Jump to content

[Question] How do you welcome new members?


Recommended Posts

I was talking to another community admin who hosts real world events for young entrepreneurs in Amsterdam, yet she was having a hard time getting the engaged in the community.  How do you get new members to engage? 

Some things that I do:

1. Automated welcome - I use a custom mod from the Marketplace to send an auto welcome message via PM and email.  

2. Introduction board - I have an introduction board where I've pinned some useful new member guides and where they can introduce themselves.  

3. Forum flow - I'm personally mixed on my current approach (and I'll explain why in a bit).  My forum boards are laid out as a funnel for new members.  They start with easy boards and get progressively more involved to true content.  The pro of that it's perfect for new members, the downside is that boards for the most active users are pushed to the bottom.  

4. Ambassador program - I nominate several members to serve as Ambassadors who immediately greet and welcome new members.  They're like a welcome committee.  

5. Emotionally disclosing question - This is the newest change I've made based on best practices from community management.  When asking members to introduce themselves I no longer ask generic questions like "how did you find us?" Or "what's your background?" I now ask questions designed to open up the emotional vulnerability of new members, with questions like "how do you feel you can contribute to the community?" Or "what's one challenge you're currently feeling frustrated about where we can help?". They're much more topical, and designed to provoke an emotionally-driven response.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

Some other things that I've been starting to do:

6. (Depending on the size of your community) In the monthly newsletter, say hello to all the new members who joined in the past month. This is a raw dump from the member list filtered by date range.  

7. Promote to Our Picks and showcase in the monthly newsletter any new member introductions.  I'm between the normal users and my community Ambassadors, there's a decent number of responses.  

8  I haven't developed a systematic approach to this next one, but you can filter for a custom range in the ACP > Statistics > Community Activity (eg. April 1 - April 30). You can then scan for members with less than 5 content items who posted in the date range to look for new members who are starting to post.  

There's a lot of power in this metric.

How do you say introduce new members? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi @Joel R

I'm doing 1 and 2. And I've a block with threads with 0 answers so I can help new members quickly.

3) sounds interesting, but what do you do with your described Forum flow?

How much new members do you have per month? I've 70 to 100 – it's to much to welcome everyone. Now I've a mixed monthly newsletter – for the newest articles and the most interesting threads and "things" in community. I'm thinking about splitting it into two newsletters so that the community members get more targeted content. 

In my auto welcome message I'm inviting new members to our weekly chat. But this also means that me or one of moderators should really be in Chat on time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 9 months later...
On 4/20/2019 at 11:10 AM, Joel R said:

6. (Depending on the size of your community) In the monthly newsletter, say hello to all the new members who joined in the past month. This is a raw dump from the member list filtered by date range.

We get a minimum of 50+ members a week, up to 80-100 in the summer.  That would be a really long newsletter.  😂

Good advice on everything else.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...