What You Need to Know About the New Community Platform

This year, the NCBA has switched to a new online community platform. This new community platform for Sections, Divisions and Councils offers many more features than the previous system. Below is a summary of the basics and what you need to know to utilize this platform and its features.

Things You Can Do	The Old System	The New System	Instructions
Post Messages via Email	Yes	Yes	Click here
Reply to Messages	Yes	Yes (but not to messages in the old system)	Click here
Look at Archives	Yes	Yes	Click here
Upload Profile Picture	No	Yes
Add Social Media Links to your Contact Information	No	Yes	Click here
Post or Reply through the Website	No	Yes	Click here
View Discussions by Thread	No	Yes
View Attachments	Yes, difficult	Yes, easily	Click here
Choice of Replying “only to sender” or “to everyone”	Yes, very difficult	Yes, easily
Get a “real time” or Daily Digest email	Yes	Yes	Click here

Overview

The website for the new community platform is: https://communities.ncbar.org. You can login with your NCBA username and password.
The new user agreement can be found here.
Help/FAQS can be found here.
You can easily change your preferences to “real time” or “daily digest” by navigating to your profile icon in the top right of your communities home page and clicking Profile > My Account Tab > Community Notifications > Notification Settings. You can also change your contact information and profile picture under the profile tab.
My Communities consists of the Sections, Divisions and Councils you are a member of.
Community Home reflects the most recent discussions, upcoming events, as well as any new announcements for the community.
Discussions allow you to send a message through your email (Outlook, Gmail, etc.) by using the email address listed at the top of your community’s home page (i.e., Family Law or Family Law Council) under “Discussion Email Address.” You can also post or reply to a message directly through the community platform. Discussions also allow you to view discussion threads and search for previous messages sent.
Library provides access to all Section, Division and Council resources. For the Section/Division, this includes bylaws, resource links, forms, publications, etc. For the Council, this includes minutes and meeting packets.
Members helps you search for the contact information of any member within your community.

Things You Can Do Now

You can upload a profile picture to appear next to all of your messages.
You can add social links to your contact record.
You can post or reply to a message directly through the online community platform.
You can view discussion threads organized by message and topic.
You can easily view any attachments from messages sent by navigating to the library tab and choosing the first folder that is named by community.
You now have all resources and information surrounding each of your communities in one location.

September 10, 2020/by FamilyLaw