Whether you have a digital workplace with dozens of members or thousands, member management can be a daunting task. As your organization grows and changes, your membership needs will change as well, and your Igloo is designed to adapt. Still, there are things you can do to ensure that membership isn't a chore before the first person is added to your digital workplace. 

Like content management, member management takes strategy. Membership means more than people accessing your Igloo. It carries with it Group memberships that will ensure they have access to what they need, and profile elements that make it easy to connect to other people in your digital workplace. Successful member management reduces platform friction for people and can help them tap into the expertise of everyone they work with.

Adding members

There are a lot of different ways to add members to your digital workplace. You can add them one at a time, invite them to join at their leisure, add them in bulk, or have your Active Directory handle the whole process through our sync tool. Select the method that works best for you, and apply it consistently across your membership. 

When adding members, consider adding them to Groups as well. Even if these Groups are preliminary, you can always move people between them or rename the Groups later. Having a set of common Groups for locations, departments, and teams can save time when setting up Access and Subscriptions, and ensures that everyone has access to what they need on day one. 

Maintaining membership

Maintaining membership over time means having your finger on the pulse of your organization. If you're adding members manually, schedule regular time to go over Group changes with stakeholders, and ensure new members are added before they need access, not after. For Igloos using the ILST, we recommend checking on the config file at least quarterly to ensure that it's meeting your needs. 

Maintaining your membership is about more than adding and removing people. As new Groups are spun up, people will need to be added to them, and removed from others if they transition inside your organization. It's also worth driving profile completeness. You can use member adding methods like Bulk Upload and ILST to fill in the brute facts for members, but having them fill in their bio, expertise, and interests will help people connect with who they need to through search. 

Cleanup

It's important to be timely when someone transitions out of your organization, and revoke their membership. Not only will this free up a license, but it immediately removes their access and subscriptions. Their content and comments remain, but revoked members will no longer appear in search, nor on the People Page. Rather than checking on this regularly, it's best to integrate Igloo into your HR workflow to handle revokes immediately. 

Member management is the invisible work of maintaining your digital workplace. If it's going well, people will never know it's happening, because everything they need is at their fingertips. 

If you have questions about the Igloo platform, workflows, or best practices, you can leave a comment here, or ask a question in the Community area.