offers a space to effectively communicate. This means that your institution can gain a great deal of valuable and authentic insights from your community through the platform.
For example, you could open up communities through discussion forums, send out questions/surveys to your members, or encourage social engagement within your community. This all creates a space where your community can share their thoughts and provide feedback – allowing you to learn from them.
Community portal software should be used to target a very specific community with a specific interest., You can use the software to create a broad community, but then you should try to refine this by creating subspaces for different communities to engage around different topics. This creates a different level of detailed information and insight into your members.
3. Share Important Information With Your Community
Online community portals are an excellent way to share information about your institution. This could be sharing details for potential new members, or sharing information to keep your current community engaged.
For example, an educational institution could use a community portal to share detailed information and advice about its curriculum. You could also share important information with students about things like their attendance, schedules, assignments, contact information, and more.
If you have more niche sub-communities within your broad community platform, you could share information that keeps these communities engaged. This could be anything that provides value to them, helping you grow this area of your community portal.
4. Create An Engaged Alumni Network
Whether you’re a university or an organization, you can use your community portal software to create and maintain a strong alumni network.
This is important as an alumni network offers many unique advantages. This includes factors like alumni fundraising or developing larger professional networks to help with rehires and recruitment.
This is where your community portal software comes in. The software should create a space where your institution can share information and engage with alumni. It should also allow your alumni to connect and engage with each other.
With a solution like Aluminate, organizations can create highly engaged alumni networks that help them achieve their goals.
5. Helps Members Make Strategic Connections
In order for your community portal software to add value to your institution, you need to make sure you use it to provide value to your members. One of the best ways to do this is to help your members create strategic connections.
With the right community portal software, you can facilitate networking within your community. Members can use the directory to find new connections and reach out to them. This can add loads of value to different types of communities.
For a professional community, this could be focused on professional network connections. For an education community, student members could connect with other students or even alumni. In both cases, the community could also be used to facilitate mentorship programs, which can add enormous value to your community members.
6. Design Your Community Your Way
Community portal software lets you create communities specially designed to achieve your institution’s goals. Instead of using social media platforms, dedicated community portal software lets you customize your community to match your exact needs.
For example, you can create groups and forums as you need them. You could gear your community towards customers, employees, students, or whoever else you want to engage. Do you need to add file-sharing options? Private Messaging? Add a membership directory? Set up, discussion boards? With an online portal, you can create a customizable portal to suit all your requirements.
This is important in order to achieve the specific community goals that you should establish before setting the community up.
Conclusion
Online communities are incredibly important for all kinds of institutions. They are places where members can engage, access important information, and create strategic connections and networks.
If your institution provides an online community that provides immense value, then you will be able to create a stronger connection with your audience and improve brand awareness.
This all starts by having the right online community portal software.
With a solution like Aluminate, organizations can create customized online communities to match their needs. This includes detailed membership directories, community engagement tools, and a user-friendly solution to community networking.
Find out how Aluminati can help you make the most of your alumni community.
