Storyboard is built to help your organization find new opportunities to use audio to engage your employees and team members. We have a fantastic tool to do that through Storboard Groups. Our Groups feature, which is available to all Pro Tier administrators, enables you to create as many podcast "series" as you wish to target different audiences for team updates, trainings, and more.
Furthermore, when using Groups, you can create folders of episodes that are available for anyone in your organization or you can limit a Group to only certain members (for instance, if only the Sales team should have access to a new 6-part training series). In this article, we'll explain how our Pro users can leverage both of these Group types.
All Pro Tier users can create and manage Groups from the Administrator Portal. When signed in, you will see a tab for My Groups. If you have not yet created a group, you'll be invited to do so by setting a group name, group type, and logo. If you have built Groups in the past, you will see an option to edit or invite new users.
Storyboard Groups have two functions: they can create content that anyone in your organization can choose to access or they can be limited to a certain, targeted audience. Let's start with the first scenario where you wish to create a new podcast training series that could be useful across your organization and should be made widely available.
Here's an example to illustrate how this might work. An organization has been using Storyboard for a month to release companywide training materials. Now, the CEO has an initiative that she would like to provide a weekly 5-10 minute condensed update on key news, topics, and insights. This might be a great use case for Storyboard Groups.
To implement this strategy, the Storyboard Administrator might go to My Groups and create a new Open Group called "CEO Town Hall." In turn, this "Town Hall" folder will be available for every employee in the Groups tab where they can subscribe. They will not see these episodes by default, but they can choose to subscribe to listen to all past and future episodes. Additionally, future episodes will send push notifications out to subscribers only to keep them engaged and bring listeners back to your podcast feed.
To upload episodes after creating the Group, the Podcast Administrator will simply choose the Group name -- like "CEO Town Hall" -- when uploading future episodes in the Upload a Podcast tab. Storyboard will take care of the rest.
Based on our Administrators' feedback, we offer a second tool for organizing your podcast series: Private Groups. In this scenario, an administrator wants to share a set of podcasts to only a select audience, like the company's managers or customer support team. It is imperative, let's say, that no other business unit or audience will have access to this set of podcasts. This is a great opportunity to use Private Groups.
We'll use another example here to outline when Private Groups will be helpful. An organization has created a training that should be available to 200 managers but not to the rest of the company's 1200 employees who hold various roles. The administrator will launch this 6-part training series through a Private Group and invite the management team using our tool.
After going to My Groups, the Administrator will see an option to set this Group to Private Mode. When they do so, there will be a helper tool to choose any user who should be able to see, listen, or download this series of podcasts. The administrator will go through and select any and all users who should be able to receive the training content.
For the user experience, it's quite simple. When a listener is added to a Private Group, there is nothing to accept or do. Instead, the listener will see this Group's content when they log-in next time to Storyboard. All episodes will be added to their main feed, and the listener will be able to see the Private Group as a folder in the Groups tab. For users who have not been added, they will be unable to see this Private Group or its episodes.
Private Groups can serve many functions to help expand your vision. If you ever have a sub-group in your organization (like a business unit, regional manager's team, etc.) that wants to launch their own podcast, you can do it "out of the box" with the Storyboard product. You would simply create a Private Group, invite this new administrator, and they will be able to manage this folder. Even better, it will not be revealed to any user who is not an invited user, which means it will not confuse or over-expose content to your other users.
