Hello Program Managers (and Administrators)! By assigning users the role of Topic Manager, you can distribute publishing capabilities to more people in your organization while keeping guardrails in place. A Topic Manager can:

• Access Studio, where they can see only the content and metrics for their assigned topic(s).
  • Optional: if enabled, Topic Managers can also create and manage campaigns.
• Leverage direct publishing - when they submit content to their assigned topic from the mobile app or web experience, that content is published immediately (skips the "needs review" status).

Read more about how the Topic Manager role works in our permissions article.

Who Is a Good Candidate for the Topic Manager Role?

Anyone that is trusted to publish content without review (to at least one topic!) is a good candidate for the Topic Manager role. To set the Topic Manager up for success, check out Questions to Ask below.

Here are some scenarios to consider when thinking about how this role can best fit into your organization. These scenarios are not a comprehensive list -- you may find that there are other ways where you can apply this role in your company.

• Expand to Other Departments - give a representative from outside of the Comms organization control over a topic for their business unit or team.
• Employee Resource Group - empower a group of employees to manage their own topic focused on a specific topic.
• Leadership Topic - allow an executive or other leaders in the company (or their assistants) to manage their own topic.
• Champion Content Creators - unlock direct publishing for employees who are already submitting great content. Use the submissions report to identify and recruit those users to become Topic Managers.

Questions to Ask

We recommend reaching out to your Strategic Advisor or Customer Success Manager for an in-depth conversation about your strategic approach to engaging Topic Managers. Plan ahead so that you can think through how to maximize the Topic Manager role and set them and your platform strategy up for success. The following questions are intended to help prepare for that conversation.

These questions assume that you are an Administrator or Program Manager with access to all functionality in Studio.

Ask yourself about the big picture:

• What is your platform strategy?
• Are you following Firstup's best practices? You can talk to your Strategic Advisor or Customer Success Manager about these practices.
• Where are Topic Managers required to enable your strategy?
• How will you train and prepare Topic Managers to leverage the platform to perform their role and responsibilities?
• Do your Topic Managers need access to Connect in addition to content creation?

Some topic settings you should consider in the context of a Topic Manager:

• Targeting - do you need to make a public topic targeted to ensure that managers can only reach a certain audience? If you have a targeted topic, do you want to adjust which groups are targeted or make changes to how the groups are defined (ie which Members are in the groups)?
• Auto follow - do you have topics that include content that the business needs all users in the target audience to see? By enabling auto following, you increase the visibility of content.
• Auto-publish - Topic Managers can publish regardless of this setting (the special power of the Topic Manager is to always auto-publish!). You may want auto-publish turned off so that Member content goes through "For Review" and only Topic Managers can publish immediately.

What can you do to help your Topic Managers be successful? Some ideas:

• Establish the Topic strategy, which should include the topic’s goals and metrics, content strategy, promotional strategy, and all associated process and governance documentation.
• Send an email campaign to your Topic Managers to communicate your hopes or expectations for their role, along with the resources you can include to help them train and get up to speed on your strategy.
• Let your Topic Managers know they can enable content submission notifications to stay up-to-date on any submitted content needing review.
• Encourage your Topic Managers to check out the Firstup article Getting Started - Topic Managers.
• Create a topic targeted to just Topic Managers and turn on auto-publish. You can use this topic to educate and train, share best practices, communicate special messages, and/or the Topic Managers can publish content for each other.
• Make a plan for reviewing and rewarding content performance. The goal should be to develop a process that enables Topic Manager to understand what to publish and when to publish (how often, what time of day), with regular meetings to review goals, metrics, and results (content performance). Topic Managers should know that they can learn from content and improve results via this process.

Do you want to explicitly advise Topic Managers of some features they cannot access, but you could adjust for them? For example, Topic Managers cannot:

• feature content
• cross-publish posts to topics the Topic Manager is not assigned to
• auto follow users to the assigned topic
• update the targeting of the assigned topic
• add new users to the program
• change a feed configuration

Resources

Learn more about Topic Managers from our Knowledge Base articles:

• What can Topic Managers do? See Topic Manager Role and Permissions Table.
• How do Topic Managers create content from the mobile app? See Direct Publishing.
• How do Topic Managers send emails from Connect? See Create an Email.
• How do I give Topic Managers access? See Add New Studio Users.
• How do I review Topic Managers at the Topic level? See Create or Edit a Topic.
• What Knowledge Base articles are written for Topic Managers? See Getting Started - Topic Managers.