BuddyBoss Help Is Key to the Success of Your Project

My team and I work with several BuddyBoss sites a month. We get a lot of what we call, “BuddyBoss Help” calls. As a BuddyBoss expert team, this makes sense. We have stacked up a lot of experience using BuddyBoss and tools like LearnDash. These are the tools we most use for building online courses, intranet sites, business portals and other membership sites. 

We recently got a call from someone who found us while searching for terms like BuddyBoss Help, BuddyBoss Guru, BuddyBoss Expert, and BuddyBoss Consultant on Google. You get it. They were looking for help. 

Compared to others we talk to, they are doing better than most. They did their research. They evaluated several potential platforms that were possible matches for what they needed. It wasn’t like they picked it on a whim which happens more often than you’d think.

They were looking for help building a BuddyBoss expert site for their sales team members to communicate with each other. BuddyBoss definitely delivers there. They needed a place for the team to congregate and discuss different topics. For example, they were looking to provide an area where the team could discuss sales strategy. They needed an area where team members could discuss best practices. They then wanted to allow team members to select which topics were of most interest to them. They didn’t want all their team members to get notifications for every discussion on the site. That would be overwhelming. The point was each team member would be in charge of the information they would get.

All this is a good match for what The BuddyBoss theme and BuddyBoss Platform provide.

They also needed an area where they could publish course-like information. They wanted to offer an orientation program for team members just starting with the company. It would be used to:

• welcome them to the team, 
• give them information critical for new members, and 
• show them the best ways of finding the information on the site.

When you need something to build course-like features, we would put LearnDash to use for you. That's a solid learning management system (LMS) that integrates really well with BuddyBoss.

After speaking with this team in particular, it sounded like they could also benefit from a good search feature to make it easy for the team to get the information they needed without going through too much trouble.

What concerned me is that the team working on the project was really struggling. They knew BuddyBoss could do so many of the things they needed, but they didn’t have the experience using the tools to get it to do what they needed. They needed what I like to call, “BuddyBoss Help” and hand-holding and guidance to get them from their very good ideas to some concise requirements to a working and implemented system.

BuddyBoss, LearnDash connected with tools like Memberium giving you access to backend CRMs like Keap/Infusionsoft or ActiveCampaign can be a super resource for a project like this. Getting these configured so they work smoothly AND meet your requirements is a real stretch if you are working with these tools for the first time.

In the case of this team, they started working with a Wordpress developer they knew. This was someone they trusted who had done a good deal of web development for them. They had been working with them so it made sense to call that person.

The problem is that if you’ve never used tools like this, you won’t initially know what are the best ways to use the tools. You may get it working because you’re good technically, but it’s unlikely you’ll implement best practices. That’s something that comes from experience. 

Deciding, for example, if making use of a CRM like Keap is best to do initially or later takes some insight. Would ActiveCampaign be a better choice than Keap for the CRM? There are pros and cons to both. Each provides features that are better for one situation versus another.

Since this call was for an intranet, e-commerce and taking payments from users wasn’t an issue, but when it is, there are a lot of platform questions to be answered. 

• Should you consider WooCommerce for taking payments?
• Which payment processors work best depending upon payment sizes, locations of the majority of customers (i.e., US, UK, Canada vs a more international audience.)?
• If using ActiveCampaign, which doesn’t have native payment processing, is WooCommerce, ThriveCart or some other solution best.

The decisions you make as you define your requirements are so important. Making the wrong decision can have big, negative implications going forward.  My recommendation always is to find an experienced BuddyBoss consultant. Find yourself an experienced LearnDash expert. Make sure that person has an in-depth understanding of backend CRM options and understands when that’s the right approach versus using a Wordpress centric approach. What you want is an end result that is well architected and supports you in the short-term and prepares you well for the plans you have as you grow in using the solution.