Effective Slack Invite Link Management Tips for Community Managers
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Reading time: 1 minute
🔗 Slack Invite Links If you maintain an open community and want to grow the community organically, you will at some point want to introduce Slack Invite Links. These links allow your prospective new community members to join your community without invitation and self-service their own onboarding. You can find them in your Slack workspace dropdown pictured here. However some caveats that catch every new community manager:
These links by default are set to expire after 30 days. We recommend setting these links to Never expires so you do not need to worry about updating the link on a time-based interval.
These links also have a limit of 400 new invites. After 400 new members have joined using this invite link, the link ceases to work! Our recommendation is twofold. (1) Provide a static link that redirects to your Slack Invite Link. Something along the lines of yourcommunity.example.com/join will do. (2) Every 400 new members, you’ll want to switch out this link with a new invite link.
💡Tightknit actually offers a feature that helps solve some of these problems. We give you a static URL, track new invites, and warn you when you’re at 300, 350, and 400 new members. Here is documentation to learn more and if you’d like to get started today, please reach out or set up a demo.
Zach H. I’m really going back to the beginning here! 😅 Ok, I’ve been in communities where it was generated invitation all the waaay over to ones where it was member onboarding email flow with Slack introduced later after vetting. There are trade offs I’ve seen between reducing friction and getting right into community and preserving some friction but more guiding the experience ramping up to being in community. I’m curious, go another level down on your recommendations? Because out of anyone, you and Stephen C. have probably seen the most communities across the board, and I thought that would be good practice to take in alongside building specifically for my community. 😊
It truly depends on the size and scale of the community Jennifer Y.! I’ve seen multiple approaches that work well.
Same...I think that's what I'm trying to mine from your brain Zach H. -- what approaches for what groups have you seen work exceptionally well. Let's lean into the pattern acuity for a second! 😄
I'm cooking on something here before taking it back in channel in front of community at large.
If you have a human-powered screening process, it’s worth doing the invites directly over email.
If you are looking to automate onboarding, it’s worth doing the invite link
Many other variables but that’s my breakdown for you
Confirmation at it's finest! 😊 Ok, but then...what seems to have the best shot at continued community involvement in each of these onboardings? For human-powered--I'm thinking conversion grows because of the elevation, the ties to others, the care that all come from email invitation flow. Does that have to transition to workflows with the same leaning in? For the more automated, thinking potentially higher threshold to clear to get conversion, but possibly also that signals more motivation to participate once in community?
That is a question for your team since I don’t really know your community as intimately as you do. Both work but it depends on what your space is for
Oh, sure...again just context from your pattern acuity. I'm just gathering as I'm setting up and also reporting back. So be assured, not taking anything as prescriptive--more just mining some pattern recognition.
Maybe better to ask: where have you seen patterns that surprised you? Or ones that took a while to be revealed, that you didn't already know from your days at Salesforce, that only have emerged now leading Tightknit? I went back to the beginning of this channel, tracing how it came together, for a bit of inspiration. I just watched the first panel call you did, grabbed several of the slides to include in a reference guide for RWIT on Slack as community and productivity tool. There was really great stuff in there! And I just learned about the Channel Tools app...and I was literally just brainstorming around tools like this from a request from RWIT leadership! Also, I'm going to figure out how to create an RWIT slackmoji as a nice pebble to take back. I've also been seeing how you do some cool connections tagging in threads to connect people...if I might ask, I'm thinking about community where flow starts on website, then individual welcome and next activation has either been join into Slack and intro self or more now it's invitation to monthly virtual onboarding session (which reminds me a bit of what Jan Y. does in virtual webinars for CxXchange, with the breakout rooms, taking away some new contacts that folks have talked to personally). So, now, we're trying to create a smooth integration going in the same direction, trying to get more across the board activation in Slack when shared in the onboarding flow, and then overall trying to get Slack situated as a conversation hub. While also launching a couple of newer internal special teams experiences. We're doing well throughout that onboarding flow, up through the introduction. But then, it becomes uneven after that milestone. So, I'm leaning in to learn 360 about community marketing and mgmt. I've found some interesting/useful tools on YouTube about the Circle community platform, and have been pulling over any notes that would fit (outside any differences due to different features for Circle).
