Is your association planning to transition their existing, "standard" Higher Logic Community to a Topic Community? If so, this article serves as a checklist to educate and guide Community and Super Admins through the process of updating their users' notification subscriptions to ensure the best user experience once the transition is complete. The information in this article represents Higher Logic's best-practice recommendations.

If you're not familiar with Topic Communities, check out this article to learn how they're different than standard communities.

Before we begin...

Let's cover a few important nuances about this process:

• Topic Communities have a unique set of discussion notifications that operate independently, and in addition to, those from a standard community. This means that when switching to a Topic Community, our recommendation is to remove your users' previous discussion subscriptions and set them up with Topic Community subscriptions.
• Why is this important? If users' previous subscriptions are left in place, they will continue to receive them, in addition to any they'll now receive from the Topic Community. This can be both confusing and frustrating. 
• Lastly, once a community is switched to a Topic Community, users will no longer be able to manage their "old" discussion subscriptions in the Notification Settings section of their profile (on the My Account > Community Notifications page shown below). Again, these subscriptions are still active but not manageable by users. Instead, a Community or Super Admin should work with Higher Logic to help you manage these subscriptions in bulk. This process is outlined in the Admin checklist section below.

Switch to a Topic Community

As mentioned earlier, this article is dedicated to educating and guiding you through the process of  managing user subscriptions when switching to a Topic Community.

Check out Set up a Topic Community to learn how to switch your community to a Topic Community.

Admin checklist

This section outlines Higher Logic's best-practice recommendations for how:

• Community and Super Admins can manage their user's discussion subscriptions when switching to a Topic Community to provide the best user experience possible.

Step 1: Update user discussion subscriptions

For this step, you're going to reach out to Higher Logic Support and explain you're switching your community to a Topic Community. As part of this process, create a case and request the following:

• Request Higher Logic Support to bulk-remove all of those users' existing community subscriptions (Daily Digest/Real-Time).
• Then, Higher Logic Support should bulk-subscribe users to the new Topic Community subscriptions (Personalized Digest or Personalized Digest & Real-Time Discussion Emails).

Step 2: Communicate subscription changes to users

Users will not be automatically notified of these changes, so it's up to you to let them know. The easiest way to reach all of a community's members is using the Email Community Members email feature.

To do so:

1. Navigate to the community that was updated to a Topic Community.
2. Click Settings > Email Community Members.

3. In the To field, select Community users who have a organization membership (i.e., all of the community's members).
4. Write your message in the Community Admin Message text field. Inform these users of the recent community change and how it affects their discussion subscriptions.

1. We recommend explaining you have removed their existing subscriptions and have set up their Topic Community subscriptions. (They are free to update their subscriptions as desired. See below.)
2. We also recommend educating them about how Topic Communities function by including a link to our Topic Communities knowledge base article. Specifically, they'll need to understand how to manage their Stated Interests and notification subscriptions, which is outlined in the article.

5. When finished, Send Email to send it to all of the community's members.

For additional information about the Email Community Members feature, including how to create email templates, check out Email Community Members.