A single Cross-Council online community
(giving members access to over 4,500 council members from a variety of disciplines)
Extensive Member Directory w/Search
Each Council Member has their own member profile. A profile is a member's personalized page on the community that provides information about them, a photo, and a personal portfolio to other members (post content of any format). The profile details information and statistics about:
Member & their organization
Areas of expertise
What vendors members use in certain major categories across all areas
Members can specify their interests.
What kind of members do you want to meet?
Members can specify your notification preferences (keeping contact information private, but still receive internal messages)
The system will suggest relevant people matches for members via email (based on both profile and interests).
People can also search for people interactively, through the "People Map (a visual representation of the community)," or by attribute. However, matching via the People Map is two-way, taking into account mutual interests and relevant profile information.
Also, search across the entire community - members can keyword searching across both content (files names and descriptions)
and people in the community. Through one common search, members may find all of the following — relevant
people, groups, forum posts, documents, blogs, and media files, within the system.
Targeted Discussion Groups
Targeted & relevant
Discussion groups are designed to complement each council's list serve.
Unlike the list serve, each post and reply is tied to the author's member profile in the community.
Members can join an exisiting group or create their own! For example, members can start groups around an area of expertise or regional discussions.
Each group allows users to post, reply, search, engage in discussion, set up meetings, and rate messages.
In addition, groups and particular discussion threads may be subscribed to via email or RSS.
Live Chat Functionality
Community members may connect with one another in real-time.
The integrated AJAX-based chat system requires no downloads or plug-ins of any kind.
Community Blogs
Each member of the community may share their ideas-opinions-thoughts-knowledge through an online web log/journal (blog). For example, members can post their thoughts on recent credit union experiences, events, or hot industry topics.
Other community members may provide comments upon each blog post, providing community members with a space to create an open dialogue.
All blogs can be subscribed to via email or RSS.
Other Misc. Features
Presence - As people navigate through the community, the system will indicate when another community member is
online at that time.
My Contacts - All community members may save off any member to their own personal "My Contacts" list, which provides
them with a centralized place to keep track of those community members who are particularly important to them.
Private Messaging - Members can communicate directly with any other members of the community. Every member in the system is
given a private in-box which is a repository for your private discussions.
Tag Search - Other individuals within the community may utilize those tags to quickly browse and “tag search” using a tag cloud to quickly find the information which is most important to them.
File Posting - Members have the ability to post content of any format (video, music, documents, etc.) to their member profile page or post files to a group they are a part of. Files and discussions can also be rated by the community.
