WiserEarth Group Support

Monitoring group activity with your watchlist

Being part of a group automatically puts that group in your watchlist. Every activity that occurs in that group, will be broadcasted to your watchlist alerts page. You can opt to link new alerts into your email inbox and have them served up "as it happens, "daily", "weekly" or "never". More about using watchlist here.

WiserEarth groups for your community

By now, you would understand that WiserEarth groups is pretty flexible and versatile. You can customize the layout, choose which modules to use, manage members, manage content, and even promote your group beyond WiserEarth. You can also set your group as a private group if you want to use it for your team.

You can use it as a knowledge management system, as a place to communicate and coordinate project, as a place to raise awareness around an issue, as a place to organize your community, and even as your website.

Custom address for your WiserEarth group

You can buy a domain name and map it to redirect visitors to your WiserEarth groups. So, for example, if your group page is on www.wiserearth.org/group/savearth, you can buy the www.savearth.org domain name and link it to your group page. This way, when people type www.savearth.org in their browser, they'll be taken to your WiserEarth group at www.wiserearth.org/group/savearth

Integrating your WiserEarth groups with your main website

You can embed a WiserEarth group in your main website as a space for visitors, volunteers, and staff to communicate and coordinate projects. This uses a technique called I-frame (pronounced "eye frame"). The same technique can be used to publish portions of your group, such as the listing of resources or events, to your main website.

Read this page for more details, examples and how to: WiserEarth I-frame Option: What is It and How Can I Use It?

Promoting your group

Some ways to promote your group:

• Make sure that your group is active so that it constantly shows up in the first pages of the browse groups page.
• Tell your friends about it, or better yet, invite them to join your group
• Write something about your group in your profile page, facebook page, etc., and invite people to visit and join.
• Participate in WiserEarth. Add and edit content. Join discussions. Join other groups. People will naturally want to know about you, visit your profile page, and find out about group(s) you administer.
• Put a link to it or a WiserEarth badge linking to it on your main website (e.g. Great Turning group and Great Turning website)
• Put a link to your group in your email signature
• Share pages from your group with friends and with other people on the internet. Use the ShareThis button explained on step 5 of this tutorial.

Creating and linking sub-groups

One group is not enough? No worries, you can always create more groups to accommodate specific type of activities for your members. Some of them can be private groups if you like. You can then link these groups in the Related Groups module (see step 2 of this tutorial) and as explained in step 5, sharing content between your groups is also easy to do.

Tips for Group Admins

Please visit WiserEarth's blog for the latest tips in managing and growing your group.

Extra storage space

Is 1Gb of free storage for your group's files not enough? Please contact support@wiserearth.org for storage upgrade inquiries.

Getting help

Lost? Got questions? Need help? Don't worry, just go to our community Help Desk. We usually respond within 24 hours, and often, much sooner than that.

Need extra feature? Got suggestions? Experiencing errors?

We're all ears for your feedback and suggestions. There's nothing more pleasing than being able to serve the WiserEarth community better. Drop by with your thoughts in the WiserEarth Suggestions group anytime.

Well done! You have successfully completed this tutorial.