Growing and Engaging your Discord Community: A How-To Guide

Growing and engaging a Discord community is not an easy task and that’s why at Autocode we are extremely proud of the 40,000+ member community we’ve built. In this blog post, we’ll be sharing how we have created a thriving, supportive and friendly community.

Whether you are a game developer, bot builder, discord community manager, or social media influencer, these tips will help you build an active community.

Table of Contents

• Provide opportunities for competition and collaboration
• Ensure consistent staff presence
• Elevate active and helpful community members
• Provide opportunities to showcase members and their work
• Leverage the power of Discord Bots

Provide opportunities for competition and collaboration

One way you can boost your server’s engagement is through competition and collaboration. Here at Autocode our multi-talented Developer Relations Lead, Jacklyn Biggin, runs Autocode Community Challenges at least once a month. These challenges are an opportunity for our community members to come together, collaborate, show off their skills, and learn new technologies via friendly competitions.

We’d recommend following these guidelines when designing competitions within your server:

1. Encourage participation with rewards and server roles. Here at Autocode, we reset our entrant and winner roles after each challenge meaning previous winners have to win the next challenge to keep their role!
2. Be consistent. You want your community to look forward to these fun events, therefore setting dates and times is important. For example, you can organize an event during the first two weeks of every month.
3. Use Discord’s Scheduled Events feature, and make sure to provide an easy to access document for your community to review event rules and expectations.
4. Have a dedicated Discord channel for these challenges, This is very helpful and will keep your discord server organized as well as provide a space for your community to ask questions and discuss the event.

Ensure consistent staff presence

Another great way to engage and grow your community is by ensuring you have a consistent staff presence on the server. Your staff needs to be integrated into the server as part of the community to build trust and create authentic connections.

At Autocode, our captivating Media Producer, Nestor Romero, moderates question and answer sessions with Autocode team members once a week in a Stage channel. QnA sessions are an opportunity for community members to ask questions and allow them to connect with the team behind the platform.

Here are some of the things we think about when running our Q&As:

1. Take questions ahead of time. At Autocode, our community can submit questions ahead of time via a /qna command.Learn how to build a similar command here. The questions are stored in a Google sheet and make it super simple for our moderator to organize and prepare. Submitted questions also appear in our #community-events channel, which helps create buzz around interesting questions.

1. Broadcast this Q&A to your Discord server using Discord’s Stage channels. Stage channels are the perfect way to conduct audio events since Stage channels allow you to set speakers, moderators, and members can join as the audience. In addition, there are no alerts interrupting the event when someone joins or leaves the stage.

1. Keep your Q&As relevant and casual. Remember, they are guided conversations. Allow your community to connect with you and your team members by finding the balance between being authentic and sharing the knowledge or info relevant to your community.
2. Prepare for the evolution of your Q&As. While QnA sessions may start off as a way for your community to get to know your team members, over time they may evolve into monthly updates on your bot, community, or product. Let things naturally evolve in a way that works for your community.

However, outside of events, you should still aim to have your staff online and around as much as possible. Simply having staff active in text and voice channels can make a huge difference to your server’s activity.

Elevate active and helpful community members

Community leadership is necessary for your server’s engagement and growth. It’s important for your team to quickly identify the most passionate, selfless, mature, and committed individuals in your Discord community. They will be the ones to foster a healthy and supportive server.

At Autocode, we recognize these leaders as our Community Heroes, and we’ve created a special role for them on our server. These Community Heroes are the backbone of our community and their presence is positive and helpful. They are the first to volunteer to test new features, help out in our support channels, and create amazing apps, websites, and Discord bots to share with others.

If you’re building a similar program for your server, here are some tips we’d recommend following:

1. Create a leadership role. Write a guide that outlines what the role entails, rules, and expectations, and explains their privileges.
2. Create an application process for this role in your community. Instead of promoting random community members, provide a path for leaders to achieve this role. This may also allow you to gain more insight into individual community members. You can check out our Community Hero application here.
3. Actively invite leaders to apply. Once you identify these leaders, it’s important to invite them to apply to this role. Encouraging them to apply rather than just waiting for them to can give them the confidence boost they need.
4. Introduce your leaders. Assign your community leaders a role in your Discord server and introduce them to your community
5. Recruit community leaders consistently. At Autocode, we review applications once a month.

Provide opportunities to showcase members and their work

Allowing your community to come together and showcase their work around a topic of interest can be a great way of driving more engagement in your Discord server.

At Autocode, our animated Content Producer, Ethan Kellogg, leads Show and Tell sessions. During these sessions, our community can share their latest apps, Discord Bots, and websites that they’ve been working on.
Here are some things to remember when planning these opportunities:

1. Plan and schedule ahead of time. Create a server event so that people know when your events start, but be sure to keep things casual when running them. Allow people join and leave, ask questions, or hang out for the duration of your event.
2. Be considerate of time. Utilize Discord’s server insights (https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032807371-Server-Insights-FAQ) to identify days and times during the week when your server is the most active. Try to select times to host these sessions that allow for international participation - remember that not everyone will be in the same timezone as you!
3. Be inclusive. You should encourage and allow everyone to participate. Take a quick poll before the event to see who is interested and check in with them to find out what they plan to talk about.
4. Be welcoming and encourage members to interact with each other. The purpose of Show and Tell sessions are to get people invested in each other's projects and to encourage the community to share those projects in the first place. Encouraging feedback, updates, WIPs, etc. can all help achieve this goal. When planning similar events for your community, think about what your members need to be successful in your community.
5. Leverage voice channels and text channels. Voice channels provide the ability to screen share and give live demos. You can also encourage members to share links, screenshots, and recordings of their projects in a text channel during these events.

Leverage the power of Discord Bots

Discord bots are undeniably one of the handiest tools you have, and we recommend using them to take your Discord server to the next level. A basic server can be transformed into a truly awesome place to hang out by building and adding fun bots to it.

At Autocode, we have built a multi-purpose bot that takes care of many of our moderation needs and also keeps our community jamming to their favorite tracks.

Here are some things to consider when adding Discord Bots to your Server.

1. Browse listing for popular Discord Bots. Read their descriptions carefully to figure out if they’d be a good tool for your community. For example, Bot.gg is Autocode's curated Discord bot list that you can easily search through to find the perfect bot for your server.

1. Build your own custom bot. You can start building your first bot with our guide for building Discord bots here.
2. Test bots in a test server. Make sure to create a test server when trying out bots. You want to avoid disrupting your community when installing and testing bots for the first time.

Thank you!

Thank you for reading! I hope you have found these suggestions for how to engage your Discord community helpful! If you would like to chat about any of the mentioned suggestions, please join our Discord server and ask our team! We’ll be happy to share!