What is a community?
Communities serve three basic purposes:
label and organize communities in the Dashboard
provide filters for subscribers to determine the type of content they wish to receive in automated emails
enable site visitors to find relevant content
Using communities to organize your Dashboard:
Communities (and their parent tags) can help you organize the back-end of your site. Parent tags are labels that group communities together. For example, given the communities, "Accounting," "Engineering," and "Journalism," you might assign the overlying parent tag, Academic Communities, the default parent tag for majors. Keep in mind that you can change the names of parent tags to reflect your organizational preferences.
Using communities to set automated alerts preferences:
Once you've set up communities in your Dashboard, subscribers can select the ones most relevant to their interests in order to customize the types of emails that they receive from your career center. Automated emails are sent to subscribers with content that is tagged specifically to their preferences. The best part is that you don't have to do a thing -- automated emails are sent without your lifting a finger!
Using communities to find content on your site:
You can also set up communities to group content together for specific users. For example, you could create create a community for Parents/Families and use this tag to consolidate content most relevant to their concerns and interests.
Communities are organized by parent tags. For example, the communities, "Accounting," "Engineering," and "Journalism," are all majors, and would therefore fall under the same parent tag. The default parent tag for majors is Academic Communities, but can be changed to reflect your organizational preferences.
When you publish content, you have the option to assign various communities to it. Content pieces that are tagged to the same community will be grouped together on the corresponding community page. These pages are known as career communities.
Communities are labels that are relevant for all content types, like Career Communities, Audience types, or Industries.
Communities play two major roles on your site: they act as (1) pages for career communities to organize content, and (2) as labels that allow you to segment your audiences -- and eventually determine which types of content users receive in their automated alerts.
Note: It's important to remember that communities are different than content categories, which are only relevant to the form of content they were created to organize. To learn more about content categories, reach this article.