How Talkbase's 'Community Applications' Minimizes Challenges for your Gated Community

The influx of online spaces has allowed people to form anonymous Internet identities. From throwaway Reddit accounts, to alternative personas in the Metaverse, it’s easy for anyone to make up identities. Though this can be liberating at times, for community builders, it can lead to risk factors for their communities. We all remember the beginning of the Covid pandemic when “zoombombing” became a Wikipedia-able term.

Gated communities are becoming increasingly popular in today's society due to the additional layer of security and safety that it brings. They offer a safe haven behind a login to ensure community members’ identities have been verified or vetted before being able to join the community.

Additionally, gated communities are a great way to ensure that members who join your community are aligned to the vision and purpose of your community. For example, if you have a community for people in the Human Relations profession, it would be detrimental for the community if someone in sales who sold a platform for HR got in and started spamming channels with their company and reaching out to members to try and get sales leads. Or, it would be equally detrimental if people not in the profession got into the community and diluted the quality of content and engagement related to HR.

Challenges for gated communities

Though gated communities are great, they often provide additional challenges to run. For instance:

• How do people join or apply for the community?
• How are you notified when someone asks to join the community?
• What is the vetting or review process for potential members?
• How do you communicate the status of someone's request to join the community?
• How do you actually bring accepted people into the community?

Creating this process and addressing the above questions typically requires a lot of Community Operations for initial setup, working with partnering teams like developers to create a site or application form, and additional technical effort for the reviewing and follow-up process. After it’s been implemented, it then takes constant bandwidth away from the community team to review applications and send notification emails on application status.

Community Applications

Talkbase’s Community Applications feature removes much of this additional work and overhead.

• Create a fully customizable application form
• Easily publish the form on your Community Page or embed it onto any website
• In-app notifications when new applications have been received
• Review pertinent information provided in the application form
• Decision directly in Talkbase - accept, reject, or waitlist applicants
• Send customizable and automated emails to notify applicants

Watch Community Applications in action here:

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The Talkbase Community Application feature is incredibly easy to use and is accessible to all community team members. It streamlines the entire process for bringing qualified people into your gated community, important for security and ensuring that the right people are joining the community. If you are interested in learning more or trying it out, please visit https://talkbase.io.

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