The Complete Guide to Online Community Onboarding on Owned Platforms

The key is to place your milestones in order from easiest to hardest, so that you are escalating your community member’s skills and autonomy through the sequence. Most onboarding sequences should be about 6-12 milestones long.

Some examples of activation milestones are:

• Completing your profile in a community platform


• Reading community guidelines


• Responding to something an admin has posted within the community


• Responding to something another member has posted within the community


• Introducing yourself in the community


• Making your first unstructured post in the community (i.e

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(research across a variety of platforms and use cases often seems to suggest that having a profile picture significantly impacts engagement)

In reality, when we onboard community members, we should be aiming to take them on a journey from net-new member to active member (and perhaps even to becoming a superuser). We’re aiming to take someone from square one to someone who:

• Has all of the technical and logistical understanding needed to utilize your community (i.e., they have set up a pr

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