I believe that the main purpose of community management is to ensure that being part of a community is interesting and enjoyable for people while it also benefits others in the community and the company.
Over the years I noticed that moderators sometimes miss certain points. So I decided to write a short memo for moderators to refer to when needed.
So, please enjoy!
The key moderation principles
Let’s start with a list of ideas we should remember when interacting in the community.
Assume good intentions
Assuming good intentions is a key principle of community building. Always remember that the vast majority of people who come to your community and decide to write something genuinely want to help others. To make it work you need to be able to interpret users’ actions from a positive perspective and then help the users transform their energy into something interesting to them and useful to the community.
For example, if a user reacts strongly to a bag in your product, help them write a feedback post with a detailed description of the problem and specific suggestions for improvement.
Lead by example
Your actions speak louder than your words. So you should be a role model for the behavior you expect from other members. Be the first to start a discussion, be helpful for others, and maintain a positive tone to set a high bar for the entire community, if that’s what you expect from others.
Be helpful
From theory, we know that there are three types of relationships:
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Positive relationships, when people like you and treat you well.
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Negative relationships, when they have negative feelings towards you.
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No relationships, when people are completely indifferent to you.
Positive relationships with our users are what we strive for. The easiest way to build positive relationships is to help users. Help report bugs to developers, help remove spam for the server, help resolve conflicts between users, and so on. Ultimately, your goal is to make others in your company feel like they can accomplish more than they could without you.
Be trustworthy
Most communities are built on the idea of future possibilities—that together as a group we can build something useful that we cannot build alone. A fundamental part of such systems is the trust that participants have in each other and in you as a community leader.
Trust usually starts with your honesty with others and with yourself. Of course, situations vary, but whatever happens, remember: you can leave things unsaid, but never say something that is not true. Otherwise, you’ll lose the most important resource of all—trust.
Be fun to be around and stay positive
The vast majority of online community members are volunteers. They’re only part of your community as long as they’re interested and enjoy it. One of the ways to make your community enjoyable, is to be a fun person to be around. Actively use humor, emojis, and memes, and foster lighthearted, informal conversations. Your positive attitude alone can make your server a place where people want to return again and again.
Be respectful
Treat every participant with dignity and respect, regardless of their experience, tenure, or opinion. Demand the same treatment of you and others from all users in the community, regardless of their background or status. Remember that everyone has the right to their own opinion, and your job is to ensure an equal and comfortable environment for everyone.
Give users a chance to save face
Our goal is to encourage users to be active and make everything possible so users are not afraid to make mistakes when acting in the community. There is one thing that kills it all. The name of it is public criticism, regardless if a user does something wrong. As a result, never criticize or discuss users publicly. If someone does something bad, the first thing you should do is contact them privately and explain the situation (assuming good intentions!) If somehow other users have already started a public discussion, focus solely on the problematic behavior and rules of the community and never on the user who did something wrong.
Use your ban hammer as less as possible
Not all rule violations should result in punishment.
We are all human. We make mistakes from time to time, especially when emotionally charged. In most cases, almost any difficult situation can be resolved through a conversation. Serious penalties should only be used for intentional harm to the community.
Communicate often
People trust those they know, and they know those who are always nearby. Your job as a moderator is to never disappear from the chat for too long.
How to keep the beat: Strategies to start and support discussions
Now that we know the key principles, it’s time to talk about how to keep your Discord server active. I think to be successful in this endeavor, you don’t need to talk much. What you really need is to make other users talk.
For this to happen, two conditions must be met:
- Users should have something to talk about.
- Users need to feel safe and not afraid of making mistakes.
As we recall from the previous part of the article, to fulfill the second condition, it is necessary to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and support and completely avoid public criticism.
To make users have something to talk about, you can either initiate discussions yourself or help to grow existing ones.
Create a new discussion
Here are some ideas for a good discussion.
- AMA with developers and top users.
- Organizing social initiatives and contests.
- Brainstorming ways to grow the project.
- Discussing leaderboards, in-game successes stories, and other user activities.
Other great topics include discussing industry news and sharing funny memes and jokes. (Just remember, fake jokes are rarely funny. Share only what makes you personally laugh!)
When you want to start a discussion, you need to find a topic that at least a few users would potentially be interested in discussing. Note that there’s no need to immediately lead the conversation to a specific question with a specific answer. If the topic you’ve raised is interesting to some users, those users will pick up the conversation and develop it further with almost no effort from your side.
It’s also worth noting that creating active off-topic discussions is not as easy as it might seem. Usually, such discussions are the result of the good system work of the community team.
Developing existing topics
You don’t have to initiate a discussion every time. A more effective way to facilitate discussions is to grow discussion from what other users have started. To do this, simply ask as many follow-up questions as possible whenever you notice someone starting a conversation and that conversation isn’t receiving the attention it deserves from the community. Please remember to ask questions with a sincere desire to delve deeper into the topic or learn more about the person.
Another effective approach is to track users’ interests. As soon as you see that one user needs help or advice that another user can provide, you need to personally and intentionally ask one to help the other.
You can come up with a ton of interesting, innovative approaches to stimulating discussions in your community. Whatever you choose, most of the time the essence of this approach will boil down to what’s called “active listening”.
Welcoming new users
The next important topic for moderators to master is engaging new users who have just joined the community. The simplest approach to this task is to personally greet newcomers.
It’s important to note that the purpose of personal greetings is to give dedicated attention to a user. When we greet someone personally, we expect them to remember us and hope they’ll take some reciprocal steps toward us (for example, posting something about themselves in chat). Therefore, it’s crucial to maintain a balance between public activities and private messages, as well as manual interaction and automation. I would recommend doing the following.
First, add a bot that creates a log of all new users. Then, when you see a new user, contact them with a private message. Here is an example of the message
Welcome @{USERNAME}! Whether you came to ask a question about the game or to socialize with other players, please feel free to start posting in
#general. We also will appreciate it a lot if you can#introduce-yourself. Once again, we are glad to see you in the {COMMUNITY_NAME} community!
Next, you need to improvise. Once a user takes action in the community, you need to support them. For example, if a user introduces themselves in the #introduce-yourself channel, you can say hello to them publicly.
A few more words about private messages. Since we don’t have any information about new users, we’ll send roughly the same message to everyone. However, I wouldn’t recommend automating this process, as it would defeat the purpose of greeting people personally. A much better approach would be to find volunteers from the community who would be willing to help you to greet newcomers.
Contact users who are about to leave the community
Although we’ve already talked about this, let me reiterate. Many online communities are initially launched to increase retention. At the same time, churn within the community itself can and should be addressed as well. How? One way is to promptly contact users who are about to leave the community. The idea behind this is roughly the same as with welcoming new users—we want to give users personal dedicated attention and show them that they matter to us.
What exactly should be written depends on the history of participation in the community of a particular user. For example
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If a user reported a bug, ask them if the issue has been resolved and what they think about the fix. If there’s no solution yet, contact the developers to confirm whether one will be available soon, and then contact the user.
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If the user just said hello and didn’t post anything after that, offer them to
#introduce-yourself. If you’ve already suggested this, find out if you or the community can help the user somehow.
Remember, the goal of this activity isn’t so much to solve a problem as to engage in with the user. We want to show the user that we care about them and welcome them into the community. So sometimes simply checking in with users is enough.
Discord server channel setup
Let’s quickly discuss which channels are needed on a server and why. I’ll start with an axiom:
The fewer channels your server has at the start, the better.
Why? Because people come to a community for the sake of other people [they’re interested in]. Furthermore, no one wants to be part of a dead community. When people log in and see that the last activity in the chat was several months ago, they inevitably question the rationale for posting anything themselves. Therefore, unless you have a large and active user base, keep only one channel for all types of messages. Typically, this will be #general.
Once your #general channel has a large number of messages each day, you can add a few more. Usually these will be:
- A dedicated channel for people to introduce themselves, aka
#introduce-yourself. - A channel for conversations on unrelated topics, aka
#floodor#off-topic.
Please note that off-topic conversations usually emerge naturally as a community grows. Until they begin to dominate the main channel and interfere with users’ conversations on the community’s main topic, separating them into a separate subchannel won’t do the community any good. Actually, this principle is a rule of thumb for separating any topic into a separate channel.
A dedicated #introduce-yourself channel can be added quite early, as it’s often difficult for people to overcome their shyness and introduce themselves in an active general channel. At the same time, personal introductions, as we’ve already discussed, are extremely important, as any relationship is built through self-disclosure on both sides, and sharing about self is the first step in this process for a user. Our goal here is to create the necessary trusting environment. A dedicated channel for #introduce-yourself is an excellent start in this direction.
I think that is it for now. If you see where I can make this manual better, please let me know.
Also, if you need any kind of analytics to help you decide where your community is and what to do next to grow it efficiently, please let me know! I am happy to help!