Three pinned announcements that tell new members exactly what to do
Three pinned posts do the work of a welcome email, a rulebook and a map. What goes in each, and when to rewrite them.
Someone joins on a Tuesday and asks where the call happens. You answer. On Thursday someone else asks the same thing, in slightly different words, and you answer again, slightly less warmly. By the fifth time you are copying and pasting, and by the tenth you have started to feel mildly resentful towards people who have done nothing wrong except arrive after the information scrolled past. That is not an onboarding problem. It is a placement problem.
Why new members get lost in a good community
A feed is chronological, which is right for a living room and wrong for a front door. The founding members learned the rules as they were invented, one post at a time, and everything felt obvious. Someone joining in month four lands in the middle of a conversation with no context, sees forty posts of shorthand, and has to reconstruct the rules from clues. Most people will not bother. They will read a bit, feel slightly outside it, and drift.
The awkward truth is that you are the worst possible judge of what is obvious here, because you built the place. The questions you find tedious are exactly the ones worth pinning, and the number of times a question has been asked is a better guide to what belongs at the top than your own sense of what matters.
Repeating yourself versus pinning it once
Compare the two ways a new member's first ten minutes can go. The difference is not effort on their part, it is whether the answer was where they looked.
| Answering it every time | Three pinned announcements |
|---|---|
| The same question answered by hand, week after week | The answer sits at the top of the feed for everyone who arrives |
| New members piece the rules together from old posts | Purpose and norms stated in one place, in plain words |
| The call link buried in a post from three weeks ago | The rhythm and where things happen, pinned and current |
| A quiet new member who never posts | One clear first action, so their first post is easy |
| Your welcome depends on whether you were online | The welcome is the same at three in the morning |
| Rules change and nobody hears about it | You rewrite one pin and everyone is looking at the new version |
Writing the three
Draft all three in one sitting, in the order below, and keep each under about 150 words. If a pin needs a scroll on a phone, it is doing two jobs and should be split or trimmed.
Before you pin anything
0/7Pin one: what this is and who it is for
Two or three sentences on the purpose, and one on who it is not for. The second half matters more than it looks: a member who realises in week one that they joined the wrong room and leaves politely is far better for you than one who stays confused for four months and then charges back. State the tone as well. 'Half-finished work is welcome here' is a rule that changes behaviour; 'be kind' is a rule everyone already agreed with and nobody reads.
Pin two: how this place runs
The rhythm, in specifics. Which days you post. Whether there is a live call and roughly when. How quickly you reply, honestly, including that you do not reply at weekends if you do not. What happens to billing: that it renews monthly or yearly depending on what they chose, and that they can cancel themselves whenever they want. Saying the cancellation part out loud is not an invitation to leave. It removes the low-level suspicion that makes people leave early to be safe.
Pin three: the one thing to do now
One action, not a list. Introduce yourself in three lines. Post the thing you are stuck on. Answer this week's question. The point is to get a new member's first reply written within their first ten minutes, because a member who has posted once is a member who posts again, and a member who has read for a fortnight without posting is on their way out. Make the action so small that not doing it would be odd.
What this saves, in real time
Suppose eight people join in a month and five of them ask something covered by a pin. Each answer costs you three or four minutes, plus the context switch, plus the small tax of feeling like an information desk. Call it half an hour a month and a slow erosion of your patience. Three pins take an hour to write once and are rewritten perhaps twice a year.
The bigger effect is on the members you never hear from. The ones who ask are fine; they were always going to engage. The ones who quietly could not work out what was expected are the ones who lapse at renewal, and they are invisible until they are gone. A pinned first action is aimed squarely at them, which is why it is worth more than its length suggests.
Start a community where the welcome, the rules and the first task are already waiting at the top of the feed.
Start for freeThe mistake most people make
They pin the launch. It made sense in week one, and eight months later a new member's first impression is an announcement about an event that happened last spring. A stale pin is worse than no pin, because it teaches people that the top of the feed is decoration and trains them to scroll straight past the parts you need them to read. Pin only what stays true, rewrite in place when it stops being true, and keep the number at three. If you find yourself wanting a fourth, one of the existing three is doing its job badly. There is more on the wider arc of a member's first week in the onboarding welcome flow.
Four is usually the point where members stop reading any of them. If everything is important, nothing is at the top for a reason, and you have simply moved the scrolling problem upwards.
Overlap is fine and even useful, but assume nobody read the email. The pins are the version that is actually in front of a member when they are looking at the room, which is when the question occurs to them.
Keep pin one and pin two universal, and make pin three the action for everyone. Tier-specific detail belongs in a normal post you can link to, otherwise the pins turn into a manual.
When the answer changes, and on one scheduled read-through every few months. Read them as a stranger would, on a phone. Anything that made you wince is the thing to fix.
Pinned announcements are the least glamorous part of running a community and one of the few that keeps paying you back every month without any further work. Three posts, an hour of writing, rewritten twice a year. Everything else you do inside the room gets easier when new members arrive already knowing what the room is for. The community product and how access follows payment are described on the communities page, and what sits on each plan is listed on pricing.
Write your three pins first, then open the doors and see how few questions arrive.
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