What happened to welcome?
Events this week!
Belonging Builders Community Conversation. Thursday, July 28, 10am PT | 1pm ET | 5pm UTC Meet and get to know other community builders. This session will be focused on connecting with each other and what matters to us.
Community Co-working. Thursday, July 28, 12:15pm PT | 3:15pm ET | 7:15pm UTC Need to get some heads-down work done? Don’t do it alone! Find accountability and light connection at our co-working session on Zoom. Introvert-friendly and super productive.
What happened to welcome?
“Welcome isn't a neutral state. We have to tend to these things.” - R. Eric Thomas
A few weeks ago, during our Community Conversation (come to the next one!), we had a discussion about onboarding people into our communities.
I used to work on product onboarding, so this is a topic I've thought about a lot, but in the call I heard a lot of great ideas, including ones I hadn't thought of. And I can’t wait to share them with you!
Community Onboarding
Onboarding is critical to the health of a community.
There are a few things that make onboarding integral to building a healthy community, but unfortunately, a lot of tools we use for community make it easy to just "add" people on a platform without actually doing any onboarding to the community at all. And community, as we've said before, is not just a collective of people who are in the same space, it's a growing, evolving group of people who care about one another and know one another.
It's important for a new member to feel welcomed.
That might seem obvious, but I would say that the majority of online communities I've joined don't even get to that baseline. Then there are some communities with bots that do some welcoming and context-setting--which is better than nothing--and there's kind of a spectrum of welcoming that goes from there.
If you're trying to build a community that holds space for belonging and strong connection, it's worth investing the effort in doing more robust welcoming and onboarding.
When onboarding is successful, your new members feel not only welcomed, but that they understand the values and norms of the community and what people do who want to get more invested. You're not just giving instructions, you're modeling behaviour.
Talk to people already thriving in your community. The more you understand the journey that your most invested and reliable members took to get there, the more you can convey that process to new members.
Cohort Onboarding
The gold standard of cohort onboarding involves creating small groups of new members hosted by an established member, and giving them a standard process to follow. A great way to do this is by setting up a synchronous meeting and having icebreakers or using Liberating Structures to facilitate more deep interaction.
Setting and Re-setting
In an online community, it can be easy for values and code of conduct to get lost. Making it easy for these to resurface can help get new members more familiar with the community and its norms, and can also help to avoid "policing" which can encourage dominance in the name of cohesion. As an organizer, the more you can be and help your veteran members be stewards rather than cops, the more your community will feel like a great place to spend time.
Not just for the newbies
Onboarding is not just important to help new members feel welcome.
Good onboarding can help the community at large. At times, when people have formed some tribal affiliations within a community, bringing new people on can introduce a sense of threat or "things aren't the same as they used to be." Onboarding new members means integrating them into the group in a way that is rewarding and reassuring to existing members.
Most communities are healthy when they have some natural turnover and fluidity. People's lives change and when someone has become a leader or heavy contributor in a community, but then fall away, their absence is felt.
When people have built trust and feel open and vulnerable with one another, the introduction of new people can feel intimidating, sometimes leading to a less-than-welcoming experience for newbies.
You can avoid cliquishness by keeping veteran and highly participatory members involved and even responsible for welcoming. This often requires some possibility conversations to facilitate a collective understanding and excitement for community growth and sustainability. Check out the framework Peter Block has for running community conversations to learn more.
A few more quick tips from our Belonging Builders Community Conversation:
Give new members opportunities that align with what they want to do
New folks need guidance, they need a safe space, and they need norms to be spelled out or structured
Give members the sense that they have freedom to have an active voice, to take ownership, and contribute their own ideas
Give new members small responsibilities as they get more involved
Understand what goals new members have in being a part of the community, help them meet these goals if they are part of what your community can foster
Don't automate everything, but some process and automation can ensure new members don't slip through the cracks
Model the behaviour you want to see in the community and call it out when you see people doing it well
Thanks to Kortney, Kass, Rosie, Jessie, Asli, Piper, Mitchell, Wayne, Suzanne, Sharon, Marvin, Karin, Isabel, Jacky, Elvis, Anna, and Erik for contributing to these learnings! And join us for our next Community Conversation this week.
Reads & Resources
Rosie's counter-take: I don't want to be onboarded (thoughtful disagreement always welcome!)