Your Guide to Boosting Community Engagement

IN THIS ARTICLE

1. Accessing the Action Center
2. Community Recap Feature
3. Weekly Summary Notifications
4. Understanding Suggested Actions
5. Interacting with Actions
6. Tips for Success
7. Frequently Asked Questions

Overview

The Action Center is a tool designed to help Community Owners and Facilitators quickly gain an overview of what has been happening in their communities through the Community Recap, and then enable them to participate more efficiently with the Suggested Actions area. Suggested Actions: identify posts that can be acted upon to improve conversations, engage members, and encourage better interaction and content sharing within your communities. The Action Center aims to provide prioritized action recommendations to help community leaders use their limited time more effectively. The intention is to focus them on strategies that build their presence in the community, which has positive impacts that are often underappreciated by community organizers. These action categories are known to promote good community health across most Yellowdig communities. Currently, Suggested Actions focus on helping community leaders more easily connect with members who have not been recently engaged by a community leader, spark conversations with posts that have no comments yet, and recognize outstanding contributions. 

This article explains how to use the Action Center to keep your community vibrant and engaged.

Accessing the Action Center

You can access the Action Center in two ways:

• Community Menu: Navigate to the Data submenu and click on “Action Center.”
• Right Sidebar: Use the Action Center button for quick access.

Community Recap Feature

The Community Recap feature offers Community Owners and Facilitators an easy and convenient way to stay abreast of their community’s activity. It generates summaries of posts and comments, providing a high-level overview of conversation topics, community dynamics, and engagement trends over a selected period—giving you more time and insights to meaningfully connect with your community.

You can choose from preset date ranges to generate a summary. The current available options are:

• Last 24 hours
• Last 7 days

AI Disclosure and Disclaimer: The summaries within the Action Center are generated via an LLM from our standard data storage areas and are currently created using AWS Bedrock. Community data is not being used to train any third-party AI models. Although we have taken many precautions to minimize misinformation and ensure the models produce useful output, due to the limitations of these models, we recommend verifying information from the Community Recap summaries within your communities before fully trusting their accuracy. We understand there are many reasonable concerns about AI use, which is why we developed our AI pledge. We believe this feature aligns with that pledge. Please contact us at support@yellowdig.com if you have any questions about this feature, Yellowdig’s use of AI, or if you have feedback that may help improve the accuracy or usefulness of this feature.

Weekly Summary Notifications

As part of the Community Recap feature, a weekly summary is automatically generated and sent every week, highlighting community activity from the past 7 days. The summary is delivered via email, in-app notifications, and mobile push notifications.

Learn how you can manage your notification preferences.

Understanding Suggested Actions

The framework used for the Action Center is focused on empowering community leaders to identify where to focus their efforts for maximum impact. The Suggested Actions do not currently use LLMs, and the feature does not attempt to “read” the content of the posts themselves to make recommendations. Instead, recommendations are based on algorithms that typically identify posts matching the suggested actions. Although every effort has been made to ensure each recommendation is useful, our recommendations may occasionally miss the mark. Please exercise caution before blindly following them. The feature is designed to display the full post and allow you to jump to the community for more context, as we recognize the importance of aligning your actions with what your community members are doing and saying. Therefore, we expect Owners and Facilitators to thoughtfully engage with the Suggested Actions area to identify any poor suggestions. We strive to balance the strengths of algorithms with human judgment to help you achieve optimal outcomes for your communities. If you encounter questionable recommendations, please share them with us at support@yellowdig.com.

The Action Center organizes recommendations into three categories, each with a specific focus to improve community engagement. Up to 15 actions are displayed on load, with a maximum of 5 actions per category, presented in a horizontal carousel for easy navigation.

1. Connect with Members

• Purpose: Engage members who haven’t recently interacted with a facilitator.
• How It Works: The system identifies active members from the past 7 days, ranks them by the date of their last interaction with a facilitator (oldest first), and suggests their most recent post. Recommendations stop once all members have been engaged within the 7-day timeframe.

2. Launch a Conversation

• Purpose: Encourage commenting on posts without comments to spark engagement.
• How It Works: The system lists posts from the past 7 days with no comments or replies, ranked by oldest first. Suggestions continue until no posts without comments remain in the timeframe.

3. Recognize Members

• Purpose: Highlight and reward active posts with accolades.
• How It Works: The system ranks posts from the past 7 days without facilitator accolades by their “most active” score (based on comment count and positive/neutral emoji reactions). Recommendations stop once the number of accoladed posts exceeds 20% of total posts in the timeframe.

Interacting with Actions

• Completing Actions: When you complete the suggested action, the recommendation is marked as completed. Depending on the action you took, the associated post is then pushed to the top of the community feed, aligning with existing platform behavior to promote recently interacted with content.
• Navigating Actions: Use the carousel interface to flip through actions in each category, allowing you to focus on one suggestion at a time.
• End of Suggestions: If no further suggestions are available in a category, a message will indicate that you've reached the end of the set. You can then choose to navigate to take action on any item you skipped, refresh to get a new set of suggested actions, or go to your community feed to interact more.

Exclusions

The Action Center excludes posts that are:

• Flagged
• Deleted
• Tagged by Conversations Insights
• Created by blocked users

Tips for Success

• Act Promptly: Actions are based on a 7-day rolling window, so addressing suggestions quickly keeps your community active.
• Vary Your Actions: The system alternates suggestions across categories to ensure a balanced approach to engagement.
• Monitor Feedback: Look for the checkmarks to track completed actions and ensure you’re making progress.
• Stay Informed: Review the weekly summary notifications (via email, in-app, or mobile push) to stay updated on community activity and access suggested actions promptly. Customize your notification settings to receive these updates in your preferred format.

A Note on the Use and Effectiveness of Suggested Actions from our SVP of Academic Engagement

Hi everyone,

The Suggested Actions part of the Action Center was built knowing that the core goal of the tool works: Community Owners and Facilitators do develop stronger, more active, and more appreciated communities in Yellowdig with a “reasonable” amount of time spent:

• Interacting with members to help them feel valued as individuals and like they belong within the community.
• Encouraging actual conversations (not just creating posts!) by commenting or asking members questions about their posts to foster back-and-forth dialogue.
• Recognizing good content to celebrate individual contributions and inspire others to “up their game.”

However, given the vast variance in the size, purpose, interactional style, audience, culture, and location of communities, it’s never easy to determine precisely how much time should be spent or when you’ve done enough to “call it quits.” We also cannot know how many of these actions are truly “reasonable” given a community’s size, management framework, and available time or resources. This is especially true when, for example, both “good job” and “your point about self-determination theory is interesting; how do you account for the theory’s assumption that humans are motivated to improve themselves?” count as one comment.

We hope to continue learning how to tailor our help and recommendations, but community and organizational leaders using Yellowdig are far better positioned to know what they can do, assess its impact, and achieve the outcomes they seek among their members.

For this reason, we haven’t yet attempted to recommend a specific cadence or number of actions for community leaders and would need to carefully verify the efficacy of any such recommendations. We’re confident that human community leaders can make better decisions about when, where, and how much to participate. For now, the feature identifies up to 15 total actions (up to 5 per action type) from posts created within the last 7 days.

These numbers were chosen because relatively few actions per week can markedly improve community health, but regular participation is key to the best outcomes. It’s almost universally true that minimal leader presence every few days leads to poorer outcomes; even 5 actions per 7 days is helpful and may be adequate in some cases. Conversely, there’s little evidence that high levels of Owner/Facilitator activity are automatically bad. A more common issue is community leaders, even those who monitor regularly, appearing absent by not completing actions. That said, perceptions of an Owner/Facilitator’s presence don’t scale linearly with membership size; you don’t need to do 10x the actions in a community of 1,000 compared to one of 100 to achieve similar results. For this reason, I wouldn’t recommend attempting more than 15 actions in one sitting, even in a large community, unless recovering from a long absence. It’s better to complete 15 recommended actions and return the next day for 15 more than to do 30 at once.

If pressed to make firm recommendations for optimizing outcomes, I’d suggest about 25 total actions every 7 days, spread across 4 or 5 days per week, as a good target for communities of 20–300 members. That’s roughly 5 actions per visit, likely taking no more than 20 minutes a day. We often hear successful Owners doing this with their morning coffee. Smaller communities, with less member-generated content, may require slightly more Owner/Facilitator action to keep members engaged. In larger communities, more actions or shorter, more frequent sessions may be needed for visibility. Even 5 actions per 7 days is far better than none.

Fulfilling the participation expectations set by a Leader/Instructor is critical, and the “style” of interactions greatly influences their value. A helpful Facilitator inspires a stronger, more appreciated community. Conversely, an Instructor who only provides negative feedback is unlikely to make the community engaging or attractive.

We want the Action Center to balance speed and efficiency in understanding your community while making it easy to find places to spend your limited time, all while giving you full flexibility to make the right, human decisions for your community. If you have feedback on how well we’ve balanced these considerations, please let us know.

Happy Yellowdigging!

Brian Verdine, Ph.D.
Yellowdig - SVP of Academic Engagement

Frequently Asked Questions

Note: please read Community Recap Feature kb article for questions about this feature.

How are the posts selected?

The Action Center selects posts based on a 7-day timeframe for three categories:

1. Connect with Members: Identifies members who haven’t recently interacted with a facilitator. It prioritizes those with the oldest facilitator comments, showing their latest post from the past 7 days to encourage direct engagement.
2. Launch a Conversation: Highlights posts with no comments or replies (orphan posts) from the last 7 days, ranked by oldest first, to spark new discussions.
3. Recognize Members: Selects highly active posts (based on comment counts) without accolades, ranked by engagement, to add accolades and boost visibility. Recommendations stop once accolades exceed 20% of total posts in the timeframe.

Are any posts excluded from Suggested Actions?

Yes, the Action Center excludes posts that are:

• Flagged
• Deleted
• Tagged by Conversations Insights
• Created by blocked users

Are comments being considered for suggestions?

No, comments and replies are not considered for Suggested Actions. Only posts are evaluated for recommendations in the Action Center.

What happens when I complete an action?

When you complete a suggested action, it is marked as completed, and the associated post is pushed to the top of the community feed, aligning with platform behavior to promote recently interacted content. Completed actions will no longer be suggested again.

Can I turn off weekly summary notifications?

Yes, you can customize your notification settings to enable or disable weekly summary notifications for email, in-app, or mobile push. Go to the notification settings to adjust these options.

Audience: This help article is for Community owners and Facilitators. Students or Learners cannot access these settings.