Seeding your own community to start the conversation

Now that you've got your community setup, and all your cohorts ready-to go. Now you need to pre-fill or create a starting point in the community. To do that you have 2 main options. 1) Create the messages manually within cohortium OR 2) Import the content via a spreadsheet

Both options have their pros and cons. Here's the breakdown.

Creating the messages manually in cohortium

This step will require you (and even some coworkers) to interact in the community to start the conversations. Simply acting as a community member you can go in and create different messages and comment on threads. This option is easier, but will show you as the author on the posts unless you manually change that afterwards in HubSpot CRM. Changing the author is not overly complicated, but can be time consuming based on the amount of content you are creating to start.

Importing the content via a spreadsheet

This step requires you to have some minor HTML knowledge if you want formatting (IE: bold, italic, links etc) in your content. Additionally, if you want to add some comments to your initial threads it will require an additional field and setting up a workflow. This option is recommended if you have comments and main message threads.

Here's instructions on seeding your content via the spreadsheet

Here's an example spreadsheet.

1. Ensure that all of your cohorts are created, making sure you keep reference of the cohort slugs. You'll need this when creating your spreadsheet's content.
2. Ensure that all of your contacts are created, and that they include the cohortium username as well as profile fields. If these do not exist, they will need to be imported or created prior.
3. Create a new property in HubSpot for threads which is "Associated Thread Slug" as a single line text field.
4. Fill out the example spreadsheet, including the associated cohort that you want each message placed in and keep in mind that "thread content" allows for html. Note that all of your threads are going to be "Messages" unless you have specific comments intended to go within those threads. (It's reccomended to do that as a seperate import)
5.  Import your spreadsheet into HubSpot (Choosing "Cohorts", "Contacts", "Threads"
   
6. Map your properties as pictured
   
7. Verify that all of your threads are appearing in HubSpot (CRM > Threads)
8. Create your workflow to associate the "comments" to the "messages"
9. Verify that all of your threads are showing up on the front end.