If you created your community before the purchase option was available, not to worry! We'll walk you through all the steps needed to update your existing community and offer it as a sellable product, while making sure you maintain a seamless experience for existing members.
Converting your existing community to a sellable product will require an update to your community access settings, as well as additional customizations to external facing site pages.
Updating the access settings on an existing community will remove all of the students currently enrolled within the community. We've included detailed steps below on how to re-grant access—however, to ensure a seamless experience, make sure to read through all instructions before diving in, as there may be timing and messaging considerations for your students.
Communities are not currently supported by our bulk enroll feature, however, we have included some alternative options for re-granting access. Depending on the method you choose, we recommend notifying your students before making any changes to your community access settings.
Let's get started!
Each community has a landing page created by default that you can fully customize for selling! There are some new section types specific to communities including a Community overview [smart section] and Call to Action (community) section that will be added to your page automatically. Just like your other landing pages, these sections can be fully customized, rearranged, and removed depending on your preferences.
Build Your Community Landing Page
Note
Note that you will see a locked message in your community landing page banner for now as your community is set to Private and Hidden to prevent anyone from accessing it while you are getting set up. We will cover removing this in the following steps.
Once you are happy with your external pages, you can set a price for your community.
If you prefer to sell your community within a bundle, that's no problem! You can add a community to your bundle alongside courses.
For more, see: Create a Product Bundle
You've done all the preparation work, now there are just a few more steps to go to selling your community!
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From the Admin Dashboard, go to Products
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Select Communities
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Click the ellipses (3 dot icon) next to your desired community and click Edit
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On this page, scroll down to the Access settings. Before making any changes, review your current settings to make sure you are aware of which students currently have access as you will need to re-grant access later.
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Select Students that purchase this community. If this option is not available, you'll need to update your site theme.
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You will see a warning popup explaining the change you are about to make will remove all students currently enrolled in this community. If you are fine with this, hit OK.
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Save your changes
For more, see: How to Update Your Theme Version
When updating your access settings to purchase, we automatically set your community to Private and Hidden to prevent any unintentional enrollments while you are getting set up. Since you have already prepared your external pages and priced your community, you can disable these settings and allow new members to start purchasing!
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From the Admin Dashboard, go to Products
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Select Communities
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Select your Community to go to your Community Settings
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Under Visibility, deselect Private community and Hidden community
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Click Save
Note
Once these settings are disabled, you'll see a community card displayed in various sections and pages throughout your site alongside your Course card including:
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All Pricing Options [Smart Section]
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Additional Products Site Builder Section
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Upsells Site Builder Section
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Bundle Includes Site Builder Section
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Checkout pages
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All Products page (formerly called All Courses page available at yoursite.thinkific.com/collections)
If you would like to customize the image displayed in your community card, this can be done in your community settings.
For more, see: Private and Hidden Products
Now that you have updated your access settings, you can re-enroll your existing students back into the community! You have the following options for re-enrolling your students:
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You can manually re-enroll each student. This must be done one student at a time, so we only recommend this if you have a small number of members in your community.
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You can provide your students with a 100% off coupon for your community, so they can simply enroll again at their convenience!
You can also consider sharing a link to your community landing page with a coupon automatically applied to make the process as seamless as possible for your existing students. Learn how to copy your community landing page link below.
For more, see: Create Coupons · Share Links with Coupons Automatically Applied
Congrats! Now that you've customized everything and re-granted existing students' access, you are ready to start selling!
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From the Community Builder, select Build Landing Page on the top-right side of the header. This will take you to your landing page in Site Builder.
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In Site Builder, click the link icon on the top left of the side menu
And that's it, you can start sharing this page with your audience!
No, you can only sell communities when using a Performance checkout.
For more, see: Thinkific's Built-In Checkout