Thinking of starting a community?

Thinking of starting a community?
This will get you started off on the right foot

Originally shared by Google+

Community Management Best Practices: using the Ask to Join feature
Post contributed by Community Vanguards member Paul Snedden

Did you know that, as a Community Manager or Owner, you have the ability to change whether members need to be approved before they can join a community? It's called Ask to Join, and can be enabled on any Public community - even after it's been created.

By default, Public Communities are setup with the "anyone can join” option enabled. A great way to make sure you're only getting quality members joining your Community is by enabling the “ask to join” option. What this will do is send an 'application' notification to the Community Owner and Moderators to let you know that you have a request for a new member.

Private Communities don't miss out either. For them, Community Owners and Moderators can now change between “hide it from searches” (invite-only) and “people can find it and ask to join”. One very important point to remember is that this does not allow Communities to change between private and public. That is set at the point of creation of the Community and is not changeable due to privacy restrictions.

To enable Ask to Join, you'll need to open up the Community from the desktop/web interface - click on the gear icon from the Community page, select 'Edit Community', and scroll to the bottom.

Paul owns and moderates a few Communities on Google+, including Sydney: https://plus.google.com/communities/109313133531630502005 and Sydney Local Guides: https://plus.google.com/communities/112376213917229628646