How to build a thriving community on Slack

I’m involved in growing and nurturing my university’s alumni community on Slack. I spoke to a few Slack community leaders to gather ideas and feedback for building thriving communities. The list below is an amalgamation of those key ideas.

1. Define the vision and purpose

Have a clear idea about why the community needs to exist in the first place and what value you are delivering for the members. Craft a compelling vision and align your community around that vision from day one.

2. Define code of conduct and data handling policy

Create community guidelines before launching and publishing the Code of Conduct in an easy-to-understand language. Remind people about the ‘House Rules’ every couple of weeks for the community to become self-regulating.

3. Define the roles and responsibilities of the community champions

Depending on the size and purpose of the community, you would need various roles like a moderator, content curator, tech, AMA organiser, mentorship coordinator etc. Your chances of success will increase with a clearly defined role and ownership for the Community Champions.

4. Craft a solid membership process

You could open anyone to join your Slack community without approval, which can bring in an incorrect target audience or spammers. You also miss an opportunity to learn about community members’ goals and expectations without a solid approval process.

5. Craft a thoughtful onboarding process for new members

Good onboarding is essential to make people feel welcome and start them on the right foot. Some examples include sending automated welcome messages, asking people to introduce themselves and completing their profiles.

Encourage members to humanise their profiles by completing profile info, adding photos, taglines and showing some of their personality to be more inviting to others.

In a community of designers, it’s not helpful if most profiles say, Product Designer.

6. Build a single hub for documents and resources

There will undoubtedly be a need to create a small hub of documents like privacy policies, code of conduct and helpful resources. You could create and share that using notes within Slack itself, but it’s not the best solution for discovery. Your company website is usually the natural place for it, missing which you can publish it for free on GitHub, Notion, Almanac or any Wiki.

7. Create Slack Channels strategically

Channel Categorisation — The seemingly trivial thing about naming and categorising channels can have a huge impact on your overall engagement. Channels can be defined in many ways, e.g. function, technology, location, vertical and profession.

Number of Channels — The total number of channels should be relative to your community size. Have too many, and the conversations would be lost, giving the perception of an overall quiet place. Have too few, and the conversations would be messy. In the early days, 10-15 channels are sufficient.

Public vs Private Channels — The majority of your channels will be public. There are real benefits to having private channels too, e.g. for C-level executives in a mixed community and Community Champions.

Traffic Generation — Some channels, like pulling in curated fresh content via RSS feeds or jobs, can generate returning traffic to your Slack Community if there isn’t much action happening. These channels may not necessarily generate a dialogue.

8. Assign Channel owners

Assign 2-3 community champions per channel if possible and link it to their roles and responsibilities covering moderation, sharing content, facilitating discussions etc.

9. Set the pace from the get-go

Think of a fast-paced metropolitan and a relaxed remote village. People’s behaviour and actions determine the pace. This applies to your online community too, in which champions play a critical role. You don’t want to be so fast that it overwhelms people or too slow that it looks like a dead place.

Community members are looking for cues on how to behave and contribute by watching others.

Continuously ask members for feedback to ensure their expectations are met, and that you are putting efforts in the right place.

10. Have a question bank for enabling discussions

A pre-built bank of questions to post to the community regularly can generate discussions and create a snowball effect. It’s ideal if a community member posts this question. It can be automated via Slackbot if that’s not a possibility.

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