Promoting Discord as Your Community’s New Home 

Welcome home. Here are a few key tips to creating and growing a space that feels like your community can kick back and connect.

Turn Your Server Into a Home for Your Community

Discord allows you to bring all of your followers and engaged members from across your other social or communication platforms into an active, organized, and customized hub.

By bringing your community together from every corner of the internet, you’ll build a tight-knit group of members that want to get involved and spread the word.

Get New Members Up to Speed

Once you’ve brought your community over to Discord, you’ll be able to interact with them all directly in one place.

With easily categorizable channels and threads for all kinds of conversations, your members can find their place, get comfortable, and start chatting straight away.

But don’t forget to help people settle in! As new members continue to find their way to your community, make sure they can start interacting with existing members and join in seamlessly. You might want to host a welcome event, hand out a unique “newbie” role, or meet big influxes of new members with an impromptu get-together in voice! 

Top Tip: For new members not familiar with Discord, it’s a good idea to set up your server with channels for welcoming new members, server directories, and How-Tos

For example, you might want to give new members tips on using the basics, like how key channels work or how to customize their profile. Access to key information helps new members settle in quickly and increases their chances of becoming an active part of your community.

Amplify Your Message

The most important step of growing an active, healthy community is getting the right people – not just the most people – in and chatting. 

Once your Discord community is up and running (and you’re confident your server is ready to start welcoming new people), you can...

  • Promote your server invite link to other like-minded groups or spaces where potential members might be hanging out.
  • Encourage members to join by sharing your server invite link in profile bios across YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social accounts you have!
  • Consider partnering with similar communities and create joint, mutually beneficial events where you can attract new members.
  • Create connections with admins like you and organize ways to grow together!

Top Tip: When you’re sharing an invite link to your server, make sure you’ve set up a permalink so that it doesn’t expire! There’s nothing worse than finding a link to the perfect community only to realize it’s broken. 

The Server Invite Link Settings pop-up on Discord, where admins can set how long the invite is active and the max number of users.

Although this will be a key step to raising server awareness, it’s important to make sure you’re sharing your community mission clearly and setting expectations with new members once they join.

Finally, as you grow your community on Discord and welcome new members into your server, take to get involved! Answer questions, jump into a Voice Channel, and be transparent about your hopes for the future of your server; it's the little things that will help your community grow up happy and healthy.

With thanks to east for all their help in writing this article.