When creating a product in your community, the following items are affordances supported by the Honeycommb platform. Other affordances (i.e. t-shirt) can be created as line items on the product, but those are NOT managed or fulfilled by Honeycommb.
When creating your product on Honeycommb, the following can be added as offerings for your subscription tiers:
Access To Community
As a baseline affordance, admins can (and mostly should) enable the affordance that a user on a specific tier has access to the community.
If you're creating a community where there is NO Free Plan, it's required that this affordance be enabled when you're creating your tiers within your community.
Paid Groups
Paid groups are a great tool to create exclusive shared experiences and content targeted at specific niches inside your community.
A couple of facts and points to clearly understand ahead of time:
- Currently, existing groups cannot turn into paid groups
- A group must be marked as PAID when the group is created in the community, it cannot be added at a later date
- When a user buys one of your tiers that includes one or multiple paid groups, they'll be automatically added to ALL of the existing groups that are associated with that tier
- If you (in the future) add a new paid group to one of your existing tiers, users that have purchased that product will not be automatically added to that group. Because they are already on that product/plan, you will have to manually add them to the new paid group added to the offering. Please work with your Success manager on this one!
NOTE: An affordance with access to paid groups can be multiple groups OR one group. For example, if your Tier 2 product has access to a paid group, that product can enable access to one or multiple groups. So, in checkout, the user would purchase your Tier 2 product and immediately gain access to all paid groups that are connected to this product
Paid Or Premium Content
Separate from Paid Groups, admins can also create Paid or Premium Content as an affordance in your community.
A few facts about Paid Content:
- Paid content doesn't need to be inside of a paid group - it can be posted/shared individually within the community
- It's possible to create a tier that ONLY has access to paid content, and not paid groups
- Paid content can be posted from ANY account in the community, but it must be managed (currently) by an admin in the control center. That means, if admins are running multiple accounts - multiple users can publish paid content.
- When you publish paid content, make sure to click the "Paid" checkbox for the post via your Admin Control Center. Edit the post in Control Center, click "Paid" and save.
Verified Status
Also listed as an affordance that you build into one of your Membership Product Tiers is the Verified Status. When added to the appropriate tier, users will be automatically verified (the same is true when they stop paying for membership; their verified status will be automatically downgraded.
Some inspiration in using "Verified"
- Gamify your Membership by leveraging the system to recognize those that are purchasing your top-tier product
- Create a custom definition of Verified to align with your top tier product.
- If you're using a Freemium model, you could make all "Paying" tiers verified and denote them as premium/paying members
TIP: As a reminder, you can use custom labels to come up with your own definition of a Verified User.
Direct Messaging
Monetize access to Direct Messages by requiring a subscription to access the Direct Message feature in your community. Each community subscription product in Honeycommb can have Direct Messaging enabled or disabled. By default, all users have access to Direct Messages but you can change this by updating the Direct Messaging affordance for your subscription products.