By @Tyler Whittle. Feel free to tag me in any comments!
I’m convinced there is a pathway for people who join communities that goes as follows:
Outsider → Belonger → Contributor → Owner
I plan to write a lot more about this later and what it means in the context of DAOs. I put this here because I think it is very relevant to onboarding.
The goal of any onboarding should be to take the outsider to a contributor. After that, you’re on your own :) Below I detail a couple different onboarding experiences I have had in DAOs that I was eager to contribute to. In the Thoughts section, I highlight important areas that we need to think about as we build out onboarding best practices.
My onboarding experience with FWB was very poor. So poor that I no longer really engage with that community. I want to walk through what that was like:
*Application *****- I had to fill out an application that explained who I was, what I liked to do, and why I was going to be a contributing member of FWB. This took a solid half day to write and edit well, and I tried to be vulnerable and personable.
Admission - After getting admitted I was stoked. Hopefully these new friends liked me! However, instead of getting any human interaction when I showed up, I just felt like I was speaking into the void of Discord. One kind soul asked to hear more about my cocktail recipes, but otherwise there was no sense of welcome or belonging. I wanted to make the initial “Onboarding call”, but it seems that only happened once a month. No chance to interact with a real human to learn the ropes.
Getting Started - The issue to me with the admissions process is that I just joined a community of 7k people and was given minimal welcome and zero direction. I knew I wanted to work on the community side of things, so I applied to be a contributor to the membership team (yet another application). A few hours later, I see a new channel appear in discord that wasn’t there before, but otherwise I never heard back from the membership team.
I decide might as well make myself useful and hop into the #membership-copilots channel. After reading the last 100 or so messages, I suggest that we update the onboarding process to have a more personal touch: “I think it would be fantastic if we have a member of the membership team have a quick 15-30 minute call with new members. This will add a personal touch, and help everyone get up to speed faster.” I also add that I recognize I’m new here, so if someone knows where I can contribute best as a new member, I’d love for them to point me that way. Many have been working on getting FWB up and running for a long time, so it’s definitely daunting to post something like this with zero organizational context. After a few people agree with the sentiment of improving onboarding, I’m told by someone who seems like they’ve been there for a while that we can’t be contacting people via DMs. I push a bit on this in the chat, but ultimately this community veteran suggests I just go try out having calls with new people to get them onboarded. Unfortunately, I, as a brand new member, have no context to do this well. I think about explaining that unfortunately as a 2-day old member I can’t provide the context that a new member needs. But I don’t want to put more work on older members’ plates, and the conversation thus far wasn’t terribly receptive to my idea in the first place. This conversation topic dies and the thread moves on.
Over the next few days, I volunteered to help on a few more initiatives that were proposed in the membership channel, but no one ever followed through with me. Two weeks in, I have 0 affinity for FWB.
Thoughts - Overall, this experience sucked. I just wrote an application and spent $8.5k to join a community of supposedly great friends. There was no warm welcome, no context provided, and when I tried to start helping, my ideas were shut down and no one pointed me to where I could be useful. Unless I knew an “insider” who was going to champion me and plug me into their current sub-network, getting involved felt like a huge chore. I didn’t feel like I had the social license to jump in the middle of a conversation on a channel and provide my suggestions. I tried it anyway, and got feedback I didn’t really understand and ultimately no thoughtful discourse around my suggestion.
My onboarding experience with DAO Masters was okay, and a few key things happened that make me want to contribute to that community.
Application & Admission - DAO Masters doesn’t currently require an application. Just that you have at least 1 DAO Master token to get into the gated Discord. Since I contributed to the Mirror campaign, I already had some DAO Master. I didn’t realize the community had started meeting on Discord, otherwise I would have hopped in at the very start.