Griffin Groups: An overview of features for large landscape communications

Griffin Groups (https://griffingroups.com) is a free online tool for building a community of conservation communities and is being used to initiate and support public-private partnerships from local to global scales. In the most basic sense, Griffin Groups is a social network of social networks dedicated to conservation topics with emphasis placed on a positive user experience. The site provides many innovative, free, user-friendly methods to communicate and share information both publicly and privately. This poster will highlight some of the features of Griffin Groups used to improve knowledge transfer and communications for coordinated large landscape conservation. For example, groups are used to organize content and notifications around conservation topics, partnerships, and projects. A simple set of access settings allows for very specific sharing of information to targeted audiences. A group listserver can be established so that group members do not need to log into a website to participate after their initial registration. Multiple types of content can be contributed, including blogs, bookmarks, discussions, events, files, pages, photos, and polls. Each content type has unique features and can be searched collectively or independently across the site and within groups. Site members can opt in and out of new content notifications by group, and subscribe/unsubscribe to comment notifications on individual content items. RSS feeds for all Griffin Groups content can be filtered by member, group, content type, as well as by search terms and read using many email clients and news feeds on other websites.