As your Employee Resource Group (ERG) program grows, you may find that you want to offer your groups and employees the ability to gather and connect in smaller or more targeted groups that flow down from your existing ERGs. We call these Chapters, and incorporating Chapters into your ERG program is a great way to grow participation in your program in a thoughtful way that creates more opportunities for relevant engagement.
Adding Chapters to your Employee Groups site, and learning how to use them, is considered an enhancement. To ensure that Chapters will meet your needs, it’s important for Benevity to understand what you’re trying to accomplish and how we can help you get there.
This guide will help you understand:
- Benevity Best Practices & Recommendations
- Who to involve
- Expected timeline & implementation activities
- Important project requirements & considerations
- Next steps
Benevity Best Practices & Recommendations
We find that our clients have the best post-launch outcomes by implementing Benevity’s best practices and recommendations. Here are some related to adding Chapters to your Employee Groups site:
- You do not have to have a fulsome Chapters program thought out when you start adding Chapters to your site, but you should have some idea of how you want to roll it out. Identify which existing groups could benefit the most from adding Chapters whether it's due to geographic, functional, or size requirements.
- Chapters are often rolled out regionally to better serve employees in certain cities, states, countries etc. but you could also use the Chapter functionality to create sub-groups of existing groups that serve different purposes, accommodate committees, or provide different visibility.
- When launching new Chapters, ensure you have identified at least one ‘Group Leader’ per Chapter; someone who will learn how to manage the new chapter space in your Employee Groups site, but also someone who is willing to take on the task of being an ERG leader (or a supporting role) within your organization.
- You could also choose to grant leader permissions to new chapters to existing ERG Leaders while things are getting started.
- Group Leaders who understand the time commitment of participating in ERGs, along with a desire to build engagement within their groups, will be the most successful. You can identify and nominate a new Group Leader using data points in your existing Employee Groups site, or start recruiting volunteers/nominees at any time.
Who to Involve
To set up Chapters you will need to involve the following people to complete activities during different phases of the implementation:
- Program Owner/Administrator: They will provide program requirements and details during the enhancement project, as well as coordinate with Group Leaders.
- New Group Leaders: They will learn how to use the Employee Groups site during training (if desired) and will be responsible for driving engagement in their Group or Chapter.
Expected Timeline & Implementation Activities
You can expect a Chapters enhancement to take between 3 - 5 weeks depending on your requirements. The following outlines the implementation phases and the estimated timeline for each phase. Use this to plan your project resourcing and training.
*training if applicable/desired
Activities in each phase
- Discovery
- Gather requirements
- Define scope
- Configure & Test
- Enable technical components
- Configure chapter buildout
- Pre-assign Group Leaders (if desired)
- Pre-assign group members (if desired)
- Training
- Program Administrator training
- Group Leader training
- Group Leader office hours
- Launch & Post Launch
- Roll out to all ERG members
- Monitor engagement
- Support
Important Project Requirements & Considerations
Before proceeding with the Chapters enhancement, ensure that you understand the following considerations:
- Once Chapters are turned “on” in your site, only Program Administrators can create new Chapters
- Group Leaders can invite additional Group Leaders to their parent or chapter group.
- All ERGs do not need chapters. Similarly the chapter structure can be different for each parent group.
- There is no staging environment for Employee Groups, but Chapters can be previewed prior to being published.
- The Chapters enhancement is complete once Chapters are turned on, configuration support is complete (if desired), and any training (if desired) is complete.
Next Steps
Now that you understand what adding Chapters means for your ERG program, and how you can enhance your Employee Groups site with the addition of Chapters, contact your Client Success Manager to get started. Please review this Scoping Questionnaire, as you will need to complete it before getting started. We also recommend sharing the enhancement information with the representatives listed above in the "Who to Involve" section
Enhancement Guides help you get a better understanding of what to expect, the people involved and the project requirements. They are a great resource for you to review with your teams while you prepare for the implementation.