When it comes to product development, priortizing the user journey to ensure they get value is paramount.
Similarly, the key to building a community on Discord is a focus on the initial member journey, as well as ensuring that members have access to the right resources throughout their experience in your community.
Starting with the new member onboarding process, you need to tailor the experience to suit the make-up of your audience. Have a troubleshooting discord? Ask new members what kind of problem they have and direct them to the appropriate channel. They probably won't like it if presented with a series of ‘getting to know you’ questions. However, that would be just the right approach when you have a more personal community, wherein making them feel welcome counts.
The right tools for the trade
Welcome bots are a great way to automate the process. Developing your own in-house bot is a solution. You can customize it to the particular needs of your community. However, it incurs additional resources and time - both of which might be better spent elsewhere. So it’s not for everyone.
An alternate choice are Off-the-shelf welcome bots. Most are fairly easy to set up. The flip side is they lack flexibility. Apart from a few options that are mostly cosmetic, you never quite get the exact solution you need. Much like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle where you can almost see the picture, but all the other pieces are missing.
What’s the solution if you’re unsatisfied with both the above choices?
Enter Dots with a no code bot builder!
With our automation flow creator, you can literally learn how to create the onboarding flow, that’s perfect for your server, in a matter of minutes.
And the best thing is that you can create flows for different triggers (like slash commands). So it is not just limited to welcoming new members.
Let’s start
You can create a new automation as soon as you set up your dots account (More on that here).
automationGo to the ‘Automation’ tab and click on ‘New trigger’.
Step one is choosing an Entry point. An Entry point is the trigger at which the automation will run. It could be a role change, a button click, a slash command, etc.
For our purposes, we’re going to create an onboarding automation so let’s go with ‘When a new member joins Discord’ as our Entry point.
Look ma, no hands!
Adding and removing elements from the flow is just a couple of clicks.
By default, the first element added is a Send message function that allows us to greet the member in a specific channel like ‘welcome’.
You can also make it more personalized by creating a private onboarding Channel (and yes, for Discord nerds that are wondering about the 500-channel limit - we auto-delete the channels!).
To remove any element in the flow, select it and then click ‘Delete element’.
To add a new element, click on the black circle.
It’s as simple as that.
Get the relevant information to craft a better experience
The new elements you add allow you to send messages, surveys and email prompts.
Surveys are especially useful to create branching paths if you want to modify your responses based on the member onboarding.
In the example below, we ask for their location. Depending on their response, we could send a message like ‘Hey, you’re from <location>. These members are also from there…’ .
As well as adding a personal touch, it also offers a lot of flexibility.
Let’s say you’re running a server for a particular product and offer product support via Discord as well. At the start of onboarding, you could have a simple survey question that asks them if they’re here for troubleshooting. If yes, send them to the support channel. They’ll be grateful that you are cogniziant of their need to get the issue fixed asap. For those who are not there for support, continue with the rest of the onboarding process.
Tinker to your heart’s content!
All the changes we make to the editor aren’t live. So keep editing it until it feels like the kind of onboarding experience you want members to have.
Clicking the play button on the top right of the editor allows you to test the flow within Discord. Navigating to the channel in your server shows you a button that you click to begin the test.
An easy way to internally test flows with your team members is to give them access to the channel.
Once you’re ready, hit ‘Publish’ and your new flow is live!
I’m intrigued. What now?
Whether you have questions, or would like to see a demo of our no code bot builder in action - our discord server is the place to visit. You gain access to the builder, as well as get to hang out with other cool people!
