By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable
You walk into a restaurant. There are people dining, chatting, having a good time – and there’s an empty table, but there’s no one there to greet you, seat you or give you a menu.
Do you stay?
You might, or you might leave. Either way, it’s not a comfortable first impression.
Turns out that what holds true for restaurants holds true for online communities as well. The State of Community Management 2015 survey finds that communities with programs to welcome new community members are more likely to have lower rates of inactive users and more user-generated content than communities that don’t welcome new folks in.
We highlighted setting up new member programs one of our quick wins for improving engagement, and giving them a more human face – through custom welcomes, calls or video, for example – can drive up new members’ future engagement even more. They don’t take a huge investment of time, and they are in most cases easily scalable.
And the payoff is noteworthy – communities with new member programs had about 20% more active members, according to our survey respondents – and they scored 10 points higher on our user engagement scale, which estimates the relative contributions of members and the organization in a community.
But enough of my talking – someone is standing in your doorway. Go say hello and show them around.
Each new member of TheCR Network gets a welcome call when they join. Learn more about TheCR Network and how it can help you advance your community by visiting communityroundtable.com/TheCRNetwork
