How to add users to rooms

 

The difference between members and contributors is that contributors can post content to the room, whereas members cannot. This is true regardless of whether the room is open or private, and regardless of the group to which a users belongs to.

 

It is important to note that the abilities that groups of users have determine users’ actions. The table below shows two groups of users. Those in the ‘Default’ group, and ‘Experts’. Notice that users in the default group have not been given the ability to start conversations in rooms, whereas experts have this ability.

 

Nevertheless, contributors in the ‘Default’ group can still add content to the room, since they have been invited to the room as ‘contributors’, rather than ‘members’. The opposite is true for members in the ‘Expert’ group. Although they are experts, they are not able to add content to the room because they are ‘members’ of the room, and not ‘contributors’.

It is also important to note that even if you give a group the ability to access rooms, users in this group will still be unable to access a private room unless they are invited to it. In other words, group abilities do not convey specific room access.

Lastly, you may have noticed from the first image that a ‘resend invitation’ link appears below Victor’s profile. This is because Victor has not yet accepted the email invitation to join the Zapnito ‘Advisor room’ as a member. Although Victor will not appear in the ‘members’ room directory until he accepts this invitation, should he log in to the site and try to access the ‘Advisor room’, he would still be able to view its content and conversations. Therefore, users need to accept the invitation email to appear in the room directory. However, they do not need to accept this invitation to gain access to the room.

It is also important to note that users who have previously registered to your site, and subsequently accepted the room invitation, will be taken directly to the room. Those who have not yet registered will be taken through the registration process before landing on the room to which they have been invited.

The manual invitation email looks like this:

Bulk CSV uploads

Manually inviting users to a room on a one-by-one basis can be time consuming. Bulk CSV uploads in the Users page allow you to submit a file containing information on the users you want to invite to your site.

The mandatory fields to be included in this file are: “Name, Email, Title, Company, Professional Reg Number, Password, Group Name, Type”. “Title, Company, Professional Reg Number” can be left blank. Please note that “Type” is either ‘Person’ or ‘Organisation’, as appropriate. Moreover, the group name must exactly match one of the group names in use on your site. Group names are case sensitive.

You can find more information on bulk uploads and download an example CSV template of the upload file from the Upload Users (.csv) tab on your site’s Users page.

To invite users to a room with a Bulk CSV upload, go to the room’s directory. You can find this directory in the ‘edit’ page of a room, via ‘Settings’. Copy and paste the name of the appropriate group name. In the example below, these are “Advisor Room (Members)” and “Advisor Room (Contributors)”.

Copy one or the other depending on whether you want to invite users to the room as members or contributors. The difference between these is described above, under ‘Manual Invitations’. Subsequently, paste the group name under the field ‘Group Name’ in the CSV file. This will invite users in bulk to the room. 

The main thing to note about adding users to your community in this way is that they will be considered fully registered to your site and to have accepted your site’s terms & conditions, privacy notice and community policy. Therefore, you should only use this feature to invite users who have already accepted these terms or who have otherwise agreed that they are happy to be added to the community in this way. 

The users on your CSV file will each receive an email telling them that they have been registered to your site and asking them to reset their password. Don’t worry, they don’t need to know which password you originally set for them to be able to do this! Once they change their password, they will be invited to complete the registration process.

Please note that users who have been invited to a room with a CSV file will fall under the group ‘Default’, or the equivalent default group in your site. If this group has no abilities, your users will only be able to navigate through your site without interacting with it. Should you want to give these users abilities, we could either modify the 'Default' group's abilities for you, or you could do a second CSV upload adding these same users to a second group, such as 'Experts'.

Users who are members of two groups will adopt the abilities of both. To avoid confusing users with two separate email invitations, our Zapnito team can temporarily switch off notifications for your site before the second CSV upload.

For your convenience, you will also receive an email confirmation of whether your CSV file has been processed correctly.

Campaigns

Users can be invited to register to your Zapnito site generally and to rooms specifically using the Campaigns tool. 

This tool allows you to create a bespoke URL allowing people who click on it to register to your site. When users register via the URL, they will be added to the group you specified when creating the campaign. What’s more, the Campaigns tool tells you how many users have registered using the URL in question. 

To access campaigns, go to the cog icon on the top-right corner of the screen, click on ‘Settings’ and navigate to ‘Campaigns’. Once you are in the Campaigns settings page, click the ‘New Campaign’ button to begin. This opens the campaign creation screen.

Give your campaign a name and specify to which group users should be added when they register via the URL. Once you have selected a group, you will be able to click on the green button 'Create Campaign'.

Optionally, you also have the option of specifying the final landing page where users will be taken to once they click on the campaign. This is the Redirect URL. If you do not add a redirect URL, new registered users will land on the homepage of the community when they finish registering. 

Once the campaign has been created, you will be able to find it in the Campaigns settings page, from where you can copy the campaign's URL and distribute it as you wish.

When users click on the campaign link, they will receive an email asking them to confirm their account. They will subsequently be asked to register to the site by following the usual registration process. 

Zapier

Zapier is a tool that automates workflows, connecting different apps together to send information between them. It has over 2,000 apps that can be connected, including Salesforce, MailChimp, Slack, Stripe, GoSquared and Shopify. 

Through Zapier, you can connect your Zapnito community to your existing tech stack. The basic Zapier set-up involves one trigger, like a sign-up, and a related action. You can also have one trigger that causes two actions. For example, someone joining your community could be added to Salesforce, as well as receive a welcome email that is automatically sent through MailChimp. All automated, no resource required. These triggers and actions can be set up by you or your team to invite users to rooms.

We have created a Zapier Workflow Automation course with the aim of allowing you to have control over such integrations. The first user case of the course contains information on how you can add a list of users to a group via Zapier. This was done with the example group "Room contributors".

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch with us at support@zapnito.com or add a comment below.