Once on to exploring Salesforce, you may have come across Salesforce Communities as an effective way to engage the constituents on the Salesforce platform by offering them a unique volunteer portal, donor portal, event registration, and many other such features with a user account. In the Salesforce terminology, these are called Customer Communities, which aim to cater to an external audience to the organization.

You may have known it before, but what about having a community for your enterprise’s internal users and board members? Here, we will discuss some handy ways for you to build communities on Salesforce for this purpose.

Think of the right strategy

While planning for employee communities, you need to think of a workable strategy. Break your echo chambers and explore all ways through which the staff may use the collaborative space.  Most enterprises already use third-party instant messengers, email, mobile phones, and various other modes of communication for official communication, so why do you need to add another one? For this, you have to consider the needs and advantages of a communication platform in the context of an enterprise database and making the database records a part of the conversation. Going a step ahead, the conversation threads can also become a part of the rich data environment in the CRM. Emails may be hard to keep track of overtime, and the most important pieces of knowledge may also be lost sometimes. If all these communications can be made a part of your database, these can be retrieved anytime with ease.

However, Salesforce Communities are not meant for communication only. Based on the setup you plan, there may be many other people outside the organization who can effectively interact with you. If you are looking for ways to offer restricted access to the volunteers and constitutes to your database, then establishing Salesforce Communities is a great way to do it. Next, you have to consider various uses cases of your Community as to:

• What might you use for the Community to depend on?
• What kind of user licenses may you utilize? And so on.

You need to understand the differences between the Salesforce products and licenses to plan out a new Community. Here, we will discuss three major choices by FLOSUM in Salesforce Communities and how each can be used.

1. Chatter

If you have not explored Chatter ever, then it is a good option to explore. Chatter is kind of a discussion forum in-built in the database. A significant portion of the Salesforce features is built on Chatter, including Salesforce Communities. So, for all the admins, it is worth knowing about the same. It is also worth understanding that with ten free Salesforce licenses, you may get thousands of free Chatter licenses. Chatter Free licenses will let you access all the Chatter features without access to the database records as Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, etc.

Chatter Free is ideal to ensure:

• A dedicated space for the board members to better collaborating and communicating with each other.
• For board members to communicate with the executive directors and the senior management team.
• To introduce Salesforce to other departments which have not yet adopted Salesforce.
• Create closed private groups, which are visible to the entire organization for targeted collaboration.
• A space to upload files and store them in the database.

All the regular users with a standard Salesforce license will be able to use these Chatter features. They do not have to get another Chatter Free account to do the same. You can explore some Chatter Communities in action by going to the ‘Power of Us’ hub of Salesforce. Explore the Chatter tab and see how the community works and how posts, groups, and file uploads happen in it.

• Employee Apps Starter

If you have to take a step forward to Chatter and gain access to the database records as a part of the communication, you may consider the Employee Apps for Communities license. This is a separate license that is ideal if you want to get a custom app for the users to gain restricted access to the database records of Contacts, Account, and Cases. The possibilities of using Employee Apps include.

• Case Management in the services organizations
• To look for and edit the contact information for the constituents
• Track the log hours for the volunteer work shifts.
• Access the Salesforce Knowledge Base articles.

Employee Apps do not offer access to the Campaigns and Opportunities etc. The users of Employee Apps will not be able to interact with the marketing and fundraising activities. Primarily, Employee Apps are meant to work with the Community Cloud of Salesforce. This will offer a unique way to create a custom-tailored experience for staff and constituents. The Communities act like a web-interface type layer on the Salesforce CRM. Using Chatter Free licenses, the users can interact directly with the same user interface which your admins use. It is possible to do a global search, and the tabs, page layouts, etc., are the same. With the use of communities, you can also create a new interface.

• Partner Community

Partner Community is the next level of license, which offers a concrete set of internal and constituent communication features, which includes access to the Campaigns, Opportunities, and other such features. Along with internal employees and director board, Partner Community licenses can be used with the external partners also. In typical sales environments, you have to contact the vendors and partners to close sales deals and access the database. A Partner license here will cover all good features of Chatter and Employee Apps with the above-mentioned additional features. With a Partner license, you can get access to:

• Products and pricing to facilitate sales.
• Opportunities to let the board members directly enter the prospective gifts they solicit.
• Easy to handle dashboards for tracking the metrics.
• Report builder to crate events and attendee lists etc.
• Send emails to the target audience in bulk.

As you have a clearer picture of Salesforce Communities to engage with your employees and associates in newer and creative ways, you may further decide by exploring your use case to choose the most appropriate Community platform for your enterprise.