Creating subcommunities to reflect organizational change

Create a subcommunity to bring together a subset of members within an existing community for a specific purpose.

What can members do in a subcommunity?

When you create a subcommunity, you and any other community owners automatically become owners of that subcommunity.

Create a subcommunity

  1. Open the community to which you want to add a subcommunity.
  2. From the Overview page, select Community Actions > Create Subcommunity.
  3. Fill in the form provided. The most important field is the subcommunity's Access: type. The access options depend on the access level of the parent community.
    • When the parent community is Public to my organization, the subcommunity can be public, moderated, or restricted.
    • When the parent community is Moderated, the subcommunity can be moderated or restricted.
    • When the parent community is Restricted, the subcommunity must also be restricted.
  4. Click Access Advanced Features and add members to the subcommunity by doing one of the following:
    • Click Add all members of this community to your new subcommunity.
    • Alternatively, to add a subset of the parent community membership, enter the names of the people or groups that you want to add in the Members field.
  5. Click Save.

Some restrictions

To create a restricted community that people can discover and can request access to, select Let anyone in my organization see the community's title, description, tags, and owners. People in your organization but who are outside the community can then see the community's details in the My Organization Communities view. These details also appear in search results.

A subcommunity cannot be more visible than its parent. Therefore, if a parent community does not have Let anyone in my organization see the community's title, description, tags, and owners selected, then the subcommunity cannot have this set either.

You cannot change the External access setting for a new subcommunity. That is, all subcommunities have the same setting for external access as the parent community.

What's next?

Subcommunities display on the Communities page. If the Subcommunities app is added to the parent community, any subcommunities also appear on the parent's Overview page.

A Subcommunities link is added to the navigation bar in the parent community to enable you to open the subcommunity from the parent community. You can also access your subcommunities from the I’m a Member or I’m an Owner views.