Community Building 101: Curating and Cultivating a Space Using Discord
The team at Tiltify is often asked how charities can recruit more people to fundraise for their fundraising efforts. It is not uncommon for nonprofit professionals to feel a little like a fish out of water when it comes to recruiting people in digital communities like Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube… AND once you recruit them, what are the best techniques to encourage them to fundraise for your organization.
Fortunately, there are places online where these individuals are already hanging out that you can adopt to help grow your recruitment and fundraising efforts. Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app used by thousands of streamers and organizations worldwide to arrange meet-ups, build communities, exchange ideas, or afford people a space to gather and collaborate. It functions similar to Microsoft Teams, Cisco Jabber, Slack or, AOL Instant Messenger (shout out to my 90’s babies) where people type and share into a chat room real time.
Discord has become one of the most popular and widely used tools across streaming communities around the globe. As a charity, if you’re interested in growing your audience in the influencer fundraising space, consider creating and investing time and resources in Discord. Discord affords fundraisers a space dedicated to your organization, collaborate with new creators, share successful campaign ideas, and house a convenient space for updates, announcements, and upcoming events.
If you haven’t already, join the Tiltify Discord Server where we share updates about our products and chat with charities and content creators!
Using Discord is a simple way to stay in touch with creators to ensure they have the necessary resources to run a successful campaign. In addition, Discord can provide a charity with additional insight into how the fundraising space is changing, moving, and how you can use that information to your organization’s advantage. For example, a charity might notice common themes or ideas that piqued the community of the fundraiser’s interests. Having a space dedicated to your charity builds deeper, more meaningful relationships with your fundraisers. Curating and cultivating a space using Discord shows fundraisers that you care about their need for a dedicated space. To further strengthen the relationship between the creator and charity, facilitate conversations that will resonate with your audience and encourage them to join the conversation.
Here are some of our favorite Discord servers to give you some inspiration:
You can also search for charities by navigating to “Explore Public Servers” icon in the lower-left in the Discord App.
As you start to think about building your own Discord server, we suggest you treat Discord like other social media channels. These spaces are dependent on engagement to grow. We recommend you have a volunteer or staff member who is responsible for responding to posts on a regular basis. We also recommend that you think through ideas for keeping your Discord community-engaged and having fun by asking them questions or hosting activities to bring them closer to your organization’s mission.
