Community Management

We signed our agreement with Higher Logic in early July and are off and running with our project.  Our goal is to use HL to engage a community of teachers who work with students who are visually impaired.  We want these teachers to have a place to connect/stay connected, share experiences and resources, etc.  

We have a lot to learn about the platform and ultimately how to best leverage it here at Perkins but early indications are that we've made a good choice.  As a brand new customer, I figured I would try the blog feature and share my experiences.  Most of you on this site probably know everything I'm about to learn.  

Some early highlights from our project:

• The color picker requires a bit of trial and error, but you can get your site to look like your public site through the Admin
• We needed to flip from Integration security to Standalone security based on our need to configure user profiles.  This was discovered a few days in and HL made the change for us
• Our design approach is to peel away features first, then add them back as our internal project team makes decisions.  Starting with a less is more design premise
• Sites vs. communities had me stumped initially, but I think I've learned that you can use both in similar ways.  We are going with the one site/multiple communities approach for our purposes
• One strategy we are using here is to use the Community feature for our HL Project Team.  This gets us quickly using the tool and allows us to have discussions, share documents, etc.
• Did some minor CSS tweaking to close up some extra space and update fonts, but otherwise no coding necessary
• Tons of resources available but can be overwhelming.  Accelerated baby steps.

 Enjoying the tool and working with HL so far.  We are pushing to a mid-August Beta and a mid-September launch, so time is of the essence.