Automated, scheduled Welcome Post That Tags New Members

[SouperC (NotSoSuper)]

I suspect this might have to be a marketplace topic, but I’d like to start here because I feel there’s merit for it from a community standpoint.

Shortly we’re going to start a process of welcoming new members weekly in a new topic under our announcements category. The post will tag the new members and have a short call to action to introduce themselves.

I understand that there an automated direct message that they get as part of Discourse, so this would be an additional call to engage.

From the community perspective, the goal is to

• Creating weekly “cohorts” so that there is a potential creation of a bond between that specific group. A sense of commonality.

• Show that they weren’t the only person that signed up this week. Others did too, so they made the right decision by joining the community.

• With those two in mind, encourage them to introduce themselves to the cohort for that week and therefore the community at large.

@HAWK might be able to add some insights from the community/engagement side too.

Could this process be automated?
I’m sure there is a limit for the number of tagged people in a topic… but until certain communities hit that point, I think this is worth exploring.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

This definitely sounds like it could be a good way to get new users involved, and it could help close that initial gap of turning a registered member into an active participant.

One manual way to do this today would be to create your new introduction topic every week/month and then edit the automated welcome message to link to the current topic.

This also sounds mildly similar to a plugin we’ve been talking about internally that would pair two users together to encourage more collaboration and pair programming amongst our own team. This could be additional functionality (or a fork) of that concept — where instead of choosing two users at random, you could automate a topic that “pairs” a larger group of users together who meet a certain criteria (e.g., signed up within X time).

[bts (Brendan Schlagel)]

@awesomerobot

This also sounds mildly similar to a plugin we’ve been talking about internally that would pair two users together to encourage more collaboration and pair programming amongst our own team.

Cool idea! Sounds very similar to Mingle - An Introductions Plugin by @gdpelican — maybe that could be extended to support additional match criteria. I haven’t used it yet but looks like it already supports specific groups + group sizes! This could probably get pretty close to the use case @SouperC described.

[SouperC (NotSoSuper)]

That’s a pretty cool plugin.

[jordantrizz]

Has anyone taken this plugin and updated it to create a topic instead similar to Facebook groups?

[Shirly_Nowak]

Hi everyone! Just wanted to check in on this and see if anyone is implementing something like this in their communities? Or is there any plan on a plugin?

In my case: I do have PMs sent to any new member, personalized with automation, but I would like to post publicly and tag them, so that especially the shy ones can receive welcome messages from the rest, so they feel more welcomed to interact.

Any ideas? How are you managing this?

[chapoi]

I think it’s a really nice idea!

We have monthly/weekly AI generated summaries of what happened during that period, I wonder if that might suit your purpose actually?

By making an AI persona with a special prompt to make a weekly new topic, tagging the new members, maybe with some welcome text

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

This is currently possible using the automation plugin, though there’s a catch in that the automation would need to be triggered by the user filling out a custom user field on signup (it uses the “after user update” trigger).

So for example, on my test site I have an “accept the terms” checkbox on signup that’s required

And I have an automation configured to trigger when a new user completes this field

so then, when the new user completes this field on signup it posts to a topic

[chapoi]

But how do you use the automation to make a collective topic where all the new users are tagged together? Individual topics lose this point a bit

@SouperC

Creating weekly “cohorts” so that there is a potential creation of a bond between that specific group. A sense of commonality.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

Yeah you’d need a “welcome new people to the community” topic, and this would create a new post for each new account in the topic… a bit different from what the OP was originally asking

[Shirly_Nowak]

@chapoi

I wonder if that might suit your purpose actually?

It could yeah, if it were possible to just make it about welcoming new members. (For summaries I have a newsletter)

@awesomerobot

there’s a catch in that the automation would need to be triggered by the user filling out a custom user field on signup (it uses the “after user update” trigger).

This is what I was trying out, yeah. The subscription process in my community is a bit different, since we work with WordPress signups first (memberpress). But maybe I could think something up. These automated publications would be great for my purpose.

@awesomerobot

you’d need a “welcome new people to the community” topic, and this would create a new post for each new account in the topic… a bit different from what the OP was originally asking

That’s correct. For now, since the community is small, I can manage buy creating the post manually every week but it is something I would like to automate in the future.

I was thinking maybe with the data explorer, if I could extract each week an extract of the new members - then create an automation that would read this data, and tag the members in a new topic. Just a thought

[tobiaseigen]

Awesome! An AI and automation-supported process to invite cohorts of members is a fantastic idea and I’d be interested in trying that out here too. It would be interesting if the topic could be generated automatically as a shared draft, which would then be reviewed and added to by a moderator before posting.

I set up a new member introductions topic as described in the first post for the Grassroots Justice Network. That site is now private but if you like you can join it to take a look at the intro topics. I left that organization over 5 years ago to join Discourse, but am gratified to see they valued it enough to keep up the process!

The topic was not created automatically but manually by moderators, every two weeks, as part of onboarding and welcoming new members which is also manual. This was quite nice because it gave our team the opportunity to review the new members, weed out any spammers that got through, help them add their organizations and update their bios, and generally get to know them individually.

I just checked and see that these intro topics list 50-100 new members every two weeks and tend to get a handful of replies, so they do have a positive impact. Especially if moderators and leaders in the community actively respond to make new members feel seen and welcomed! It’s actually quite fun to click through the usernames to read their bios and get to know them.

Basically the GJN process looks like this:

• A member of the moderator team starts a public topic tagged #introductions every two weeks to introduce the new members to the community.
• They use an external system to get a list of new usernames, their organaizations and country they are from. This could be done with a data explorer query in Discourse.
• Start a new topic using a template, paste in the list, personalize as desired
• add whisper to @ mention moderators to remind them to help welcome new members
• new @ mentioned members are notified by email and start replying
• community members respond to welcome new members
• moderators edit previous new member intro topic to add the date range covered.

The template looked like this:

New Member Introductions

Welcome new members!

We are happy to have you join the Grassroots Justice Network. This is a space to connect with fellow practitioners from around the world and keep in touch for solidarity, learning, sharing, and collaboration.

Kindly note that this is also a civilized space, with guidelines, for the purpose of improving the discussions. Please take some time to go through our community guidelines.

This topic brings together new members. Please introduce yourself. Tell us a bit about your work and your expectations for joining the network. You can add a reply using the blue Reply button down below.