Things to Consider When Creating Community Member Invites

“Inviting people to an online community should be a different strategy from marketing.”

All online communities come with a core group of members who contribute more in comparison to many others.

This is actually indicative of the fact that your community nurtures a thriving environment. And because this small group of loyal members is a vital aspect of your online community, you, as a brand, must never ignore their contributions. You will only invite community churn and low engagement as a result.

Thus, you must ensure that you keep your core group always engaged. Community invites are a proven way to increase member engagement and retain them. But what are the right tactics to create stellar invitations?

Let’s dive in to find out!

Things to Consider When Creating Member Invites

To ensure that you keep your inner members at the core of your community, you’ll have to consider a few things. Let’s touch base on all of them –

1. Selection Should be Based on Clear Criteria: Who are your core community members? Your fellow community members should have knowledge about who you select and the reason for their selection. If your community members don’t have clarity about this, your selection might come across as biased. This might affect your engagement rates as other members may not participate. To combat this, you should create clear community guidelines and acquaint every member with them. You can mention some specific requirements such as experience, age, etc. as a qualifying criterion, and lastly, draft and send an invitation to those who qualify.

2. Follow a Pre-Defined Plan for Selection: Next, you must ensure that your selection process is straightforward and completely transparent. Your community members should have complete clarity about the exact selection process and their eligibility to receive an invitation. You should also specify all the admission deadlines. All this might sound overwhelming, but to streamline the process, you’ll need to eliminate the guesswork with a pre-defined process.

3. Keep Your Invitations Crisp: Now, that your process is defined, you can take a step ahead by sending out community invitations. Your community member’s experience depends on these invitations. Thus, these should be absolutely crisp and should convey the message. Also, ensure that your community members receive an invitation from a specific source. That can be a community manager, moderator, or anybody involved.

The invitations that you create should be warm. The messaging should be crisp and should generate curiosity and excitement in the minds of the members who receive them.

Here’s a checklist of what your community invitations should include:

• What is the invitation about
• How will they benefit from the invitation
• What contribution is required from their end
• How long will the initiative continue if it’s specific to a program

This is the stage where you engage your community members.

Pro tip-Do not make it seem like they volunteered for this, as you need their consent. This way, your community members will feel like they’re a part of something they didn’t opt for. Let the engagement and effort come organically. So, let them reach out to you to know more about the program. You can mention each and every detail in your community invitation to bind your community members’ interest. Now all you’ll have to do is get at creating stellar invites for your members.

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