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About the Stitch Welcoming Program

Outlines the Stitch Community initiative designed to help new members feel welcome when they join the community

Andrew Dowling avatar
Written by Andrew Dowling
Updated over a week ago

The Stitch Welcoming program is a new initiative intended to help new members feel welcome when they first join.

Here is a video that helps explain the background behind the program and how it will work:

If you're not the sort of person who likes watching videos, the main points you need to know are:

  • We created the Welcoming Program as a response to the social anxiety that many new members face when they first join Stitch

  • Our research showed that a large percentage of members sign up, create a profile, get verified, and even pay for a Full membership, but then do nothing. Many of them don't join an event, send a message, or suggest an activity to members in their area, they just wait.

  • After interviewing many of these new members, we learned that social anxiety was preventing many of them from taking the first step to meet others in the community. Coming along to an event where you know nobody is hard!

  • The Welcoming Program ensures that new members will receive at least one message from an "official Stitch Welcomer" in their first week after joining Stitch, to help them overcome some of their social anxiety.

  • Only selected members will qualify for being an official Stitch Welcomer

  • If you qualify, you can choose to opt in to being part of the Welcoming Program by turning on a checkbox in your Stitch Settings

Let's explain a few of these ideas in a bit more detail.

How do I qualify to be an official Stitch Welcomer?

As outlined above, not every member can be an official Stitch Welcomer. To qualify, you need to:

  • Have been a member of Stitch for long enough to become familiar with the community yourself (typically more than 6 months), or have volunteered to help start the community in your area as part of the Pioneer Program

  • Have a good Member Rating, based on your demonstration of Stitch's community values, and enough members rating your interactions positively.

Your Member Rating gets calculated by aggregating the feedback that gets given whenever a member reviews an interaction with other members:

The Stitch system will determine that you qualify for the program if it receives a large amount of feedback from other members to indicate you are consistently:

  • Respectful

  • Kind

  • Friendly & Welcoming

  • Helpful, and

  • Supportive

in your interactions with other members. If Stitch detects that you qualify to be an official Welcomer, you’ll see the following section show up on your settings page:

If you see that section, then congratulations! It not only means you qualify for the program, it means you have been recognized by Stitch members as being a wonderful human being!

How do I join the program?

To join the program, Click More in the top right corner of Stitch, then click Profile and Settings, and select the Welcomer Settings link at the very bottom of Profile and Settings. Clicking on Welcomer Settings will open your Welcomer Settings page:

You can then turn on your Welcome message by clicking the Welcome message checkbox:

Stitch provides a default message that will be sent to new members. You can keep this message as it is, or edit it to add a personal touch.

If you choose to edit the message, just remember that your message should explain why you are reaching out, and the focus of the message should be on making the new member feel welcome.

If anyone were to use the Welcome message for personal gain, rather than making the new member feel welcome and improving the wellbeing of the community, they would be removed from the program and may have their Stitch account suspended.

Additional settings

In the Advanced settings section you will see several other settings that let you control how many messages you send, whether your Welcome messages get sent to members outside your area, or to unverified members.

We recommend you leave these settings as they are until you have had a chance to see how the program works.

Who do my messages get sent to?

Stitch's Welcomer algorithm will send a Welcome message on your behalf to a limited number of new members each day. The system will try to balance several different factors, such as:

  • Prioritizing messages to members who may live in your area or nearby

  • Limiting the number of messages sent by any single Welcomer

  • Matching you to members with similar interests

Over time we will add additional settings to give you extra control over the quantity and frequency of the messages you send.

In short

We are thrilled to have a new way to make our new members feel welcomed, comfortable and at home at Stitch.

If you've been a member for more than 6 months, please use your Welcomer Settings to opt in to becoming a Welcomer, and you'll help the people in your local area feel like they belong at Stitch.

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