GRAVVY

Gravvy’s life changed on November 14th, 2014 when he started an online forum thread to talk about his favorite video game. Two years later, he decided his community needed a space all their own, and his server was born and has been running strong ever since.

Community Doesn’t Happen in the Comments

Before Discord, Gravvy's threads typically stuck to discussing aspects of the game, but he found that the secret sauce (pun intended) to keeping members coming back to their Discord server is taking a multifaceted approach.

“While we have a general overall base community, we’ve also fostered tons of sub-communities within. Allowing different sections of our server to become mostly self governing with little moderator interference. This allows our community to thrive in more than just one way.”

Thanks to the structure of the server, members are able to find their people in more ways than one. Members not only feel this way about fellow members, but the moderation team as well. Gravvy speaks about how they are comfortable in sharing their ideas on how the community can improve and how this is rooted in trust.

“When encouraging and managing a vocal community, we have to approach each situation with a different mindset than a standard moderator to user mindset. We attempt to communicate with our members openly about everything. While we are moderators/administrators, we like to take an open part with our community. This allows our community to trust us as they are not afraid of us.”

Exchanging Value

Gravvy’s goal for the server is to foster a strong community that will last by providing value tailored to its members.

“Whether it’s our in-depth knowledge guides, incredibly helpful community helpers or just a place to converse with like minded people. These fundamentals help build that long term value that our members stick around for.”

The server's offerings were so valuable, that the community was willing to support it financially. Server Subscriptions allowed members to do just that!

Gravvy states that while their adoption was initially fast and simple (up and running within 7 days!), the team learned a lot about how to perfect their Server Subs strategy in the months post-launch.

His piece of advice to anyone interested in adopting Server Subscriptions? Plan as much as possible and expect to make mistakes, listen, learn and try again.

“As with everything community related, whether it’s starting a community, introducing a support method like Server Subscriptions or just changing rules around, you have to plan for everything ahead of time… One mistake we would definitely change if we could do it all over again is to build in more benefits for contributing [subscribing]. You can never have too many benefits as you can always scale down. It’s more difficult to scale up.”

Closing Thoughts

Gravvy reinforces the importance of finding the “why” behind your offerings and communicating this clearly to your community members. Getting started quickly with Server Subscriptions is possible, but your community needs to be told the reasoning behind why you are launching it! The more transparent you are, and the more unique value you provide, the more likely your members will be to contribute.

In order to keep them coming back and subscribing, Gravvy reminds us to, “Get community feedback! Listening to your community’s thoughts and feelings is the number one tool you can use to fully understand at what level your community will be willing to support Server Subscriptions. Under promise and over deliver.”

Want to see what all of the hype is about? Click here to join the server and here to learn more about how to set up Server Subscriptions.