One of the key reasons that members of your community join, is to be meaningfully connected to other like-minded individuals; those that share the same thoughts, ideas, passions and interests! “Matchmaking” as the admin or manager of the community is a powerful way to uniquely deliver curated value to members of your network to build lasting relationships via your community platform. You may have even outlined this as a goal when planning for the Foundation of Your Community 🙂

This tactic is a great line item in your Community Roadmap and something that more mature communities can do consistently over the course of their lifespan.

To execute on this matchmaking tactic as part of the strategy for your community, you’ll need to ensure that you have the following things configured:

• Custom fields that enable you to understand what your users want/need/interests are
• A profile that you’ve created in your community and dubbed @MatchMaker; you can easily create this user via your control center and a valid email address is not required.
• The configuration of your Direct Messaging model is set to the “Everyone Model”
• Some time to sit down and ensure that you can create curated connections for the people that you care most about!

Ultimately, your goal is to get your community members to a place of value faster. By connecting them with the people in their network that share their same interests, you’re likely delivering on (one of) the promises that your community is aimed at.

Step 1: Configure Your Custom Fields

When you configure your custom fields in onboarding, your goal should be to understand more about your users and clearly gather their wants/needs so that you can tactfully use them to create a better community experience on their behalf. In this case, we’re using onboarding custom fields custom fields to help better understand their profile.

When you create these new custom fields for this use-case, think about traits and characteristics that you can use to identify commonalities in your community and shared interests to better drive relationships and add meaningful fidelity to profiles.

Step 2: Create Your Matchmaker Profile

Here’s the creative part: Community Matchmaking in this context is extremely based on your community and how you *think* you’d approach connecting two people (or more). As a starting place, you could simply create a profile branded @MatchMaker that’s sole job is to connect individuals via your Group Direct messaging tool.

Step 3: Start Matchmaking!

Here’s the creative part: Matchmaking in this context is extremely based on your ability to connect people based on what you know about them and why you think two or more people should be connected to one another.

When you start matchmaking people, pay attention to the following attributes that might indicate if someone is a good (or bad) match for each other:

• Is this person actively creating and engaging with content? (look at their post count)
• Has this person logged into their account in the last 30 days? You can see this by viewing their “Current Sign In At” view in the user view:

• Does this user appear to have a complete profile? Pay attention to their profile picture, bio, custom fields and activity!

When you connect two people (or more) it’s important to detail to both of them:

• Why they are a fit for each other (establish the context)
• What they have in common
• Where to take the conversation next

If you’ve clearly outlined the items above, then you’re ready to get rolling. Using the Honeycommb Group Direct messaging tool, go ahead and start sending those introductions!

An Example of Matchmaking:

Using your Custom Fields, identify two or more individuals that might be a good fit; at least those that you suspect could be a good fit for one another. In this example, we’re going to run a query in our user table that filters all of our users that have their hometown in New York and their favorite color is Ice Cream:

If your search query doesn’t return any results, try a few different variations based on how your custom fields are organized. When applying this tactic against your Custom Fields Strategy, “Array” type fields are going to give you the most consistent answers

Now that you’ve found your two community members that love Chocolate Ice Cream and are from New York, send them a group direct message by logging into your @Matchmaker profile and starting a new message to the both of them. Your message could look something like this:

After your first connection, move onto your second! This is a simple way to connect users in your community via matchmaking and create a curated experience to further connect your audience with the value of your community.

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Curious about how to implement this strategy for your community? Reach out to Honeycommb today to get started and chat with our team about how strategically connect your users. Book a Demo to see what we can build together for your people!