Affinity Group Coordinator Notes
Affinity Groups help connect researchers with communities of interest. Announcements, events, and trainings can be shared through the website and through Constant Contact email lists. Affinity Groups consolidate links to slack channels, Q&A Forums, and relevant knowledge base CI Links. Affinity groups are either associated with a particular ACCESS resource or they are more general community groups. People with allocations on ACCESS resources will automatically be connected to the appropriate Affinity Groups. A members email list for direct communication between Affinity Group members can be enabled if desired.
Editing your Affinity Group
Affinity Group coordinators can edit the page, broadcast announcements and events, email the group, as well as add other coordinators.
Adding Coordinators
Type a few letters of the name and then select from the list of names presented.
The people you add will have permissions to edit the affinity group, send emails to the group, and view group members.
Add Tags
Add relevant tags so that people can find groups relevant to them on the affinity group page and through searches. This step is very important to help people find your affinity group.
Summary
Provide a short description that will appear on the Affinity Groups directory page. This summary should be concise so that people can quickly scan the list of groups. (160 characters, or less, is a good target).
Description
Provide a longer description that will be displayed on the individual affinity group page.
Please include information about the intent of the group, what type of communications you expect the group will use, and how often.
Display CI Links on your Affinity Group
CI Links are a great way to share helpful links with your users. You can include up-to-date documentation and anything else you want your community to see.
To add CI Links that have been already added to the ACCESS Support portal start typing and look for the CI Link you want to add to your page.
If you need to upload a new CI Link, do that first on the CI Links page.
Communications Channels
Slack
Provide a link to your Slack group if you have one.
Q&A Platform
Provide a link to http://Ask.CI , StackExchange, or other Q&A platform specific to your Affinity Group. If you include a link to your ask.CI category, recent topics posted in your ask.CI category will be displayed on your Affinity Group. If you would like help getting setup on ask.CI, please open a ticket.
Github Organization
Provide a link to your Github Organization, if you have one.
Email List or Email Contact
Provide a full URL to the email list or email contact for your affinity group.
i.e. https://mydomain.com/our-email-list/ or mailto:example@email.com
Affiliating Resources
Allocated CiDeR Resources
ACCESS RP Affinity Groups are associated with CiDeR resources. Users with allocations on these resources automatically become members of the group.
Recommended Resources
Community Groups can recommend CiDeR resources for group members and add a description for why a particular resource is recommended.
Affinity Group Activities
Affinity Group Membership
People can use the join buttons to join Affinity groups. They will be added as a member and receive email notifications.
People with allocations are automatically added to ACCESS Resource Provider (RP) Affinity Groups so that they can get email notifications about outages, announcements, and training events.
Members can leave affinity groups, and re-join, at any time.
View Members
Coordinators will have a button on the bottom of their affinity group to a list of member names, roles, and emails, with the option to download a csv.
Adding Announcements and Events to your Page
Currently you can add an event or announcement that you created to an Affinity Group that you coordinate.
Edit one of your events or announcements. (Creating Announcements & Trainings)
Add an affinity group that you coordinate.
Press the save button.
The event or announcement will be listed on your affinity group. page.
Broadcasting Announcements and Events to the Email List
Edit one of your events or announcements.
Add an Affinity Group that you coordinate.
Check the box next to “Broadcast to Affinity Group email list”.
Press the save button.
The event or announcement will be emailed to your affinity group members.
Email Affinity Group
Coordinators will see a button on the bottom of the AG page that will allow them to email the members of the affinity group. The email subject will indicate that the email is from your Affinity Group.
Members Email List
Please open a ticket if you would like to enable the members email list for direct communication between Affinity Group members. You will be able to select the prefix for your Affinity Group (e.g. mygroup@lists.connectci.org) and customize the welcome message and the footer for your group.