In this article
Overview
You can use the Community Manager to create and modify the website that your participants will interact with. They will only have access to whatever information you decide to publish, take surveys, and see any currently available surveys along with any surveys they have already completed.
You will also be able to modify community settings such as new web pages, widgets, components, headers and footers, and your community's theme. Utilize Community Manager to customize your email templates. These templates are used for all email communications, including survey invitations, newsletters, and automated notifications.
1: Creating a Community
The Community Manager menu will only be available for existing communities. To create a new community, select "Community Manager’ from underneath the "Panel Functions" menu:
Click on "New Community" and a new window will appear for you to get started:
The New Community window allows you to add a new community to your panel. Each panel may have more than one community assigned to it. The following fields are required to create a new community:
- Community name: The community name, used only for internal references.
- Point admin: The admin user responsible for confirm point redemption requests. This settings is used to notify rewards administrator when new points redemptions are available.
- Initial points: Initial points awarded to panelist when they sign up to this community..
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Pref Msg Type: Control preferred message delivery media for community based communications such as reset password, confirm initial registration etc.. Can be set to one of the following:
- E-mail - Sends a standard HTML E-mail message.
- SMS - Sends a simplified text only message via SMS text messaging services.
- Both - Sends a message via both E-mail and SMS text messaging.
- Auto - Sends a message based on the device the panelist is visiting the community with.
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Create standard portal pages automatically for me:
- Yes - Selecting yes will create standard default pages, articles, menus and theme. The provides a base line community for you to expand on and customize.
- No - Selecting no will create an empty community. All pages, articles, menus and themes will have to be created manually.
- Default theme: The default theme drop down allows you to preselect a default theme. This option is only available if you chose Yes for Create standard community pages automatically for me. Otherwise no default theme is created. The theme selected here can be changed later.
Once you are satisfied with your settings, click 'Create" to create a new community, and you will see the following message:
- Your Portal has now been created!
You can continue by adding content and customizing the settings to your needs (by clicking the "Edit" icon).
2: Managing a Community
There is also a variety of community management options available within pre-configured menus on the Community Manager page. See below for a brief description of each menu. If desired, you may click on any menu name to view more information.
2.1: Overview
The Overview page provides a general overview information for the community's statistics and status.
2.2: Settings
The Settings page allows you to configure the general settings, moderator permissions, and public listings for your community. You can also use this page to customize its language localization options and enable panelist reward redemption.
2.3: Themes
The Themes page provides a way to create, edit, switch and delete themes for your community. When a community is first created, a default theme is automatically created and set for the community.
2.4: Headers and Footers
The Headers and Footers page allows you to create a variety of headers and footers for your community pages.
2.5: Banners
The Banners page allows you to create stylized banners that will appear at the top of your community pages.
2.6: Widgets
The Widgets page allows you to create widgets to show supplementary information on the side of a community page.
2.7: Components
The Components page allows you to create a module as the main content of a page, such as an article or a contact form.
2.8: Pages
The Pages menu provides a listing of all community pages, and allows you to create or edit pages as desired.
2.9: Menu builder
The Menu builder page allows you to create a menu to navigate the various pages that exist in your community.
2.10: Landing pages
The Landing pages menu allows you to edit the landing pages that panelists may see when clicking on survey invitations, or opt-in, opt-out, and password reset emails.
2.11: Activity awards
The Activity awards menu allows you to assign points to certain panelist events in the community for use with custom activity rankings.
2.12: Email Templates
The Email Templates menu allows you to format and brand your community emails, survey invitations, and newsletters to match the site.
2.13: Auto notifications
The Auto notifications menu shows the email and SMS messages used by Panel Management to inform community members when certain actions are requested by the panelists.
2.14: Quick polls
The Quick polls menu allows you to reference panel datapoints and session details to conditionally show menu items, pages, widgets, and quick polls.
2.15: Data exports
The Data exports menu allows you to download community data, including discussion post and reply data, as well as any quick poll responses.
3: Technical Considerations
- The Community Manager is accessible across devices and most major browsers. See Supported Browsers and Devices for more information on Panel Management browser functionality.
- When a user visits a Community, they are assigned a single session cookie. This cookie is used to identify them across all Community pages and is essential for allowing panelists to log in. For security purposes, the data stored in the cookie is encrypted and the cookie itself will be cleaned up by browsers once they are closed.
- Community session length is limited by cookie to one hour of inactivity, after which time a user has to log in again.