The Community Glossary

Carefully put together words with more than just boring textbook definitions. Get a deep-dive into the world of community-building through best-practices, real-life examples, explanations, how-tos, and what nots.

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Direct Message

A direct Message or casually referred to as a DM is a message you send to a community member’s personal inbox. DM is also used casually to tell someone you will be messaging them or have messaged them personally.

“I’ll DM you the details.”

“He DMed me about the event.”

“She’ll be DMing me the content.”

Sending DMs is a great way to personalize interactions and has been popularized in communities as the go-to method for onboarding, activating, and driving engagement.

It’s not much of a problem when you have a small, manageable community that can be handled manually. But DMing thousands in larger communities is outright impossible to do one by one. This is why we developed the Bulk DM feature that lets you send automated bulk messages to members. There’s also a variety of message templates you can choose from to cut your work even shorter.

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Explore Similar Terms

Online Community

Online communities are those that are hosted on an internet platform where like-minded people can come and have healthy discussions and exchange ideas on mutual topics. Online communities often serve a purpose and some even have goals.

Onboarding

Onboarding is the process of welcoming or introducing a new member to the community. It’s a critical part of community building and often the gateway to nurturing. A good onboarding process can make or break the new member’s stickiness to the community.

Activation

Think of this as the fuel for your community. Activation is what helps take your community off the ground. Activation is the process of breaking through the atmosphere with effective engagement tactics and strategies until the it reaches the orbit - the realm of organic growth.

Community Engagement

Engagement within a community is a process of improving, introducing, and increasing strategic endeavors to organically push members toward investing themselves more in the community. The more members engage in conversations and sharing, the higher the engagement gets.