One of the most common questions we get from creators is how to use Discord (and whether they should make one for their community) which is why I’m thrilled to announce a new workshop to help answer this!
Discord is an awesome (and free) community platform that allows you to communicate over voice, video, and text with your friends and communities. Patreon has built an integration with Discord that allows you to develop a deeper connection with your patrons by being able to provide custom access and fun rewards. If you’re new to Discord and curious to see if it would be a good fit for hosting your community, join us for this workshop! Expert Discord user and creator @ManateeGaming will be leading us through the ins and outs of getting started. Bring your questions!
This sounds great, thanks Mindy!
Is this recommended for people who are slightly more advanced? I have questions about custom commands, things of that sort.
Also wondering how the heck to get patrons active on Discord when most of them don’t use it for any other reason (unlike facebook groups, for eg)
Thanks a bunch
Great question @natemaingard! This initial workshop is designed to be an introduction but we do want to do a second workshop that is much deeper dive into Discord to answer some of the more advanced questions! There may be time at the end of the first one for questions about engagement, but I defer to @ManateeGaming on that
CHALLENGE! We’ll send some Patreon goodies to everyone who replies here with a question before the workshop, and their main learnings from it afterwards!
Thanks for the workshop! Looking forward to more info. How do you encourage your community to engage with you through the discord platform? What are some good “first offerings” to teach folks how to make use of the content?
I’m really looking forward to the workshop today, as I am completely new to Discord! Is there a way for Patrons to share images with me through it? That’s been one of the hardest things to coordinate on Patreon, since they can’t post photos in comments and don’t seem to be able to send images through the private messaging system either. Perhaps this is not the place to ask this, but I figured it was worth a try! Again, can’t wait to learn more about this new platform and thank you for hosting it!
Looking forward to this today! I love that we can now have video conferencing on Discord - any ideas of how to utilize this with patrons? Also, I’ve been wondering, Should I get a premium account to really use all of Discords features?
I’d love to hear some of the perks we can give patrons that we can fulfill on discord. I’ve started patron-only viewing parties on Discord that seem to be going well but I’d love to hear additional ways we can really get the most out of this integration.
I don’t have 24/hr moderation and I don’t know many that do, so I think you’re fine for that. Have a trusted
person or two to help you out, and the community sorta runs itself in most cases.
My going-in question: Are there ways to use Discord that I’m not already using, to make it more effective?
Already I’ve realized that having an #announcements channel would help keep the flow of conversation in other chat channels go much better, and that’s just a small tweak. Getting lots out of this, thank you!
I have quite a few older followers who are not just tech-leery, they border on tech-phobic. How confusing will this be for people who have to be coached into how to just follow me on Patreon?
How customizable is discord in terms of aesthetics? The screen shown in the video was a dark grey - is that just the creator’s view, or does it look like that for everyone? Can you change background color, have some kind of banner, etc?
This was very helpful as someone who has had a discord for quite awhile as a way to get back to basics. I had honestly neglected my channels and hadn’t been using them to their full potential, and am excited to get back into my channel structure and make the server better for everyone!
It’d be great to have Cody or another experienced Creator do more seminars on more detailed aspects of managing a Discord.
I really appreciated Cody going over the basics of setting up a Discord. I had already started, but hit a bit of a wall when it came to accessing and understanding the automation options offered by bots. MEE6 is pretty cool and I’ve added that bot, but - Premium MEE6 notwithstanding - I’d quite like to set up some bespoke bots to do some jobs of managing the Discord, so guidance on that would be most welcome.
Thanks for the feedback!
I’ve had some issues with harassment on my social media platforms, so I’m hesitant to open a live server and have to deal with it there as well. Shouldn’t let it put me off the platform entirely, I suppose.
I’d really love to hear more specific perks as well! Especially outside of gaming. Specific examples would really help me know what is possible with this integration
Main learning: that discord has the potential to be a pretty awesome community hub that ties patreon, website, blog, and social media together into one home base.
You can moderate your Discord server to have your security pretty high against harassment, but honestly most of the social media problems don’t carry over into your Discord. Don’t let that stop you!
