Use Thinkific Communities to engage your students in meaningful conversations — both with yourself, the course creator, and with each other. Use Communities to help drive engagement and keep your students around longer!
In this article:
App Store Solution: Circle SSO
About This Feature
What is a Thinkific Community?
A Thinkific Community is a place, outside of your course content, where you can foster conversations with your students. Each Community has a dedicated page (on your Thinkific site) where students and instructors can interact through written posts and comments. Communities are similar to Facebook Groups, with access granted at either a site level, or associated with individual courses or bundles.
Why create a Community?
Communities allow users to connect with you and your audience: build trust and loyalty, collaborate socially and connect globally. You can build a Community around your content to add even more value to your online courses or create a Community as a higher tiered offering!
What are the benefits of a Thinkific Community?
Create your own branded Community
Just like everything you build with Thinkific, your brand is the star, with no outside distractions. Choose colors and key imagery, plus host your Communities on your own custom domain, without the noise and distractions of social platforms.
Assign Community memberships
Assign Community access by a specific course, bundle or memberships, or create a site-wide Community to allow any of your students access!
Fully integrated with your Thinkific site
Community members are automatically added (or removed) based on enrollments in your Thinkific content — no more manually adding and removing people.
Built on a platform you can trust
Thinkific is trusted by over 40,000 course creators, and unlike social media platforms, you control all the content that appears in your Community. No ads, no tracking, no spam.
How It Works
Each Community has a dedicated page where your students can create new posts as well as view and comment on existing posts. Communities are individually named and branded with your desired Community image, as well as color and font. Posts can include an image, video, or file link if desired!
Important Considerations
- On Site Builder Theme versions 1.12.12 or higher, Communities available to students are automatically displayed in their Student Dashboard
- A Community can also be accessed through a direct link to the Community page
- 1 Community is available on our Pro plan and unlimited Communities are available on Pro + Growth plan and higher
- Note that currently a maximum of 21 Communities can be displayed in the Student Dashboard. If you have more than 21 Communities, we recommended sharing Community links directly with your students in a text lesson or via email. Including a link in a Course Welcome Email is a great way to notify your students of any Communities they have access to when enrolling in your course!
- We don't currently have the option to delete or archive a Community. If you are no longer using a Community, you can make your Community private and only accessible to you as the Site Owner.
How to Create a Community
- Go to Support Your Students
- Select Communities
- Click + New Community
- Input Community Settings (see details below)
- Click Save
Community Settings
When you are creating your Community, you will have the following settings and customization options:
Basic Settings
Here, you can input the Name of your community and a short Description to let you students know what your community is all about! The name will appear in the header of your community page as well as the right side with your description:
Access
You can customize who will have access to your Community with the following options:
Logged in students
Students who are logged into your site can access your Community regardless of their enrollment status.
Enrolled students
Limit access to one or more specific courses or bundles on your site. With this option, Community members are automatically added (or removed) based on their current enrollments. To specify enrollment for a specific course or bundle:
- Select Enrolled students
- Click Select a Course/Bundle
- Check off the box to the left of all Courses and Bundles you want included
- Click Apply
Students in groups
Limit access to students in one or more Groups. To select desired Groups:
- Select Students in Groups
- Click Select a Group
- Check off the box to the left of one or more Groups you want included
- Click Apply
Groups must be created before they will be available in the dropdown menu. Learn more here: Create a Group
Only me
Great for preparing a Community that is not ready for launch yet!
When you first create your Community, we recommend setting your Access to Only me as you get started. This way you can make sure that you are happy with how your Community looks and even create your first post before students jump in. You can always return to this page to update your Access once you are ready! Check out Community Best Practices here.
Note that your Community will automatically appear on the Student Dashboard in Site Builder Theme versions 1.12.12 or higher for all students that have access.
Appearance
Adjust your Primary color and font to match your branding! The color will be applied to the header and buttons of your Community and the font will be used as the main font throughout.
Image
This will appear in the top right side of your Community above your description.
View Your Community
Once you Save your Community, you can access it from your Community details by clicking Go to Community on the top right of your Community details page. You can also copy your Share Link and paste this in your browser to access your Community.
If you are not currently in your Community details page, you can also access your Community as follows:
- Go to Support Your Students
- Select Communities
- Locate the Community you want to start posting in
- Click the 3 dot icon and select Go to Community
Once you have created your Community, you can start posting! Learn more here: Manage Your Community
Do you have feedback on our Communities feature? We want to hear from you. We are continually making improvements and if there is functionality that would help your business, please let us know!
App Store Solution: Circle SSO
If Thinkific's built-in Communities option isn't quite right for your particular community needs, you may want to consider the third-party Circle SSO app, available in the Thinkific App Store.
Circle is an industry-leading community building software. This app allows Thinkific customers to seamlessly create Circle communities using their Thinkific credentials and/or connect their existing Circle account to work with their Thinkific site.