Hi all - I'm curious how folks handle member profile completion. It seems like it's not possible to make custom profile fields required (am I wrong?) so I'd love to hear how other people have incentivized members or set up workflows to remind them!
Hmmm I wonder if we could do this ourselves. We do take in the custom profile fields and know which ones are on the site. If we had a “Profile Completed” milestone, that might help drive people to complete this. I’ll add to our backlog and noodle on this one. How many fields do you have Lauren D.? (also would still love other’s opinions!)
Hi Lauren D.! Great question. Are you running your community on Slack? If so, I totally understand how tricky this can be—I’ve faced the same challenge in my own Slack community. During onboarding, I introduced a guide called "How to Make a Great First Impression" to encourage profile completion. I also set up Slack bots to send gentle reminders and made a point to do personal outreach for a more human touch. That said, it’s important to respect that not all members will feel comfortable sharing too much about their identity. As community managers, we’re working to build mutual respect and trust, which often starts with authentic and complete profiles—but it’s a balance. Rather than directly incentivizing this, I recommend tools like Tightknit to award badges for members with complete profiles. It’s a subtle and effective way to encourage participation while keeping things optional and inclusive. It’s definitely not an easy one to solve, and I was constantly refining my approach, too. But you’re on the right track by asking these questions—excited to hear what you try!
DeMario B. Thanks so much for that thoughtful response! I really appreciate that insight from direct experience, and agree that it's all about finding the right balance. We want to show the value in it without being pushy. I like the badge idea - have you found a way to automate that, or somehow notify someone on your team that someone has fully filled out their profile?
Lauren D.! You're welcome! We're in it together. In the spirit of vulnerability, it would annoy when members would only use their initial, have no profile picture, or an incomplete profile. Like, how do you expect to build a meaningful relationship with someone by hiding behind initials? (OK sorry had to get that out haha). I didn't find a way to automate it because it would require some coding. It can be done because I was using another vendor, Trova, for that. I would use Trova to urge members to complete their profiles. You can select groups of members based on profile complete rate. I was hoping to then leverage Tightknight to then assign those members badges in bulk. So a bit of automation and then a bit of manual. Always happy to workshop a solution with you.
I'm so with you DeMario B.! I never understand folks joining a community then giving VERY little info about themselves. So I'm trying to make the process as easy and welcoming as possible. Do you know of a way directly in Slack where you can see if someone has completed their entire profile?
Lauren D. I was on their free plan so I wasn't able to view that info. But I'm sure you could probably run a user report. That becomes too manual though. The question becomes is it worth the time investment? What is the outcome you're wanting to achieve? What are some other ways might we explore it? Is your onboarding process automated? Is there a way we can put it in that sequence? Or could you send a monthly bulk message to all your members reminding them to update/refresh their profiles? That way everyone is seeing the same message in case some people got a new job, has moved, etc? What do you think about that?
Now added to the backlog. Hard problem is that Slack doesn’t send us an event when a customer updates their custom profile. Our thoughts are to either:
have a manual button like “Check Profile” that users need to press to obtain the profile
Or have a cron job that repeats daily checking if someone has completed their profile.
Maybe both?
Would love everyone’s thoughts
