Feature Idea: Auto- welcoming! Feedback welcome
Hello All!
The 7 Cups welcoming team is one of our most accomplished teams! In recent months, we launched the member welcome team. Since then we have been welcoming members daily. I am incredibly proud of every single listener who helped welcome members. Creating a welcoming environment for all new users is a 7 Cups community value that we cherish and work hard to accomplish. Anyone who comes to 7 Cups and is struggling deserves to be welcomed with open arms. Welcoming a newbie signals belonging, support, kindness and connection. Learn more about why creating a welcoming environment at 7 Cups is so important here!
In this post, I am going to focus on some product/ site updates which are designed to help and support the member welcome team (not the listener team yet). If you are on the welcome team, please review. We need your ideas, expertise and feedback on how to best accomplish our goals with this update.
Goal we hope to accomplish with this update:
We are an incredibly welcoming community, which is something we all can be proud of! However, we arent welcoming 100% of all new members. We have tried many things to get there and the results have been incredible. We have welcomed thousands of new members to 7 Cups! But its become clear we need an extra boost to hit our target of 100%.
How do we hit this goal?
Those of you on the welcome team know, right now the process of sending a member welcome is bulky. It requires you to have many tabs open, lots of copying and pasting...etc. Our goal will be to mainstream this system making it easier for the welcome team to send out their welcomes!
Here is how it will work:
Listeners who have the welcome team badges (power welcomer and peppermint) will unlock a special check box on their listener settings page!
This check box will allow you to decide to send welcomes to members. If you select yes, a text box will appear! You can use the pre-written message in it or write your own personalized welcome message. The message should clearly indicate that you are part of the welcome team and not there to be their 7 Cups listener. (We will provide more information on suggested welcome messages at the launch of this update.)
Additionally, you will be able to select how many welcome messages the system sends out on your behalf. You can select a minimum of 5 per day and a maximum of 100 per day.
From there, the system will send out automatic welcomes to members from your listener account using the welcome message you indicate. You can turn this feature off any any point.
Here is how the automatic welcoming will work:
Every welcome team member can choose to send between 5-100 welcomes per day. The messages are sent randomly. Once your messages are sent, the member name will appear in your contact list.
Every member with newbie badge gets 3 messages total during their first days at 7 Cups!
Day 1- 1 welcome message from welcomer 1
Day 2- 1 welcome message from welcomer 2
Day 4- 1 welcome message from welcomer 3
Items to keep in mind:
------> We will need to add more people to the welcome team as to not leave any new member behind. Therefore, wed need to constantly be adding new people to the team. One idea to solve this would be to allow any listener who reaches a specific criteria (which wed need to spell out further) to opt into this program and unlock the settings page update.
------> What to do when your member replies? While we know from experience that most newbies do not reply to their welcomes messages, some will. If a member replies to your welcome note, our expectation is that you will be kind, show them the ropes of the site, answer a question about the site that they have, show them how to find a listener...etc.
We are very excited about the possibilities for this update. We still have some items to work out and I hope this post can serve as a road map to how we have conceptualized this idea. We've not started development on this idea and we hope to hear your feedback, suggestions and ideas on how to best create a welcome feature the community can get excited about!
Absolutely an intriguing idea and I'm all for ensuring members feel welcome, but I have three potential concerns:
1. Is this going to feel overwhelming to some members? I imagine if you're already not sure you're ready to be here, getting a welcome message is great, but getting three could feel like a lot. But perhaps I'm wrong and it will feel extra welcoming
2. Will there be controls to ensure that welcome messages are not sent from accounts that aren't active? I could easily see a situation where someone marks to send out welcomes and then goes on a prolonged self-care break, leaving a member potentially reaching out in response and hearing nothing back
3. How much deveoper time would this take? While in a perfect world with unlimited dev time, it sounds great, I'm not sure it's worth further delaying other long-requested updates. I worry that too often we create new features that are 'nice to have' without fixing older features that are long overdue for an upgrade, which leaves listeners and members frustrated
@Anomalia Well said on that last point. Turn some of this "innovation" back onto better screening and training for listners
@Anomalia Good questions! Let me try to address some of these points -
1- It will just be a welcome message, without any asks. Even if a member isn't sure they are here for long term, a friendly hello always helps :).
2- Yes, there will be a check in place that if the listener isnt around for a while, the messages will auto turn off.
3- There are many features scheduled for development. 7 Cups community is a very warm place to be in. But we have been observing that many people leave after one chat or without seeking any help as they were feeling lost. A welcoming message from a listener will go a long way in assuring these people who are lonely and hurting that help is around. We have always strived to provide as much help as possible and at this point welcoming every member seemed like the right thing to do to make them feel at home and more open to seeking help.
Thanks for the questions :)
@Anomalia
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaamen on point 3.
It's very frustrating to see new features roll out when our current features aren't fixed :(
@Laura are we 100% sure 3 is the magic number because it seems a bit excessive. xP
coz like one seems lovely, two seems like maybe a mistake and they welcomed me twice, three is will these people ever %&*#ing stop bothering me. :x'
idk tho i have a mental condition <3
just be sure they're distinctly "welcome" and "welcome back, hugs" and then maybe "are you sure you don't need any hand-holding to find your way around, good luck!" ;D
(this is what happens when i try to clean up my notifications, whoops)
@bunnypants - my eventual goal is to have welcoming be more contextual so for example someone who has visited the site or the app and made a member account should definitely get one greeting that is just pure welcome to 7 Cups, and then if they maybe visited or joined a subcommunity they should get one from someone in that subcommunity that says "hi I'm Krink from Anxiety and we have lovely marshmallow roasts every tuesday night hope to see you there" and then if they are a teen they should get one from a teen or if they were in a group chat maybe someone who is a chat mentor, etc., could welcome them.
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn is good goal and management of member-resources :o
but my solution is a single variable (er, two, numberOfGreetingsSent and dateTimeLastGreetingSent; don't want two in a row ya noes) until it gets done properly Px'
either way, going to need (sooner rather than later) multiple slots for saved messages for purposes A, B and C huh x3'
*hops around you!!!* also hai ^-^
Hey Laura, how can i become a member of the Welcoming Community? :)
Hey Grace!!! Glad to hear that you want to be a part of the Welcoming Team! There is no application to join the Welcoming Team! You can start welcoming the members or listeners right away!
Information for Welcoming Members:
https://goo.gl/u2g2Qx
Information for Welcoming Listeners:
https://goo.gl/n11bfz
@blissfulGrace96
Hope all are ok
@laura
An amazing news..
Excited to see the final product.
Love
What about those people who loved welcoming manually 
Welcomers can still continue welcoming manually!
@JovialOne
I'm not a fan of auto-messages because they feel less than genuine and have less of an impact than personalized messages do. 7cups has a great community and the personal welcomes help to invite people into that community, genuinely. Auto-messages can feel really impersonal and may isolate some from the get go - especially several days in a row. I can see one message, one time, with the basics of the site and a general welcome. I love that you are trying to make the experience better, and I think with some refinement it will be fantastic.
@frailtea You can customize your welcome message as you like :)
This sounds awesome
Such a great idea!
@Laura I love this idea! I think it will go a long way in helping folks feel welcome and part of the 7C community.
@Laura
Since I heard about this yesterday I thought I would read about it. I'm not on the welcome team it would be an overload, unless this update makes it through development. Nevertheless I think this update is very important as we get hundreds to thousands of members a day. In regard to it being less professional I don't agree. This update would allow you to add your own message, so you wouldn't have to use a pretaped message.
Donald K
@DonaldK I want to b there
