It is now several months since the "Local Groups" feature on the platform was launched. This new tool has been made available to meet the needs of coordinators in terms of monitoring and managing their community. 

Thanks to your feedback, we have been able to identify the information and overview you need to fully understand this tool and promote it to your communities. 

So, why local groups?

Local groups allow us to resolve several pain points, which we'll detail below:

Legal compliance

Previously, you had access to contact lists stored on Airtable, where the moderators were added automatically without asking for their opinion. This led to a legal problem that we had to resolve

• Giving freskers a choice. With local groups, freskers know have the option of whether or not to join the group and therefore whether or not to share their personal information with you. 

Accessibility

Until now, new facilitators weren’t in direct contact with their local community. The process of joining and identifying yourself was not intuitive enough. 

• Automatic invitations. From now on, new white belts will be invited to join the community by joining the local group.

Readability

Community members did not have access to the airtable lists and therefore did not have a good knowledge of the members making up their community.

• • Lists and filtering of members. With local groups, each member can identify the other members who make up their group by filtering by belt, town, etc.

Impact measurement

The activity of a community at local level was not previously measured.

• Indicators: from now on, a filter (in "metrics") will allow you to have indicators adapted to the activity of each local group.

What should I do if facilitators don't join my local group?

New white belts automatically receive an email inviting them to join a local group, but freskers are not obliged to join it. The members of your community who have joined their local group are usually the most active and the most involved in the development of country activities. However, the association will soon send another communication to encourage freskers who have not join. 

Don't hesitate to regularly remind your local communities why it's important and interesting to join this local group: measure engagement in local groups, have appropriate indicators, and identify other members.

We already had Telegram / Facebook / WhatsApp / Slack...

The aim of local groups isn’t to replace these tools or to create a social network or discussion group. Local groups are a portal, a showcase for directing members towards the tools/habits chosen by each local community. The advantage of this showcase is that it’s present on the platform, i.e. on a centralised tool that brings together all the necessary information in the various sections.

Can I send out a newsletter from the local groups?

The aim of the local groups is not to create a newsletter tool with images, targeting of contacts, etc… The announcement system allows you to send (and archive) the most important announcements, which should be used sparingly. If you send a newsletter to your community regularly, you can choose another newsletter tool and invite the members of your group to subscribe. Remember: they must always have a choice (the GDPR is never far away).

Need to report a problem?

Fill in the support form to report any bug or suggest an improvement.