How Dots helped Splice with their Discord onboarding process and create a more engaged community!
- Tripling the engagement of community members
- More clickthroughs on content in channel
- More analytics and useful tools via the dashboard
Background
The Dots onboarding bot has been live on Splice’s Discord server for the last couple of months! You can check it out at discord.gg/splice :)
Splice has built a large, vibrant community on Discord where musicians from across the world gather to learn more about music production and meet like-minded folks. Since launching in early 2021, the Splice community has grown to well over 25,000 members.
As Splice’s community has grown in membership, so too have the community’s initiatives. Beyond just providing a space for casual conversation, Splice runs contests (known as Beat Battles), giveaways, AMAs, and other promotions to engage their community and provide an amazing experience.
Challenges
While these experiences help members engage with the community and the Splice team, they’ve also led to the server getting quite large and difficult for new members to navigate. The Splice community now includes dozens of active channels, as well as instructions for how to participate in Beat Battles, giveaways, etc. The community team was understandably worried about how difficult it would be for new folks to navigate the server.
Further, as the number of members in the community grows, the wants and needs of the community change as well. Typically, smaller tight-knit communities feature a large portion of actively engaged members, whereas larger-scale communities have more lurkers (typically on the order of 80%+). These folks are interested in the community and the product; but aren’t necessarily actively participating in the community. Large communities like Splice need to give members low-lift ways of engaging as well.
Lastly, as the community grows to a huge size, it becomes hard to know what exactly new members of your community care about. How experienced are they in your industry? What types of conversations or content do they want to see? This is a challenging problem because most of the discourse in the community is by a small percentage of active participants so it’s really hard to know what the silent masses are looking for.
Onboarding
We set out to solve these challenges by providing an interactive and informative onboarding experience to new members of the Splice community! Specifically, we were trying to help:
- Guide members to the right channels based on their interests
- Help the Splice team understand a bit more about who their members were
- Help members get connected with a moderator if they wanted to
Before using Dots, Splice had a pretty hands-off onboarding process. Members would join the server and have to read walls of text on 4 onboarding channels to learn about how to navigate the community and what the rules were:
Enter: Onboarding with Dots!
The Splice team chose Dots to help overhaul their community’s onboarding experience and address the goals above.
With Dots when a new member joins the Splice server, they do not see the overwhelming list of all channels. Their attention is directed towards a single channel, that is specific to the new member and takes them through the entire onboarding process.
The new user is presented with a welcome message, introducing them to the community manager, and letting them know who to reach out to, in case they have any questions during the onboarding process.
After this, we start asking them questions to gain insights into why they’re here.
The flow can be customized depending on the previous responses. For example, here they are directed to the collab channel since they primarily want to meet other musicians. Here, the member is presented with a choice as to whether provide more details (like their level of experience in music, if they’re a current user of splice); or to proceed faster to the rest of the server and finish onboarding. Either way, it’s a win from an engagement perspective.
At this stage, they are fully onboarded! Now they have access to the other channels in the Splice server. The welcome channel has served its purpose and will be deleted in an hour.
Result: A More Engaged Community!
In the two years before the Dots onboarding bot, the number of members that had any server activity was 15%. Compare that with the last few months, where 46% of the members have interacted with the onboarding at least once. That’s a significant jump in engagement!
Responses to the ‘What brings you here primarily’ question, have revealed a trend where a large percentage of new members join the server to meet other musicians. Insights like this help the community leaders tailor their initiatives on the server. The Dots dashboard also allows them to who is dropping off, who their most active users are along with helping them automate messages to certain segments of users.
There has also been an uptick in the number of members who provide their email addresses. Previously, they were collected via DMs. Saving the user extra clicks to move between different windows leads to more responses.
Finally, there have been more clickthroughs on Splice content on the server, including Youtube videos, people tuning into live audio streams, etc; as well as a sustained spike in traffic increase back to the Splice homepage.
Apart from creating a more engaged community, all of the above help in quantifying the ROI of community efforts.
What’s next?
Together with the Splice team, we’re constantly trying to improve the new member onboarding process.
Something we will changing in the future is the current role selection channel.
The most important question we ask ourselves is ‘How do we go bigger?’.
One avenue we’re looking at is experimenting with different flows with A/B testing; helping figure out the ideal flow that much faster.
With such promising engagement numbers, tackling the drop-off from the server is a logical next step. After all, getting new members in and engaged is only step one.
We’re excited to be part of the Splice journey, and do our part in helping build and nurture a more engaged community!
Join us at our discord server to check out our no code automation flow builder.
