Encouraging migrated community members to complete their profile

Hello fellow community managers!

I’ve been thinking about how to best encourage my members to complete their profile. We recently switched from vBulletin to Discourse and many people may not be aware of the nice user cards and profile pages. As a result, I see a lot of posts with default avatars which I believe will lead to lower engagement and less social cohesion in our group.

I’d like to design a way to message users who posted more than a certain number of messages, yet who still have a ‘default’ profile. At minimum, I’d like them to set an avatar image. I’d like to avoid manual work :slight_smile:

Some early thoughts:

  • Set up a pinned post with information. PRO: easy to do. CON: we already have a lot those and I fear information overload. Also reaches people who have already set up their profile.
  • Set up an ‘anti-badge’ that’s triggered when someone makes X posts and has no avatar set up. PRO: automated and targeted. CON: Not sure if the badge query system can do this + not sure if I want ‘anti achievements’. Needs to be kept private to avoid creating a ‘hall of shame’. Needs to be revoked once the avatar is added.

What is your strategy for this?

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Perhaps you’re already aware of this, but it’s worth mentioning anyways.

One of the composer popups addresses this very issue. The text looks like so by default:

You can edit that message to anything you like.

Search for education.avatar in Text Content under the Customize tab in the admin.

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I’m looking at the custom wizard login to solve this for a client now.

Ah I had no idea, thanks! I have my doubts about the effectiveness of those messages though - people often don’t pay attention to them as they ‘get in the way’ of what they’re doing at that moment (writing a message). It’s not the right message at the right time…

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Like forcing people to upload an avatar at signup? Or also after?

I was talking more about filling in other fields.

I’m not quite sure about how to trigger it.

You are correct @Johani but for migrated existing users they won’t get that education panel, so this is more of an issue for big migrations which should be in the topic title. So I’ll edit the title to make it so.

I honestly feel for a mass migration a bulk email in an external tool would be the best way. You probably want to bulk email everyone that got migrated to the new forum software anyway, right, to let them know it happened?

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Is there any way to re-trigger this friendly reminder for folks after some time? As mentioned above, a lot of people may dismiss it as “too soon” or “not now” but (I guess?) never see it again after they do. Maybe even something with the command line?

Forgive me for wondering – I’ve been reading and thinking about this and other reminders:

Re-trigering this reminder would be like getting your driver’s license renewed and being asked (again) whether or not you want to be an organ donor…

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@joffreyjaffeux has been working on automation stuff for a while now. This is the perfect use-case for it.

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Cool. Happy to chime in more if it’s helpful to anyone. Imagination will probably get folks most of the way there anyways.

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