How to create a welcome message for your community
Welcome to this guide on welcome messages!
What is a welcome message?
It's a new feature that automatically sends a message to users who join your community. As a mod you can optionally set one and write exactly what you want the message to say. Currently, the user will receive it within an hour of joining.
Announcement | Updated Announcement
We found these welcome messages to be very effective in increasing participation (+20%) and decreasing removals (-7%).
Note: At the time of this guide, it is currently limited to communities with 500,000 members or less. The limit just increased from 50,000, so it will keep growing
How do you set a welcome message?
Before you begin: Welcome messages can only be set from new Reddit on desktop. If you use old Reddit, just replace the "www" in your URL with "new" temporarily, set the message, and then go back. On mobile, either go find a desktop or open new Reddit in desktop mode.
Mod permissions required: Since welcome messages are set in the community settings, you would require config perms to manage it
Step 1: Open your community settings
Select Community settings from the Other section
If you are on mobile and the sidebar isn't visible, just go directly to the page here: https://new.reddit.com/r/MyCommunityName/about/edit?page=community
Just replace MyCommunityName with the name of your community
Step 2: Enable the welcome message and type your message
Scroll down inside the Community tab
Step 3: Save changes
Click the Save Changes button at the top-right
Step 4: Test your message
Click Send me a test message under the message box
How do you format your welcome message?
The welcome message field currently accepts markdown. If you're unfamilar with it, click here for more info.
What should you write in your welcome message?
It's really up to you, but here are some tips!
- Don't go overboard, because if it's too long, users might not even read it
- Don't turn it into a rules page, you should mention your rules and maybe do a high-level interpretation of them so users get the basic idea. However, you could link them to your official rules page or relevant wiki pages
- Give relevant information about your community, for example in the case of TV show communities, give them information on how to watch the show and a link to your episode discussions
- Consider including a link to a poll in your welcome message (Google Docs, Straw Poll, or somewhere else). Ask users if the welcome message was useful or not
- Overall: Be welcoming!
Sharing welcome messages
If you have a successful welcome message you'd like to share and if your wiki is enabled, you can share a direct link to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/MyCommunityName/wiki/config/welcome_message
Just replace MyCommunityName with the name of your community
If not, link it from somewhere else or paste the message below!
Related resources
Posted Feb 4, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC · edited