Welcome section in your community - worth the effort?

Thanks for asking this. I too am debating whether I need to add this. 

We had one at my previous employer, but adoption was pretty low after the first month or so.

Candidly, I don’t see much value outside of juicing up “users with 1 at least 1 post” metrics. And while I can see the psychology behind getting them to take that first post, I lean the other direction (it actually introduces noise into that metric). 

I’m also in a number of slack communities for community people and generally ignore/mute those introductions channels after a week or two in the community. 

The common thread here is that, for me and my community, the introductions are not tied to the main value of the community: getting answers to questions, self-service, etc. 

I believe in the human-side of community and would love to foster actual peer-to-peer networking/relationship connections in the community, but a forum to say hello doesn’t seem like the best solution right now.

Instead, most of my actual peer connections on InSpired come from deeper community engagement than just saying hello: replying to threads, answering questions, moving up the leaderboard. Those are the things that have prompted others to reach out to me (and me to them) on Linkedin in or in a message here on InSpired. 

TL;DR: my pov is that time is better spent onboarding/enabling a user to do the create the posts your community is primarily build for (support, ideation, etc). The meaningful intros and connections will come out of that.

I’m hoping some others chime in with examples that prove me wrong / convince me to give this a try.  

counter point to my own argument: I do think there is a lot of value in proving that there are actual people contributing to the community, especially now (#AI) and especially in support use cases. If it doesn’t feel like users coming together to help each other, it could just feel like putting a “community” label on support. That’s going to disincentivize people from contributing. 

I see a lot of value in that aspect of this. I’m just currently pursuing it through other methods. 

@DannyPancratz, thanks for your insight here! I share your perspective. I feel like the conversations and collaborations within threads help to build the sense of community. We are also using user groups where I think discussion questions could be more valuable. That’s also a good point about bolstering the first post number as well. The welcome section would potentially be bloating that metric without necessarily adding value to the community.

I also think about the experience of someone posting about who they are and then not hearing from anyone else, that wouldn’t be a good experience and might make people feel deterred from engaging in the future as well. 

Also looking forward to hearing from others in case you’ve experienced a major return on investment in the welcome space! 

~Chloe

@cstrange  Great point on the risk of a negative first impression.

To add to my earlier thought: 

 I do think there is a lot of value in proving that there are actual people contributing to the community

[...]

I’m just currently pursuing it through other methods. 

Here’s an example of something I find more important than the intro post: user profile photos or avatars. 

The more my community has photos of real people in the discussion threads, the stronger that signal is of people helping people. That’s a core part of the day-to-day UX, versus an intro post that might not get main views. 

It probably depends on the disposition of your community users. We have mainly technically inclined users who are not at all interested in “fluff”. But they are usually very gracious after they get an answer to a question, which tells me that getting prompt answers on 1st questions is probably where we ought to spend our energy to improve onboarding.

I chalk this up to @DannyPancratz point above, the introductions are not tied to the main value of the community: getting answers to questions, self-service, etc.

However, there may be value in trying to encourage introductions in a private user group setting, when you want to make space for p2p connections.

Hello @cstrange ,

This is such a great topic to discuss and learn together honestly!🙌🏼

Just sharing a part of my experience as well on here.

We have our common welcome space for new members to introduce themselves and the activity on there wavers a lot. Sometimes it peaks and sometimes there’s a major drop there. I generally look out for those who are taking the effort to really introduce themselves on the community and I continue to keep an eye on their activity on other areas of the community as well. Majority of the time, these members tend to get into our leaderboard for their activity across community, so that’s a hidden good sign for me.

In terms of replying and acknowledging those who come on the welcome space - I try my best not to miss any of these. For me, this interaction has resulted positively in them reaching out to me for anything else on community and for me to nudge them later for anything specific also feels easier, since we’ve acknowledged each other’s presence on community on the welcome space. This works even better especially if there are new folks who don’t know how to navigate community and need help getting onboarded - they feel at ease being able to reach out to you for any help.

One thing i am trying to ensure I do not do is to force them to use the welcome space but find ways to nudge them to check out the welcome space - this could be when they reach out about an email change for their profile or me nudging a new member with no profile details etc. Small, but effective ways where they feel like it’s a nice to have space for them to interact.

I also feel like lesser activity in that welcome space is not necessarily a bad sign - it goes to show me that new members are landing even better at the right places they want - to answer/ask questions, share ideas etc. 

All this said, I still feel like having a welcome space is a great opportunity on a community as long as you aren’t forcing members to use the space and let them have their journey on community. I let this engagement run by itself and not tie into any results I am tracking otherwise. It’s also a great opportunity to show a human side of things - non work related, people sharing their interests outside of what they do professionally, picture of their pets/children, hobbies etc. 😄