New Members

[Gaz]

New members are obviously very important for discussion forums.
I have a couple of questions for the team here:

1) Should forum admins send each new member a welcome message outlining a bit about their forum?
2) Do you ask for them to respond to the welcome message? I request a response in the welcome messages so that I know the system is working.

I send welcome messages to all new members and a welcome back message to members who haven't contributed to discussions in over a year.
One thing that is particularly annoying is that over the last couple of years how many of them don't actually respond.

Under VB4 I could track messages and see which ones had read the welcome message and which ones didn't and then who hadn't read the message at all.
That bit of functionality was quite handy.

I've had over 50 new members join since we upgraded to VB6 which is great but only about 10 have responded to the welcome message which is a poor return for the effort.

Years back more than half of new members responded and I'd think it was around 70%. Is it just the way people are now or could it be something else?

[Shawn Gossman]

New members are obviously very important for discussion forums.
I have a couple of questions for the team here:

1) Should forum admins send each new member a welcome message outlining a bit about their forum?
2) Do you ask for them to respond to the welcome message? I request a response in the welcome messages so that I know the system is working.

I send welcome messages to all new members and a welcome back message to members who haven't contributed to discussions in over a year.
One thing that is particularly annoying is that over the last couple of years how many of them don't actually respond.

Under VB4 I could track messages and see which ones had read the welcome message and which ones didn't and then who hadn't read the message at all.
That bit of functionality was quite handy.

I've had over 50 new members join since we upgraded to VB6 which is great but only about 10 have responded to the welcome message which is a poor return for the effort.

Years back more than half of new members responded and I'd think it was around 70%. Is it just the way people are now or could it be something else?

I think onboarding is important for online communities, especially today, as a community is more important than ever.

You can do an automated onboarding, which is when the system sends a welcome message. You can include links to the introduction section and forum rules and give them the basics to get started.

Or... if you have the time and commitment, you can manually send a PM to a new member and welcome them in person. If you do this, I recommend you develop a relationship in the PM conversation with the new member. Keep the discussion going. Learn about them, and let them learn about you. Become friends. This will really boost their loyalty and help you grow a community of extremely loyal members. But most admins say they just don't have time for that. In reality, how is it different than replying to content on the forum?

That's my 2 cents