Why do you have to onboard people into a community?
Have you ever been in a situation where you joined a community and left it the next day just because you couldn’t deal with all the chaos that happened there? I have!
It feels like you stand in the center of a big city, everyone is running somewhere, you don’t know what’s going on, and nobody to ask since they seem super busy.
Or imagine that you entered a conference, a host checked your ticket, said hello, and never had anyone talk to you after that. That’s exactly what you feel after receiving an automated welcome message from a bot the second you join some community space.
Why is an onboarding process so important? So we can avoid those bad feelings, make connections, build trust, and guide new members to benefit fully from being in your community!
By onboarding, you have to explain to your members what they should expect in the community and tell them how to use it to get the most out of it.
So, let’s roll!
What can help you in the onboarding process
Before we dive into the flow, here is the list of stuff that can help you to make your members’ onboarding easier:
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Guidelines and Policies - as [Mirella Ang de Jonge](https://communiverse.notion.site/Mirella-Ang-de-Jonge-0deee0a1675841b5835537ec31ebfa34) once said, “Guidelines are: how we behave here, and Policies are: how we enforce our guidelines.” So having them to refer to during onboarding will save your time explaining an accepted behavior in a community.
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FAQ - you’ll definitely have repetitive questions. If you collect answers for them in one searchable place, you’ll save not only time but the nerves of shy community members since they won’t have to ask anyone and just easily find answers to their questions.
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Resource database - community members will share tones of valuable books, articles, videos, podcasts, etc., and having one place where you sort and store everything will be super helpful for existing members and new ones too.
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People directory - a nice place where you can see smiling photos of all community members in one place and feel like you know them! I guess that’s exactly how usually people use a members directory 😀
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Community hub - basically, it’s where you collect all the stuff mentioned above in one place and can share one link instead of many. For example, here is what it looks like in the Cultivators community.
The Hub from the Cultivators community.
How the onboarding process looks like
The onboarding aims to make your new community member feel at home, know where everything is within the community, and who to reach out to in case of any questions or ideas.
Definitely, you’ll start with the welcome message, and you can not only say “hello,” but motivate a person to do something. For example, look around the introduction channel to understand who are those other like-minded people and whether they can find something in common already.