Welcoming Users & Seeding Content

System · October 2018

So you've got your categories set up, and your add-ons configured, and your theme built; all that's left is welcoming your users into your new community. Whether your starting a community from scratch, or migrating an existing community from another platform, you want to make sure your customers feel at home. You want to welcome them with open arms, help them get oriented, and get them excited about this new space.

Which tools can I use to set up welcome messaging?

Welcome Emails:

Vanilla's system automatically sends out an email when:

An account is created for them by an Admin
They register for membership
They are invited to join the community
Their membership is approved
If you're using SSO, you have the option of enabling what we call a "Connect Email" which is sent when the user first signs-in to the community.
All of these emails can be fully customized by your CSM. All you need to do is provide them with the copy of the text you'd like to use. If you can format this in HTML, amazing! If not, your CSM has tools at their disposal to convert formatted text into HTML.
Make sure to enable HTML emails, and customize the styles to your liking. You can do this in the Email section of your Dashboard - Settings

Moderation Messages

Moderation Messages are banner messages you can enable on various pages of your forum. Just like the box you see here above, this can be used to share starter info for new users.
These can be set up in the Messages section of your Moderation Dashboard.

The "Type" dictates the colour of the message box, and can be customized through CSS.
You can choose to only display the messages in specific categories, or on specific pages of your forum.
Messages can be made to be dismissible, or not, by the end-user.
Messages can be written up in advance, and you can leave them disabled until you're ready to see them live on your forum's front-end

The Email Confirmation Page

When you have Confirm Email enabled, users will be asked to Confirm their email address. When they do, they'll hit the "Email Confirmation Page" - which is essentially a page that says "You've confirmed your email!"
Like welcome emails, your CSM can add custom text to this page with links to relevant discussions, or categories, and it can be a great way of getting a new user's attention before they start posting.

Standard Categories, Discussions, Questions etc.:

You'll, of course, be able to use the standard posting functionality to welcome users in and show them around. Here are some ideas/suggestions:

A Community How-To Category: Walk users through editing their profile, or notification preferences, how to ask and answer questions, how to submit support issues, etc.
If you're looking to build peer-to-peer relationships in your community, Vanilla has a Welcome Post add-on that can be enabled for you. When users first enter your community they'll be redirected to a "New Discussion" page, and here they can introduce themselves to the community. The post will be published in a category called "Welcome."
If you're going to ask your users for feedback, avoid doing so in a single discussion thread - overtime, this can get overrun with comments, and become difficult to manage. I suggest creating a Community Feedback & Support Issues category so users can start individual threads for their individual questions/concerns and you can more easily respond to these.
In the Client Facing category of this Vanilla Onboarding section, you'll find a few posts you can reappropriate for your end-users. Simply edit the discussion, copy-paste it over to your production site and customize them to your liking. These include a guide on how to start a great discussion, a template to get your started on community guidelines.

Tips
The Advanced Editor add-on allows you to select which formatter you would like the community to use - HTML, BBCode, WYSIWYG, Markdown, Text or TextEx, and users will be able to format their post using simple HTML, or BBCode, or Markdown, depending on the choice of formatter. You can also choose your mobile input formatter.
Your forum comes equipped with Smart-Embed functionality to allow you to easily embed content from YouTube, Vieo, WYSTYA, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, Pinterest etc.
You can create categories with custom permissions, so you can create spaces where on Admins or Mods can start new discussions, and Member can only comment, or you can create a space that is for Q&A posts only. You can also create private spaces for users based on their roles. So a space for Premium members to learn about what's available to them, and a space for Freemium members to learn about Premium membership, for example.
You can "Announce" your discussions to keep them pinned at the top of the recent discussions page and/or the category page.

Examples

If you'd like to see some examples of these types of posts, your CSM will be happy to provide you with some.

Seeding Content - Social Proofing Your Community:

We've always said a new forum is like a highschool dance, no one wants to be the first one out on the dance floor. So we encourage you to find those brave souls around you who are willing to get out there with you and get the party started, so to speak.
The debate is always to fake or not to fake - i.e. do you create dummy accounts, and post questions and answers yourselves. While this may be ok on a small scale, you'll likely have far more success if you go about this honestly. Be open and honest with your community about what you're doing here, and what kind of community you're trying to build.
So first, focus on welcome messaging.
The goal here is to introduce your members to your community - what is it about, what can they expect. Point them in the right direction, what should they read first, how do they use this new tool.
From there you can, of course, seed some starter content - share articles, ask open ended questions, post discussions introducing yourselves.
Then you can start inviting friends, family, professionals, enthusiasts to come take a look at your project. Ask them to post questions, maybe invite a few subject matter experts to posts discussions about themselves as well and what kind of information and know-how they will bring to your community.
Here is an article that may be helpful: How to Kick Start Your Forum
What I like most here is their advice to appreciate the early days of a small community, appreciate your members, be open with them about where you're at, what you're doing and what you're trying to build. Reward them for their participation, thank them for their contributions. Your goal here is to curate and facilitate the discussions and encourage engagement.
Here's another one from Derek Powazek - On Seeding Communities

Here they talks about honesty, once again, and I love it because it reminds us that even if your launching an online tool, a business tool, everyone involved is still human, and the more you let your human show, the more honest feedback, and genuine help you can get. They remind us to keep it simple, and acknowledge the problems we're afraid of facing - the ghost town problem being #1. They acknowledge them and offer very simple, human solutions to help us tackle them.