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. 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 -

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