Rooms are open or private sub-communities within the wider community. Their purpose is to prompt engagement and encourage members to communicate with one another. Rooms have been used by Zapnito customers to bring together people with shared interests, organise events and conferences, and promote grant opportunities, amongst other functions.

1. Content

Quality content is a key foundation of any successful community. At its most basic level, content attracts and retains visitors, transforming them into registered users who ultimately give back to the community by sharing knowledge in the form of content.

Rooms that generate organic content from their members most often are the product of one or more community managers who are responsible for leading and promoting the room’s purpose. Organic content is valuable to any community, for it encourages users to engage with one another. 

WildHub, an active community of conservation professionals, has achieved this goal by having a room called “Let’s welcome new members!”. The room’s purpose goes beyond making members feel welcomed. It encourages them to create their first post on the community and allows for networking. Once a user has created a piece of content, others can engage with it further by liking, commenting or sharing that piece of content, as well as following the user.

2. Member and Contributor Directories

It is possible to show or hide a directory of members and contributors in a room. You can do this by accessing “Rooms” in settings, selecting the room you would like to edit and switching on or off the options “Contributors” and “Members”. The difference between members and contributors is that contributors can post content to a room, whereas members cannot. To learn more about rooms and how you can invite users to a room, please view this post.

Room directories allow your users to view who else exists within that sub-community. These directories are most commonly active in private rooms, since users need to be invited to these as either members or contributors. On the other hand, open rooms can be accessed by anyone in the community and require no prior invitation.

For example, for the Zapnito community insights event, we created a room to allow attendees to access relevant content prior to the event, as well as interact with others. Attendees were added to the room as members, whereas Zapnito administrators were added to the room as contributors. The latter were responsible for adding content to the room and monitoring conversations between attendees. To encourage attendees to get to know one another, the member directory was switched on in the room settings. This drove engagement within the room, as well as during the event itself.

3. Room Conversations 

Room conversations are an excellent way to drive engagement in a room. They encourage users to “start a conversation”, which can later be replied to by anyone with access to the room and the ability to comment. You can learn more about groups and their abilities here.

If you would like users’ conversations to be published immediately to the site, please turn on the “Publish comments immediately” toggle. You are able to do this in Settings < Comments. Alternatively, you have the option of approving or blocking conversations before they are published to the community.

In the edit page of a room, you also have the option of activating “Conversation Notifications”. These will notify room members and contributors via email whenever a new conversation has been started.

In addition, as an administrator of a Zapnito-powered community, you are able to access the “Notification Preferences” settings page from where you are able to edit the default notifications of users in your community. These include, for example, whether users should be notified when someone responds to a conversation they have initiated.

Notifications keep users informed about the activity that occurs in a room, and encourage users to engage with others. Choosing the right notifications for your users is key to furthering the community's success.

4. My Digest: “Watch a room”

The Digest is a feature that enables users to stay up to date with the content and conversations that matter most to them. It allows them to ‘watch’ the channels and rooms they are interested in, and be notified by email about new content and conversations at a frequency of their choosing. You can learn more about the Digest and other newsletters here.

With the release of the ‘My Digest’ page, your users can now view in one place a monthly round-up of the content and conversations that matter most to them. You can access your ‘My Digest’ page by clicking on your avatar image on the top-right corner of any Zapnito site. 

If this page is blank, or you would like to change the content that is being shown, go to ‘Taylor your digest’. You can access this page via your ‘My Digest’, or in your ‘Account Settings’. Once you land on it, you will be able to select the channels and rooms you want to stay up to date with. Notably, you will only be able to ‘watch’ a private room if you have been invited to join the room as a member or a contributor.