What is a Branded Online Community?  A branded online community is a professional network that brings people together around a centralized, shared organization-based experience for expansive online collaboration. While an average user might casually interact with a public or personal social network such as Facebook or LinkedIn, members of a private online community are often intent on investing time with a purposeful mindset, seizing the opportunity to engage for growth.

What is the Sphere? The Sphere is a new engagement platform providing SEIA members and staff with an easy workflow to engage with communities, interact with one another, participate in events & meetings, and manage member information. This will enable members to update their accounts, receive up-to-date communication from SEIA and free up significant time for staff by eliminating administrative duties all while being integrated with Salesforce, SharePoint, and Outlook.

Three Core Components of the Sphere

Community Engagement & Oversight:

First… what is a Sphere community?  A Sphere community includes all working groups, committees, internal SEIA groups and open forums that members interact within.

When individuals open the Sphere, they will come across their main landing page with recent community discussion forums, blog articles, and calendar. Members will gain access to dynamically updated community calendars, document sharing and co-authoring abilities, and search capabilities based on membership level. They will have the ability to set email preferences, create discussions and announcements synced with Outlook, as well as self-select member participation in committees and working groups.

Event & Meeting Management:

All events, virtual meetings, conference calls, and webinars will be available in calendar format – downloadable and dynamically updated. Members will have the ability to register for public events through registration links. There will also be an option to create a new community for a premier event if needed (i.e. the SEIA Finance, Tax & Buyers Seminar) including calendars, forums, and documents.

General Account Administration:

Necessary SEIA staff and members will be able to make changes within member portals for account and contact updates, password resets, opt-in/out and add/remove from working groups and committees. There will also be a payment portal available for membership with processed payments synced in Salesforce.

Additional Resources & Features

• Advertising opportunities
• Links to articles and documents on the SEIA website
• Member database search functionality
• Cross platform responsive design – providing push notifications for responses to posts, alerts, and events