Best Practices for a Successful Discord Community
How to grow, manage, and protect what could be the lifeblood of your project
The popularity of the use of Discord has grown exponentially over the past few years. There are now about 13.5 million servers with over 150 million monthly active users logging more than 4 billion conversation minutes on a daily basis. These conversations can cover everything from NFT art, music, and games to family, news and events, and even outdoor activities.
Regardless of the reasons for starting your Discord server, you’d need to know and have a few things for it to be successful:
A Server Icon
This is your brand and your community beacon and not only for Discord. A good thing to do is to keep all of your community channels cohesive and easily identifiable by using the same server icon for your twitter, medium, and twitter profile picture. It is just as important to make sure it represents you and your community to the most of its ability. This identifier is very important for your brand. It’s what people will see first and likely be the image they most remember.
Have a First-rate Admin Team
These are the guardians of your galaxy. Inevitably bad actors will try to negatively impact your server and your community. These attacks need to be addressed ASAP. Your team will be monitoring the server virtually around the clock to prevent harm, make community members follow your community rules, as well as Discord’s own Terms Of Service and guidelines. Assign this team overlapping roles in order to have 24/7 coverage and response.
Additionally, it is the role of your admin team to keep the server feeling alive and engaging and drive that engagement throughout each channel. They can start important conversations about the project within your community and make sure to answer all incoming questions.
Rules
Having rules is what separates us from the animals. In order to not be an animal, provide a list of rules that are to be followed in your server. These can be your rules or Discord’s rules — or a combination of both — but they generally should revolve around treating members with respect and civility, content safety (No NSFW stuff), prevention of spam and unauthorized offers, etc. These are pretty standard throughout Discord. In fact, your server should follow all aspects of Discord’s Terms of Service because if you don’t, Discord staff will delete it. And you may also have rules and filters specific to your server, such as those that further monitor content or that discuss membership abilities.
Separate Channels
Having a series of channels providing different information helps keep your server organized, as well as protects the server in case one of the channels is compromised. These can include channels for welcoming, information, rules, and announcements. You can also use separate channels for bot commands to reduce chatter on your main channel or a staff-specific channel where you can privately discuss business with your administrators and others. One of the core ways to drive engagement through your community is to create channels that align with your users interests. Some examples include interesting topics like sports or music genres, while others could be mini games and meme channels where the community can share.
Verification Levels and Other Security Features
Server verification levels allow you to control who can send messages within your server. The levels range from None, where any new member can communicate without restrictions, to Highest, where server members must have a verified phone number of their Discord account. Server-wide two-factor authentication (2FA) can be set up for use as well. Discord requires that moderators and administrators enable 2FA on their accounts before they can make any administrative actions.
Bots
Bots are used to ease the workload of administrators and manage your server. There are hundreds of popular bots made and reviewed by fellow users that perform a variety of functions, from moderating, filtering, member management and acting as security guards. These are reviewed regularly by various publications — because some bots aren’t so great — but most are pretty well vetted before becoming mainstream.
Connect with Your Community
Once the server is established, building out your community is imperative. What’s the point if you don’t? Discord’s features allow for you to engage. To increase a sense of cohesion and to increase the size as participants invite their friends, you can have contests, music nights on the voice channels, or even an AMA through Stage Channels where participants can ask you, or anyone else, about the server and other ideas.
These tips will help you get an idea of how to get started and the basics to keep in mind. Also keep in mind that Results.io has a wealth of experience to get you and your project started as well as manage your servers.
About Results.io
Results.io is a Web3-focused growth agency specializing in marketing and community cultivation looking to help industry-leading projects drive engagement for NFT, P2E, and IDO’s. Learn more about the company at Results.io
