External Contributors Overview
When you work with contractors, vendors, partners, or customers on a regular basis, you may find it useful to include them in your Socialcast community. You can invite them to participate by creating externally facing groups where they securely can interact with employees without having access to the entire community. For example, if product marketing uses freelance writers to create documentation, they would create a Technical Documentation group and invite the freelance writers and any subject matter experts in the company who can assist with the project.
Only Socialcast administrators and External Contributor (EC) admins can create an externally facing group and invite people to join. Participation in the groups is by invitation only, even for community members. External groups do not appear in the Groups Directory unless the viewer is an administrator or a current member of the group.
You can tell at a glance if a group is externally facing because Socialcast superimposes a special icon (a square with four inward-pointing arrows) on the group’s image. This icon will alert community members that their interactions within the group are visible to people who are not employees of the company.
When non-community members accept an invitation, they become external contributors in your Socialcast community. Their home page provides access to the group stream, but they cannot view other streams, town halls, or the company directory. External contributors do have profiles where they can manage their contact information, account settings, and notifications. Similar to the external group images, all external contributor images are designated by the icon with four inward-pointing arrows.
Available in Free and Paid Communities The external contributor feature is available in all communities. If you are a Premium customer and prefer not to use the feature, you can contact your Socialcast account manager to disable it.