3 Perfectly Acceptable Ways To Invite Someone To Join Your Community

You can’t mass-invite people to join your community. That’s spam. It’s ineffective and does more harm than good. Do you want a deleted e-mail to be someone’s first impression of your community?

There are 3 very good and very effective ways to invite someone to join your community.

1. Through a relationship. Build a relationship with the person first. Take the time to read their blog, leave comments, send and reply to e-mails. Give before you get. Introduce yourself long before send an invite.
2. Via a referral. Gain a referral (or a mass-referral) from people you do have a relationship with. “Jon recommended I contact you about this community we’re trying to create”
3. By adding value. Find a way to add value to the interaction. Invite him to become one of the first 10 members to join your community. Offer a position of responsibility within your community. Solve a problem they’re struggling with. Your interaction has to add value.

If you don’t have one of these 3, then you probably don’t want to invite that person to join your community. As a rule of thumb, don’t invite someone to join your community at the first interaction.

Comments

[Ryan Paugh]

Hey Rich. Great post.

What would you suggest for people who are dealing with a community that's growing at an exponential rate? Do you still recommend the same practices? I've used all of these in my Community Management positions, but what happens when you're managing a very large community and it becomes hard to justify the amount of time you spend building one-to-one relationships with people?

That's a problem that I am dealing with right now. I'd love to know what you think.

-RP

[Richard Millington]

If the community is growing at an exponential rate then why do you need to invite anybody?

Community managers don't need to build personal relationships with every member. They need every member to build personal relationships with each other.

That means more activities, introducing groups of members to each other, ensuring newcomers interact with people immediately and enabling/facilitating these relationships to take place.