Digital Community Guidelines

Dr. Bliss holding Linus the kitten

Best Friends Digital Community Guidelines

The Best Friends Digital Community offers a safe place to exchange ideas, views, advice and resources with other Best Friends Network Partners in a secure and supportive environment. The guidelines below are to help our members do their part to make the community a positive and enriching place.

Every community has a culture and ours will stem from our core values.

Golden Rule. Kindness. Positive Influence. Leadership. Authenticity. Transparency.

Our core values show up when:

  • We welcome new members and make them feel comfortable right away
  • We help one another learn—in a variety of ways
  • We are respectful to one another, even when our opinions differ
  • We are each empowered to lead, and have a bias towards action in participating
  • in the community
  • We celebrate each other’s contributions and accomplishments
  • We collaborate with other communities and groups

Community do’s and don’ts (inspired by community guidelines at lonelyplanet.com)

DO

  • Respect that other people have different points of view, beliefs and confidence levels. Don’t take things personally and get to the ‘must look at pictures of kittens to calm down’ stage.
  • Welcome newcomers.
  • Search to see if the topic has already been covered. It can be frustrating for our if members feel they must answer the same question repeatedly.
  • Be specific. When posting a recommendation, or a question, the more context and specificity you can give, the better for everyone. We can’t read your mind and really do want to provide the best answer possible.
  • Give feedback, to your fellow network partners, and us, in a helpful and constructive manner.
  • Lead by example. Use the Report option inside a discussion to report problem content or members.
  • Be sincere in your contributions. Post with purpose; to inspire, enable or share with fellow animal advocates.

DON'T

  • Be condescending. Share knowledge in a way that is encouraging and mentor-like vs. talking down to someone who is ready to learn from you.
  • Promote a business, product or website, commercial or otherwise. Adding value to conversations is the best way to build an audience for your expertise.
  • Advertise or spam. We don’t mind if you include links to your blogs, FB pages or websites in your messages, provided it’s relevant and contextual information, but commercial solicitation, straight up advertising, or contributions designed to promote traffic to another site aren’t acceptable.
  • Defame, harass, flame or hold grudges. If your post attacks anyone in a personal nature, either directly or indirectly, it is not suitable for Best Friends Digital Community.
  • Be - or - feed a troll. Trolls post messages or content deliberately designed to get the blood boiling. Replying to or arguing with a troll is feeding. The best pest-control is to ignore, and use the Report feature to let us know about them so we can deal with it.
  • Discuss how to commit illegal. It’s OK to talk about the existence of these things, but don’t advise how and where to do them.
  • Create content of a discriminatory or derogatory nature.
  • Create explicit content. Material which would be restricted or considered 'adult' (such as pornography or relating to graphic violence).
  • Post personal details or private information about any other person (or anything contrary to our privacy policy).
  • Post external surveys or links to surveys on Best Friends Digital Community. We are happy for you to use any information that is already available in the community provided you contact us first, but as Digital Community is a space designed for individuals associated with shelter and rescue organizations any research or marketing surveys will be removed.
  • Post external links to crowdfunding sites. We're sure that your cause is worthy, your campaign is rewarding but Digital Community isn't the right platform to share these links and they will be removed.

We reserve the right to remove discussions that aren’t in line with our Best Friends core values and these Digital Community guidelines. We don’t think we’ll need to, but if any member violates the above guidelines, we also reserve the right to remove the individual from this community to preserve the environment.

We will update these guidelines and recommend you check back occasionally to understand the latest version that helps us build the type of culture we’d like to create in the Best Friends Digital Community.