NRECA's professional communities, which are hosted on a secure platform using the cooperative.com login, provide a place where electric cooperative employees and directors can network, ask questions, share ideas and exchange documents ​either through the community platform or via community email.

You can join from our professional communities page. Some communities are open for all NRECA voting-member employees (G&T, Distribution, Service and Statewide) ​to join, and others are private. If a community is open, follow the "go to​ community" link for that community, log in with your cooperative.com credentials, and click ​the "​Join" button to become a participant.

For private​ communities, you must request access and be added by a community manager, who will determine if you meet the participant requirements​ of the group​​.

What are the community rules, and why can't we discuss prices and rates?
​The professional communities are intended for business use, and for the protection of participants and NRECA, we have rules that govern their use. A key one to know is that, for antitrust reasons, community participants may not discuss prices and rates. Learn more about this and other considerations​ in our community rules​.

Only people who are participants in a community can view and respond to discussion posts in that community, download its​ resources, or send new messages​ to it​. All community participants, by rule, will be employees, directors or authorized consultants of an NRECA voting member organization. Private communities will have additional participant requirements specific to the community.​

Community participants can select to receive real time email notifications of discussion posts to the community (like a listserv), or to have all the posts from the day collected into a digest and emailed to them the next day. To change your settings, click on the "Settings" button next to the community name, and select Real Time or Daily Digest from the dropdown. Be sure to click "Change" when you're finished.

Yes! When a community participant receives an email (whether a daily digest or in real time), they have the ability to reply to the discussion within their email. Simply click on "Reply to Group" within the message and a new email will open up with an auto generated address.

If a user clicks "Reply to Sender," they will be taken to the community platform where they can then send a direct message to the original poster.
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Accepting this request simply adds you to this person's Contacts on the platform. The Contacts feature allows users to easily add people they may want to directly message to a central location within their profile that functions like an address book.

You can certainly add anyone to your contacts, but the feature may be most useful when adding only the users you anticipate frequent communication and collaboration with.

How to add someone to your Contacts:

1. From a user's profile.
2. By searching for a user in the Member Directory
3. From a Community's Member section.
4. By viewing a discussion or library resource post that the person has participated in.

After using any of the methods above to add someone as a Contact, they're sent a notification email letting them know you want to connect with them. Only people who have accepted your invitation to connect are added to your Contact List (and vice-versa), and you can view and manage them from your profile's My Connections > Contacts page.

From there, you can:

1. Click their name to view their profile.
2. Send them a message.
3. Remove them from your Contact List.
   

If you have additional ​questions, email Michael Lynch.