How can you increase participant engagement and help them navigate your Sutra space? In this article, we would like to offer you some tips on how you can increase participant engagement in your programs:
Create a Welcoming Video
Create a short navigation video for your participants, presenting your program space on Sutra and showing them around. You can use a free service called Loom to record your screen (https://www.loom.com/). In this video, you can explain how the participants can benefit from the space, find the content and discussions in one place, connect with each other, ask questions and post their reflections, update their profile, and send direct messages to each other
Create a Welcome and Orientation space
Create a Welcome and Orientation content space where you can put the schedule of your online calls, navigation tips within your program, and all the necessary information for the participants to feel oriented in your program space.
Share the Sutra Navigating Guide with your participants
Share the Navigating Sutra Guide with your participants inside your program space or via a Broadcast, Welcome email. You can also add it to the Welcome and Orientation space if you have one.
Add participants to all the important discussion spaces
Add participants to all the important discussion spaces inside of your program for them to get an email digest with all the updates and push notifications on the app from that discussion space.
Note: The participants can see and read messages in the open discussion spaces even without being members of them. However, they need to either join the discussion themselves or be added by the manager to post messages and receive all the discussion updates via email.
You don’t have to add participants to the general content spaces. We recommend that you simply make these spaces open so that the participants are able to see all the content inside. Sutra digest includes updates from the discussion circles only. If you would like to let the members of your program know that you published a new piece of content you can do so by using the Broadcast feature.
Important: You need to add your participants to the content spaces where you want to give them the extra rights (the editing and space creation rights). The participants can't join the content spaces themselves, even if these spaces are open - they can only see the content inside. So you, as a manager, should add them there yourself.
Use the Broadcast feature for important announcements
Use the Broadcast feature to send your participants personalized emails with program announcements, Zoom link prior to the live call or any other information.
The Broadcast feature is available on all the paid membership plans: Bronze, Silver, Gold (see our Membership plans here).
Use @ to attract people’s attention in a discussion
If you want to direct a message to a specific person, you can @mention their username like so: @natasha. This person will receive an email notification of this message.
You can also start a post with @space for all the participants to receive a notification of this post in their email right away. If you do not use the @mention, the participants will receive this post in their regularly scheduled Sutra digest, which they set up their preferred frequency for.
Add the video call link to your spaces
Sutra works best for people who are creating experiences that combine Zoom calls and online discussion. You can add the video call link (Zoom/Google Hangouts, etc.) to your program space, and whenever the participants click on it, it opens the video conference room. You can add different links to your spaces and sub-spaces, or have the main video link only in the top-level space of your program space. This feature is available on all plans.
You can add a direct video conferencing link to the content page:
Add a hyperlink (select the text, choose to add a link):
Or add an action button and customize the link in the settings:
