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.
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. The biggest goal of onboarding should be to offer new members a strong reason to keep coming back and engage voluntarily with others.
Why should you focus on having a frictionless onboarding process?
Onboarding is like making a pitch. Whatever the member sees first is what will determine how they feel about the community at a glance.
Introduce them to community culture, guidelines, and code of conduct.
An opportunity to explain the community in detail including how to navigate through the important stuff and become comfortable as soon as possible.
Makes them feel wanted right off the bat which creates a certain urge or even an obligation for them to interact.
How can you strategize a good onboarding process?
Define your community vision, goals, purpose, and expectations in a simple yet entertaining way. Package that as a personalized DM, an introductory video, or by sharing relevant resources.
Have concise and precise information spread out across multiple messages instead of sending them all at once. For example - send channel descriptions in one dm, guided tours in another, rules and guidelines in another, links and resources in another, and so on.
Introduce the new members to the entire community and encourage everyone to join you in welcoming them.
Involve them in conversations by tagging them but don’t be too pushy too soon. Encourage them gently to share their insights.
Set up an email marketing campaign if it applies to your community.
You can also try giving them a list of things to talk about at first because the beginning might be overwhelming for some members to figure out where to start.
Speaking of which, encourage them to introduce themselves and tell a bit about what they like and what are their interests.
Here are some tips on how you can set up your onboarding flow -