Is your association planning to transition a Topic Community to "standard" 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.

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 standard community from a Topic Community, we recommend removing your users' Topic Community subscriptions and giving them standard discussion subscriptions (No Email, Daily Digest or Real Time). You will learn how to do this later in the article.
• Why is this important? If users' previous Topic Community subscriptions are left in place, they will continue to receive them, in addition to any they'll now receive from discussions in the standard community. This can be both confusing and frustrating.
• Lastly, once a Topic Community is switched to a standard community, users will no longer be able to manage their "old" Topic 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.

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 transitioning from a Topic Community to a standard community in order 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 transitioning your Topic Community to a standard community. As part of this process, create a case and request the following:

• Request Higher Logic Support to bulk-remove all user's existing Topic Community subscriptions (Personalized Digest or Personalized Digest & Real-Time Discussion Emails).
• Then, Higher Logic Support should bulk-subscribe users to one of the standard community subscription types (No Email, Daily Digest or Real-Time). Let Support know which subscription type works best for your users.

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 standard 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 Topic Community-specific subscriptions and have set up their "standard community" subscription. (They are free to update their subscriptions as desired. See below.)
2. We also recommend educating them about how to manage their own subscriptions by including a link to our Manage Your Community Notifications knowledge base article. All information in that article is pertinent, but they should pay special attention to the Manage your notifications section at the end, which teaches them how to update their discussion subscriptions for each of their communities.

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.