Heather Angel: And then the onboarding challenge. So the onboarding challenge, if you look at This right here. That's exactly what this is. I just wanted to take it back out of the mind map in case that is not your cup of tea and show you something a little bit different.
So in the onboarding challenge, there are different ways that you can do your onboarding challenge. And maybe I should let me back up just a little bit, if that's okay. Right here. So in your onboarding, you've got your essentially your member center, right?
So you've got your start here space. Your onboarding challenge and that includes these specific things to do your FAQs, your virtual tour. The say hello announcements. Of course, how you set it up in your own community is totally up to you. This is just my kind of recommendation from having built communities and what seems to work most commonly throughout.
So in the onboarding challenge, which is what I'm about to talk about, that's this piece right here. So just for the visual, I wanted you to see that. So that is take a virtual tour of the community. So you want to record a tour video so that people can. Like your members when they're coming in, you want them to be able to find their way around you know when you go into a new space.
It's very, I mean whether it's a building, whether it is. On online community, whether it's even a website like you're looking around and you're unfamiliar with it. So with the virtual tour being pre recorded, you can then they your members can then reference that if they need to, if they have a question later.
It also helps them to get a little bit of your personality in there, which is a good way to get you, get them acquainted with you if they don't know you before joining. So feel free to make it very authentic. Show your personality in the video and make it very short, as short as possible. I have a community that I recorded a, an almost 10 minute video and a virtual tour video in, which is ridiculously long, way too long.
But in it, I told them. I'm doing this because my community is for community creators, right? So I'm doing this so that I can show you all the pieces of what you should be doing and why you should be using them and that kind of thing. Your video, your tour video, you shouldn't have, shouldn't be more than five minutes long.
It doesn't need to be long at all for you to get those points through. Customize your notification settings. So that's something that a lot of people don't know how to do. And so If you put this in the challenge, then they can, they go to it. They see how to do it. And they can customize those notification settings.
There's nothing worse than having somebody in your community that is getting an email for every single thing that hates email. And so they get mad at you. And you don't even know why. And they get frustrated and it's not a great experience and that's not intentional, obviously, but if they can control their notification settings that it makes it for much nicer experience.
Adding the Person's contact. So your contact, your email to their email platform. So you don't want your emails to go to spam. So that's just a simple thing for them to do. Bookmark the community URL. There is so many times that people don't go know how to get back into the community that they joined.
So it'll be weeks before they get back in and they, it's not because they don't want to. It's because. We're a very fast paced society and every time you create a barrier for entry, there's a less of a chance that they're going to actually get in and do what they need to do and be able to interact and learn from you, as well as get back to the community and so if they just simply bookmark the URL, then that is.
Going to be, their go to that. That's going to be something that they can't use that excuse that they didn't know how to join. You also obviously want to add it to your website kind of side note. You want to put it in every single email that you send out and you want to put a link to the community, so that whenever they get an email from you.
If they don't have it bookmarked yet, you've got that link so that they can just click and go right into it. So you wanna make the bare the entry point as simple as possible and everywhere. Also a note on that, which is the not to it yet, but downloading the mobile and desktop app, that's really critical for this.
The desktop app, I. I use all of the time it's a really good it's a really nice app, and the mobile is great to have when you're on the go and you just need to check in real quick or you get a notification or you have a question pop up or whatever. And it's, it's important another way for them to get in and then RSVP to an event that is probably one of the most important things, because when somebody RSVP to an event.
They've already made that commitment. So if they just come into your community and they're already signing up for an event, Then that commitment is made that they're going to come and they're going to interact and they're going to get involved quicker. If there's no events in there for them to sign up for, then there's less of a chance that they're going to get in and actually RSVP for the next event.
So one of the things that I say. to do as you're setting up your community. And this, I know this isn't about setting up your community. So it's hard for me not to get into all the other pieces. But one of the things that I really recommend doing is setting up at least two welcome events. You want to have them on different dates, different times to try to accommodate for the people as they're coming in.
And you want to have them fairly, like within a week of each other, if not closer. And that is so that, people that can't join or join right after your first welcome event will get into your next one. That welcome event is really critical because that's where you're going to go over everything, you're going to introduce them to each other, they're going to be able to do networking, and when somebody comes in, and already, if they don't already know somebody but they meet somebody there, They're more likely to interact with that person in the community the next time they see them.
So it's a, you're creating relationships immediately and it's really, it's a really important thing to do.