We had a very positive response to a recent change that was made to the hub Discussions feature a few weeks back. You can now send a copy to yourself when you create a new message in your hubs. Likewise, sending an email to the hub mailing list will also send you an “echo” email or a copy of the message.

This is nice because the sender is assured that their message was successfully delivered. In response to the positive feedback we’ve received, we took this concept a step further.

Now when you create a new hub Announcement,  you can choose to send a copy to yourself. This is especially important for those urgent announcement that you want to be 100% sure get delivered. Now, hub admins can test our SMS feature and see for yourself that text messages are being sent!

In addition to the hub Announcements changes, the originator of a new calendar event, existing calendar event, file upload, photo upload or Whiteboard creation will be included in the notification email that is sent out to the hub.

Event the smallest changes can go a long way towards enhancing your group communications.

As always we encourage you to leave a comment and use our Feedback & Support widget when logged into MemberHub.com to engage the MemberHub team.

Thanks!

Online discussions are a great way to enhance communications and help members stay organized. With so many tools available, it’s hard to tell the difference between a mailing list, a discussion forum and general online messaging. With MemberHub, every single hub (online group) has a mailing list. It’s not a forum or place to blog; perhaps those features will come later. I’m not going to spend time explaining how mailing lists work, but I am going to explain an enhancement to our hub mailing lists that have opinions on both sides.

There is a new checkbox labeled “Send me a copy of this message” that you can now click whenever you are logged into MemberHub and you create a new discussion or reply to existing discussion. In addition to this, whenever you send an email to the hub mailing list, the list will automatically send you a copy of the message. This is what we mean by “echo” emails.

For example, if you wish you to start a new discussion in one of your hubs by sending an email to “my-hub-example@discuss.memberhub.com” you will now receive an email from the list just as others in the hub receive an email.

The main advantage of these new features is the assurance that your message was delivered successfully and the ability to review your message as recipients will view it.

So, try it out and let us know what you think? What are you used to when it comes to mailing lists? What are your preferences? Drop us a comment and/or a suggestion? Thanks!

I was recently speaking with a colleague (who happens to be an avid MemberHub user) that works with many nonprofits and he revealed to me one of the hidden values in collaboration software.

Kevin was telling me that one of the common challenges in nonprofits is bringing on a new board member, or any member for that matter, and bringing that person “up to speed”. There is often a great deal of information to cover including documents to be read, conversations to take place and general history.

Recently, one of the nonprofits that he works with brought on a new board member and instead of spending a day talking or explaining discussions and opinions of various members, Kevin realized that he could just point the new board member to their MemberHub account. Because the nonprofit groups had funneled communications and collaboration through their hubs, the new board member spent a day reading discussions that had taken place through the hub, downloading and reading documents, browsing the calendar and checking out the profiles of various members. Instead of taking a day of someone else’s time the new board member was able to join the hub and the history was all there!

After Kevin finished telling me this, he turned to me and said, “Now that’s real value.”. That’s what I’m talking about.

So what is your nonprofit using for collaborative technology? Do you see the value and need for it?

Earlier this week, we listed 5 reasons to use online discussions.  Now, there’s even a better reason. We revamped the Discussions feature in MemberHub. The majority of these changes were really “under the hood”. There were a few changes to the already elegant user interface that you’re used to, but mainly you’ll notice that discussions just seem to work more natural, as an online discussion should be. Below is an explanation of the motivation behind these changes but, here’s the bottom line: Every Hub in MemberHub has it’s own mailing list. That’s really the message of this post. To make it a bit more clear here’s a list of what changed:

• Emails sent to a mailing list will be forwarded onto the recipients “as-is”
• Attachments in emails participating in a discussion will be forwarded on
• You no longer have to “——–REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE——-”

Online discussions can take place through mailing lists and sometimes they take place in forums. You can participate in the discussion from your mail client (Outlook, Mac Mail, GMail, etc.) but you can also visit a website and participate in the discussion. That’s certainly the case with Discussions in MemberHub. However, MemberHub’s Discussions feature (found in every hub, unless turned off), has been a mix between a mailing list and an online forum. In fact, it reminded many people of a blog. When logged in, a member can start a discussion, and then anyone can comment on that discussion directly in the Hub or simply respond to the discussion “thread” in their inbox.  Because Hubs are private, the Discussions feature does not mimic that of a blog. In addition, there aren’t any “topics”, so it isn’t like a forum. And what about that weird “Reply Above this Line” message in each email you received? You’re starting to get the point… We were somewhere in the middle of all this and our users were expecting different results.

Thoughts/suggestions/concerns?

Go ahead and try out the new Discussions feature in your Hub!

The main thread (no pun intended) that holds together many online groups is some form of a discussions feature. Groups need a dedicated space for their members to participate in online private discussion threads. But, I’ve had people ask me before why a group needs to use the Discussions feature in MemberHub. “Why not just use your regular email?”, they ask. Here are 5 points to consider:

1. Not Everyone has Everyone’s Email Address

How many times have you ever wanted to email a group of folks, but soon realize you don’t have everyone’s email address? So what do you do? You go digging through your inbox looking for the last email that someone sent out to everyone in the list, so that you can reply. If your new message has a different subject, you tweak the subject in the new new mail message and then delete all the text from the thread.  Does this sound familiar? Heck, sometimes you want to email everyone in a group and you can’t remember someone’s name. That’s never happened to me…   If all the members are grouped together in a hub, all you have to do is remember ONE email address. Every Hub in MemberHub has a private, email address and whenever a member needs to reach the group, all they have to do is send an email to the Hub to reach everyone in the hub!

2. You Can’t Change History

Do you keep emails around, in you inbox for a long time because they are important for one reason or another? I am bad about this. I’ll leave a message in my inbox because I need to come back to it or it’s significant. But after using MemberHub for our business (yes, we “eat our own dog food”), I’ve found that I have less anxiety about removing messages from my local mail client.  I know that the history of these discussions are “in the cloud”, within the hub. Cool.

3. Opt In; Opt Out (Customize Your Notifications)

Have you ever wished that people would just forget about the Reply All button? Some discussion thread gets going through email and you’re just not that interested; meanwhile you’ve got 15 new emails in the last 10 minutes. Well, if the discussion is taking place in a mailing list then you can opt out of discussions for the time being and come back to the Hub to read about it later. Remember from the last point – you can always access the Hub and view past discussions.

4. Recognizing the Communication Channel Will Encourage Participation

Communication is key to the success of any organization! The more you can get your members, staff and volunteers actively communicating, you stand a much better chance of reaching your goals. By making it easier for folks to communicate, you increase your organization’s chances of success. Recognizing the communication channel and encouraging its use can help improve real communication.

5. Centralize Discussions With Multiple Groups

One of the greatest strengths of MemberHub is its ability to aggregate all the groups in your life. So as a member of Hubs at your church, Hubs at your non-profit and Hubs at your sports league, you can move in and out of organized discussions with the people in each Hub.  Now, the 4 benefits above apply to each online group in your life!