Managing External Contributor Groups

Socialcast is a powerful tool for communicating and working with fellow members of your company. However, there may be times when you need to work with people outside of your company on a specific project or event. By creating an external contributor group, you can use Socialcast to easily and securely communicate with consultants, clients, or contractors.

Only community administrators and external contributor administrators can create an external group and invite members to join it. People from outside the company can only participate in external groups they have been invited to, and do not have access to the rest of the community.

External groups are private, and invitation only. Employees who are currently members of the community have to be specifically invited to join an external group. External contributor group admins can monitor all activity in the group to ensure that external contributors only see the people, conversations and files they have been invited to see.

There are variety of ways to use an external contributor group to get work done.  Following is one example of how a company can use this powerful feature.

External Contributor Use Case:
Acme Corp is hiring an agency called GlassHut to develop a video for their company. The project manager for this is Alicia Chen. Alicia’s Socialcast community administrator has made her an external contributor admin, giving her the ability to create an external group and invite non-employees to the group. Alicia creates an external facing group in Socialcast called “Acme Product Demo Video” and invites a few members of her team, and the contacts at GlassHut who they will need to collaborate with on the project.

In the group, the Acme Corp employees working on the project can share links and other resources that may assist the GlassHut team in producing the video.  The contractors from GlassHut can post questions to Alicia and the Acme Corp team instead of relying on email. In addition, the GlassHut team can upload files and videos related to the project and get feedback from everyone at AcmeCorp in real time. When the project is complete, Alicia can archive the group or keep it open for future projects with GlassHut.

To learn more, see the External Contributors section in our Community Administrator Documentation.