Inviting people to join a community

Extend your community by inviting people to become members.

About this task

As a community owner, you can reach out to people who you think might be interested in your community by inviting them to become members. Members of a public community can also invite people to join the community. The invitees receive an email inviting them to join the community, and they can then choose whether to accept or reject the invitation.

Why invite external users
Note: You might need to share information and collaborate with people from outside your organization; contractors or consultants, for example. If your community is a restricted community and allows external access, you can invite people from outside your organization (external users) to join. External users can participate in the community, but there are restrictions on what they can see and do. For more information about what external users can and cannot do in Connections, see What can external users do?.

Before you invite external users to join, review your organization's security policies on data restrictions and information sharing.

You can invite people to join a community as members, you cannot invite them to join as owners of the community.

In addition to receiving an email invitation, invitees can go to the I'm Invited view in the Communities Catalog and see the list of communities and subcommunities that they have been invited to join. Invitees can then click the link to Accept or Decline the invitation.

If you invite someone to join a subcommunity, that user must already be a member of the parent community.

Procedure

To invite people to join a community, complete the following steps.
  1. From the I'm an Owner view, select the community to which you want to invite new members.
  2. Click Members in the navigation pane.
  3. Click Invite Members.
  4. Type the names of the people that you want to invite in the Members field. Type-ahead predicts the name that you are typing by comparing it to names in the directory that your administrator specified. If it proposes the name that you want, click to add it.
    Note: Hover the mouse over a person's name to see whether they are an external user External user icon.
  5. Click Send Invitations.

What to do next

You can view all the pending invitations for a community from the Invitations tab on the community's Members page. The tab displays information about when each invitation was sent and who it was sent to.