Best Practices for Approving New Members in a Customer Community

January 09, 2026

Reviewing requests to join: would love your input! Looking for a tightknit expert or someone who loves brainstorming (or both!) to share how theyve approached approving members to join the workspace based on XYZ criteria (let's say they need to be a customer of the product that hosts said community). How have you approached this in the past? Use case: first and foremost, ensuring that only customers join. But also see it as a waitlist mechanism pre-launch. drop your best practices, thanks, all! 🧵

14 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Joel P.
·
·
Do you care that they're a user of it (eg admin, etc.) or just that they work at a company that is a customer of your organization?
Jacob G.
·
·
hey joel, thanks! it matters that they are a customer of vanta in any capacity. to what extent they individually use the product, doesnt matter
👍1
Joel P.
·
·
Is SSO via Vanta’s platform an option? With a dedicated pathway for partners, if you if you wanted to allow them in, too 😊
Jacob G.
·
·
good q; not at this point; we're moving pretty quickly. if i need to some manualness here and there just to spin something up and test with the small cohorts we have initially, happy to.
Jacob G.
·
·
i envision this (making it up; idk enough yet to know if this is possible)
Someone lands on tighknit page
they click "join the community" or whatever
leads them to a form to complete
form submission notification on my end. i review, cross-reference, send invite.
Joel P.
·
·
Got it 🫡 Then, I’d probably go with something like this:
Require business email in the form with a description line that clarifies folks who don’t won’t be accepted and the why behind it to ensure conversations are relevant and helpful to all (or something like that)
Company Name is on the form
LinkedIn URL is on the form
Set expectation that applications are reviewed on a X basis (eg, weekly) so please be mindful of it
Give your internal teams an avenue to fast track their application which still requires the form, though.
Each week, filter the company name column from A to Z then have a “Approved” column in the sheet
Add the approved folks to a campaign in your marketing platform to email the invite to join and next steps to nurture them, too, and signup for the community newsletter, if one does or will exist in the future.
Jacob G.
·
·
10/10 idea joel, thank you! im going to make note of this 🧠
Joel P.
·
·
Similar to what I did in a past role and some learnings from the way it started to what I updated it to be to reduce the time spent on manually reviewing and approving each applicant, Jacob. Other things to note:
If you get a contract and they have access to the necessary systems with appropriate releases and documents signed to give them this level of access, then I’d say that this is likely work you should pass off to them vs. do it yourself as a program manager, if possible.
Equally, the SLA for app reviews and notices could be reduced if it's not on you. Completely understand it's a business call, just an item to note.
👀1
Joel P.
·
·
Another idea though 💡 If Vanta has its CRM connected to a company-paid LLM to retain its data, etc., then you could see if you could query the CRM via the LLM to share or update the list of people based on “is customer” from this field in the CRM.
Joel P.
·
·
Never tried it, so you’d have to test it, if possible with your resources/tooling.
Jacob G.
·
·
ooh interesting idea. ill investigate that too. 🙇
Joel P.
·
·
Report back, please now I’m curious 😅
🙌1
🫡1
Cheyenne R.
·
·
I actually just worked on this with our ops team. V1 - everyone fills out our program form, then they go into an Marketo sequence that sends them the link to join the community. One of the emails is to book a call with me, I had at least two people not customers book calls (which I canceled). So not ideal. V2 - (only gets into sequence if matched or field is manually checked in Salesforce) - once they fill out form, system waits 10 min to match them up to Salesforce, if that doesn't work it tries again 24 hours, if that doesn't work every Tuesday we get a report of folks that didn’t match up (usually only 1 per week needs to be manually added)
Jacob G.
·
·
cheyenne this is great. thanks so much. i like the timeline sequenced out like that in v2. noted!!
1

Best Practices for Approving New Members in a Customer Community | Tightknit Community

Joel P.
·
·
Do you care that they're a user of it (eg admin, etc.) or just that they work at a company that is a customer of your organization?
Jacob G.
·
·
hey joel, thanks! it matters that they are a customer of vanta in any capacity. to what extent they individually use the product, doesnt matter
👍1
Joel P.
·
·
Is SSO via Vanta’s platform an option? With a dedicated pathway for partners, if you if you wanted to allow them in, too 😊
Jacob G.
·
·
good q; not at this point; we're moving pretty quickly. if i need to some manualness here and there just to spin something up and test with the small cohorts we have initially, happy to.
Jacob G.
·
·
i envision this (making it up; idk enough yet to know if this is possible)
Someone lands on tighknit page
they click "join the community" or whatever
leads them to a form to complete
form submission notification on my end. i review, cross-reference, send invite.
Joel P.
·
·
Got it 🫡 Then, I’d probably go with something like this:
Require business email in the form with a description line that clarifies folks who don’t won’t be accepted and the why behind it to ensure conversations are relevant and helpful to all (or something like that)
Company Name is on the form
LinkedIn URL is on the form
Set expectation that applications are reviewed on a X basis (eg, weekly) so please be mindful of it
Give your internal teams an avenue to fast track their application which still requires the form, though.
Each week, filter the company name column from A to Z then have a “Approved” column in the sheet
Add the approved folks to a campaign in your marketing platform to email the invite to join and next steps to nurture them, too, and signup for the community newsletter, if one does or will exist in the future.
Jacob G.
·
·
10/10 idea joel, thank you! im going to make note of this 🧠
Joel P.
·
·
Similar to what I did in a past role and some learnings from the way it started to what I updated it to be to reduce the time spent on manually reviewing and approving each applicant, Jacob. Other things to note:
If you get a contract and they have access to the necessary systems with appropriate releases and documents signed to give them this level of access, then I’d say that this is likely work you should pass off to them vs. do it yourself as a program manager, if possible.
Equally, the SLA for app reviews and notices could be reduced if it's not on you. Completely understand it's a business call, just an item to note.
👀1
Joel P.
·
·
Another idea though 💡 If Vanta has its CRM connected to a company-paid LLM to retain its data, etc., then you could see if you could query the CRM via the LLM to share or update the list of people based on “is customer” from this field in the CRM.
Joel P.
·
·
Never tried it, so you’d have to test it, if possible with your resources/tooling.
Jacob G.
·
·
ooh interesting idea. ill investigate that too. 🙇
Joel P.
·
·
Report back, please now I’m curious 😅
🙌1
🫡1
Cheyenne R.
·
·
I actually just worked on this with our ops team. V1 - everyone fills out our program form, then they go into an Marketo sequence that sends them the link to join the community. One of the emails is to book a call with me, I had at least two people not customers book calls (which I canceled). So not ideal. V2 - (only gets into sequence if matched or field is manually checked in Salesforce) - once they fill out form, system waits 10 min to match them up to Salesforce, if that doesn't work it tries again 24 hours, if that doesn't work every Tuesday we get a report of folks that didn’t match up (usually only 1 per week needs to be manually added)
Jacob G.
·
·
cheyenne this is great. thanks so much. i like the timeline sequenced out like that in v2. noted!!
1