3 Tips to Boost Discord Community Quality with Mods [Mod Growth Series Part 4]

After spending much time building out its game, one of our P2E clients decided to resume its focus on its discord communities. They want to reactivate their communities for the upcoming launch. They used our marketplace to hire a team of moderators and enlisted our help to identify strategies to re-engage with those dormant users.

Our first goal was to improve the overall quality of the server (vs. growing), given that it was already a large server. We achieved our target in 3 weeks (We started our active engagement in early October), as you can see from the server’s daily quality indicator. Our Dashboard measures daily quality as a combination of how a user talks, how connected members are to each other, the content quality, and the overall sentiment. It is not about how many new users you are getting but about the quality of those users.

Here is how the team did it:

(1) Always tag each other

A good hallmark of a community is that its members can form genuine connections with each other. Members Always learn how to interact on the server from the core team. As a result, we trained the moderator teams always to tag and reply to people specifically when talking to them. In addition, when moderators were talking to each other, they were tagging each other. As moderators talked to more members and got more people engaged, members started to notice this little feature and mimicked the team’s behavior. Hence, they began to mention each other more often.

(2) Meme aggressively

Memes are a significant part of the discord culture. Part of the mod team’s goal is to increase the percentage of memes in the user’s conversations. To encourage more memes, the team deliberately spent a few days chatting with users heavily with memes and successfully changed users’ behavior for the long term.

(3) Converse with them

Finally, as part of the new user engagement strategy, the mod team devised a plan to chat with new users in a meaningful way. The goal is to encourage users to talk at least five messages on the server to start forming a habit of returning. To achieve such a goal, mods would try to have small conversations about the user’s personal life. As you can see, the percentage of users who only sent out one message on the server declined drastically.

After building up a good playbook and solid community management team, our client went on to do more aggressive marketing for the game and continued driving new users to the discord server. This is a very effective strategy since the mods already know how to most effectively onboard and gain the attention of these new users, which lowers the user acquisition cost as the conversion rate is higher. Some preliminary data shows that members with strong engagement on discord also tend to spend significantly more than on the game itself, which leads to higher retention rates and purchasing potential.

Next, read about the 6 essential metrics to measure mods performance.