Groups – Creating Special Interest Communities

This capability in the introNetwork System brings the complete power of an introNetwork Community down to the individual Group level.

Each introNetwork is a community that has at least one thread that binds the members; it might be they all work for the same company or belong to the same Association, or they are all going to the same Conference. But the similarity may end there. Groups are a powerful way for your Community to organically divide into smaller clusters for a variety of reasons. Users may want to separate into Special Interest Groups (“Birds of a Feather”) or into Chapters (Departments). An introNetwork Group can provide the diversity of interests that a smaller collection of people within the larger community needs to work together, discuss issues or collaborate on topics of mutual interests. Groups can be:

• Public – Open to everyone and easily joined by clicking the Join button on the Group card. The Group is visible to everyone in the Groups area of the introNetwork.
• Private – Users can join the group by requesting an invitation. The Group Manager accepts or declines the request. The Group is visible to everyone in the introNetwork but is marked Private.
• Restricted – These types of Groups are not visible to the general population and are Invitation Only.

Groups also take advantage of introNetworks’ unique matching capability using tags (keywords). When a Group is created, either by an individual or the Community Manager, the creator is prompted to enter as many tags as necessary to give members of the new Group words to select so they will be matched with others in the same Group. Groups also take advantage of several other specific introNetworks capabilities such as Forums, so Group members can have private, threaded conversations among themselves; Collaborative Resources, so they can share documents, photos and files; and the Marketplace, so Community Managers can target messaging to specific Groups within the introNetwork. There is no limit to the number of Groups within the Community, and each Community can have as many Forums and Collaborative Resource categories as are required to be effective. To see Groups in action, take a Test Drive and join one of the many Groups