Welcome new members

Every network and community has their own onboarding process, but here are some examples from Bridge members;

1. As you understand new members challenges and goals, either via a welcome meeting or their application form, offer new members 3-5 intros to other members.
2. Send new members an invite link to join your member directory. New members can then create a profile, see who else is in the community, see who they know and request intros. Existing members can also see new members and request an introduction too. For example, if you are an investor, you can invite them to your portfolio founders group
3. You can also share other curated groups of useful “sub networks” they might want to know about. For example, here is group of our team, our expert mentors, vetted recruiting partners, our co-investors, etc…
4. Share your network. This allows new members to easily see who else is in your network and request more connections.

Each month, I manually onboard each user, and curate 5 intros for them based on their needs. If new founder Sam joins and she needs help with fundraising B2B ML, she will get 5 intros with founders in B2B ML who just raised.

‍Maddie at Founders Cafe

Orientation campaigns

Joining an existing community or group can be overwhelming. Setup an orientation campaign to introduce new members to your network over time. This helps drive engagement and reinforce how your network can help them succeed. You can also host this content on your internal resources page (i.e. Notion)

For example;

• Week 1 - “Here are 3 great pieces from our community on early-stage KPIs. If you want to chat to Alex on your KPI strategy just click on his name to request an intro”
• Week 2- “Hiring is always a challenge. We’ve curated a list of amazing Designers and Marketing experts in our network who are available for advice on hiring and maybe even consulting roles. Check out and subscribe to these groups for regular updates on new people we add to the network”
• Week 3 - “Our team has now shared our collective networks with you. You can use this browser extension to see your network while you work. Let us know if we can help with any insights or intros as you discover where we might be able to help”

Promote new joiners

Existing members can follow groups to get alerts when new members join. This allows them to see who joined, learn more about their backgrounds, see common connections and discover intro paths to connect. This can be further automated using our API, Webhooks and Zapier to trigger new member alerts to slack or feature new member profiles in your newsletter.

Are we missing anything?

We’re constantly updating and sharing use cases and best practices from our member community. Let us know if there are any use cases or examples we’ve missed. Equally if you need more information let us know via Intercom in the app.