Grow a Community Your Members Want to Shout About

if you’re continuously providing an inviting experience that your members want to keep coming back for, you’ll soon find that they want to spread the word and invite their friends to check out the community too.

And because the best servers are full of positive connections, here are some of our top tips for encouraging your community to advocate for your server and spread the word.

Encourage Everybody to Invite Their Friends—Starting With You

Bringing your own friends into the space and encouraging your community to invite their social circles can make for a friendly, welcoming community that grows organically.

Invite Friends to Join the Server

• Right-click on any channel on desktop or select the + on a mobile device. 
• Create an invite link or select someone from your friend’s list to send an invite to them directly. 
• Watch your server grow! 🙌
  

To allow invites, head to server settings and make sure you’ve turned on permissions to allow all members to create links. If you want to, you can make this option only available to certain roles!

Remember, your invite links expire after seven days, so make sure you edit the invite link (so that it doesn’t expire) before you start it.    

Top Tip: Because server admins can see all invite links for their server, you can assess who is sending invites and how many bites they’re getting. You can even gamify this a little and grant special roles or rewards to the members who bring the most people into your community. You can do this by going to Server Settings > Invites.

Make It Simple to Invite New Members‍

Giving your members an invitation template with some suggested messaging they can quickly copy and paste when they want to share an invite makes inviting people quick and easy.

Even better, pin the template in your server announcement channel or create a read-only text channel so members can easily grab the invitation and share it. Although it’s always good to keep these referrals natural and allow growth to happen organically, you could highlight some key pointers, especially around an upcoming event!

Top Tip: Always include a permanent invite link with unlimited uses, so potential new members don’t run into dead links. You can also share the above steps in one of your channels to encourage more referrals to show new Discord users what to do!

Give People a Reason to Join

Hosting an event is a great chance for server members to invite their friends. Joining a community through events can allow newly invited members to interact with the rest of the community in a fun and casual setting.

Events can also provide a reason for new members to enter your community in the first place (and stick around after). Creating a schedule of group activities introduces a never-ending cycle of server activity where current members and new members can mingle and everyone has a great time.

This results in word-of-mouth promotion and piques the interest of newer members who also want to participate in server fun. Interested members will spread the word and so on and so forth, forever and ever to the ends of the internet.

Although server-wide events do take coordination to pull off, they nurture server growth and are a great investment for community sustainability. Many servers will even designate a staff member to organize events and rally members to attend!

But the best events aren’t always the biggest. Focus your time and energy on providing value, so you put on something great. Then, naturally, your members will want to bring their friends along too.

Focus on Healthy Connections and Members Will Follow

Don’t expect too much from your members too soon. Before they invite anyone, they’ll need to have a good time and find your server enjoyable enough to advocate for it.

Creating a good experience and encouraging your members to participate is the first step! After that, it’s a matter of maintaining a healthy, inviting culture and letting your community naturally spread the word, filling it with new friends and old faces.

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