Laura Zug: Okay, so Bri mentioned onboarding, which is literally one of my very favorite things to talk about.
This is a framework. There's actually a tutorial in the hearth where we spoke about this framework for an hour. So we're not going to do that today. I'm going to give you a really high level and then I'll also tell you where you can download an article about it. But let's just walk around The five letters in the hello framework.
So the H is for hospitality. And here I want you to think about going to a restaurant and how the hostess greets you and how that really sets the tone for your whole event. Or if you go to someone's house, how or if you welcome someone into your home, how do you make them feel? That feeling is really what I want you to focus on with that H of hospitality and there are three main kind of action steps there.
You want to welcome them. You want to orient them, give them the lay of the land if they're at your house. Just like you would point them to the bar, and then you want to connect them. You want to help them make a friend. So if you can think about welcoming, orienting, and connecting within the first 24 to 48 hours of someone coming in your community, that is stellar onboarding.
Then think about onboarding. Not just as something that happens in that first 30 days of a membership, but something that happens every single day. How can we be like the digital concierge for our online communities and take away. Any mental load for our members. People want to be told what to do.
Try not to put the onus on your members to go seek out and figure out when the events are and to know what they should be doing. Just tell them and seriously tell them until you're blue in the face and kind of tired of telling them and then. Maybe they'll hear you. It's shocking to me how many times you can repeat something and members will still say, Oh, gosh, I wish I would have known.
I didn't know about that. So when you feel like you're joining on and on, you're probably close. Okay. So little by little, this is this concept of not overwhelming. So many times when I do an audit of someone's onboarding, I look at all that a new member is given in the first, like 24 to 36 hours, like massive lists of things to do, and that does not create the best experience.
If you can drip it out, go back to that restaurant and imagine if you're a waitress or your server. Brought you the menu, your drink, your entree, your dessert, and like the catering menu, all at one time. You, that's not how it works. They pace it out and give you what you need at just the right time.
So if you can think about that. As you're crafting your onboarding, it can really help your members know what to do. And then listen and learn is this idea of your onboarding is really supposed, like the goal of it is to open up a dialogue to prompt your new member to communicate back and engage back.
So there needs to be something in your onboarding where you are soliciting their input or feedback. So it could be. A 15 minute call. It could be a group call. It could be a quick survey, but include at least one element where you give people a chance to respond back And also learn from that. Your onboarding, no matter how amazing it is never something that you should just set and forget.
It's really important. Your community, Bre just talked about how it's an ecosystem. It's a living, breathing organism, if you will. So it's really common that You will evolve in your community, but feel really great about the onboarding that you spent all this time doing without necessarily realizing that there might be broken links, or you may actually want them to engage a different way.
So I like to recommend at least once a quarter, just go back, look at your onboarding and see if there's anything that you want to change or update. Last
Caitie Gehlhausen: bit. I wanted to just pop in too. Cause the first time that I saw this hello framework, it like blew my mind. And the first time that you said you need to be onboarding every single day.
It like just all clicked with me. And I think that just definitely just holds true. I know at heartbeat, we not only. are constantly trying to educate there are our admins and our community members of things, but we're also trying to let you know in several different types of ways that the way that we try to communicate information, we do it in many different ways, not just like one avenue.
I just wanted to point that out and I just love this framework.
Laura Zug: Thank you. I'm so glad you said that, because when we go into a longer dive into this framework the listen and learn actually does have points about how we need to personalize the onboarding and take into consideration different learning styles.
There are people who will prefer video, there are people who want a quick checklist, there are people who want An email sequence dripped over five days. Others who want it like all in one healthy chunk. So that is a good point. And then the last thing here with the O is the importance of a one off experience.
We can get ourselves trapped into thinking that everything in our community needs to be scalable. And I just want to push back a little bit here and say that the time that you invest will pay off because you're teaching a member. Your culture and how you want them to show up. So if you spend 15 minutes on a call and a member feels seen, heard and appreciated, there's a much higher likelihood that they are going to then in turn engage.
In your community with that same level of care and intention, and that has exponential benefits because they may be reaching out to many new members. Okay, so that is a lot is really fast. There's more clearly but I go ahead for you. Are you going to say,
Bri Leever: Oh I just wanted to do a quick check in with people I'd love to know from this framework if there's any of these.
H E L or O. I'm glad that you stuck the O on there. It'd be really unfortunate if the framework was just H E L L. I'd love to know, is there one of these areas that resonates with you that you want to improve in your community or that you want to dive into? So leave that in the chat. I'm also curious, and we should have done this at the beginning, but everybody who has an existing, like already existing community versus people who are still getting ready to launch their communities.
I know that we're probably going to have some people, even though this is for people with existing communities, I know we might have a lot of people who still haven't quite launched yet, but want to get their frameworks and structure up. So if you can add that to the chat every day and one off experiences.
Yeah. The one off experiences get me too. Cause I definitely fall into the trap of Set it and forget it for onboarding. And so thinking constantly about like how and Laura is so good about this in our community accelerator. She's always like making it such a warm, inviting welcome each and every day.
What are some of the experiences to offer? Laura.
Laura Zug: Yes, I do. So that maybe okay let me give you like five examples. Maybe there's. Someone who loses a loved one and you decide that it's someone you really care about and you're going to send them a bouquet of flowers. Clearly, you can't do that for every single member in your community.
But when we dive into all of this, I really encourage you just to listen to your Gut, trust yourself with what that member needs. And our accelerator there was a mom who had, her daughter was in the hospital, she had a newborn, like a young child. And she wrote, she reached out to me and said she was feeling behind and I immediately commented back and gave her a link to my calendar.
And we had a one-on-one session. I got her up to speed. I walked her through all she needed to know. I helped her and. I obviously can't do that for every single person, but not everyone's going to ask for that. So just when you got that little voice on your shoulder that says, Oh, I could do this, or it would be so nice if I did that.
I'm here to say. Do it. It will be worth it. And just don't let this voice over here that says, Oh, but it's not scalable when out, just trust this one. And that is why automation. I wanted to give a shout out here for more to that and may rule and the whole team for the new workflows that are.
Just came out yesterday. That is why workflows are so important. I'm not in any way saying not to have automation and workflows in your community, but use them so that You then have this time to have the one on one to one or these one off experiences. I don't know if that helped, but keep asking in the heart.
We can give you more example.
Bri Leever: That's great. Thanks, Laura. And we have some so in the handout again, you'll have these reflection questions to help prompt where the gaps might be in your onboarding right now.
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