Welcome Centers are great for guiding members through the features offered on your social network and for making them feel at home. A well-placed text box on your main page can become a highly visible and extremely useful Welcome Center for new members. The Indoor Music Festivals community uses a Welcome Center on their home page to greet new members.
Here’s a breakdown of what you might want to include in your social network’s Welcome Center:
- Introduce Yourself!: Create an “Introductions” discussion in the forum. Then invite new members to introduce themselves by replying to that discussion thread. An “Introductions” discussion can instantly become a great place to greet new members and find out who shares your interests.
- Get Started: Show some ways new members can contribute right off the bat. Promote your most popular features, and give a little guidance about the best ways to use them.
- Terms of Use: If you’ve created Community Guidelines, link members there from the Welcome Center. You can also refer members to the Terms of Service for all social networks on the Ning Platform.
- Link to administrator profile pages: Introduce yourself and the administrators of your social network in the Welcome Center. One quick way to do that is to add an HTML section and just add a link to the profile page of your network’s administrator. From here, new members can leave you a comment on your wall.
- Provide a “Contact Us” link: Give your members a way to contact you when they need to report an issue or want to know more about you. The Indoor Music Festivals community provides two links — one to a contact page they created, and another to the built-in “Report an Issue” page.
This is a great option for people who want to increase the visibility of the “Report an Issue” button in the footer of their social network.