Student Organization Discord Servers

The goal of a student organization's Discord should be to build community, communicate, share information, and plan. It is the student organization leadership's responsibility to manage and moderate their server to create a welcoming community that abides by University Policies, OSI Directives, and the Code of Student Responsibility.

Below are some recommendations and best practices when creating and managing your Student Organization Discord Server:

Getting Started

A Discord server should start with basic channels but can evolve as the needs for the community grow.

Recommended basic channels for an organization:

  • Welcome and rules channel for being in the Discord
  • General Announcements that only executive Board members can post on to update members of the community.
  • Channels for Executive Boards to plan events, meetings, voice/video chat.
  • Introduction channel for students to introduce themselves, receive roles and permissions.
  • General Chats: this can include off-topic conversations, sharing pets, etc.
  • Events channel to share different events happening with the org and/or other event opportunities.
  • Not every student organization will use Bots. However, if utilizing them, make and admin only Bot-Spam channel to use commands in, so as not to spam other channels with Bot input/outputs.
  • Bots are helpful artificial intelligence that can perform several useful tasks on your server automatically. That can include welcoming new members, banning troublemakers, and moderating the discussion.

Managing Your Organization's Discord

  • Make a permanent invite link when you can, and if you are unable to customize that link, use a link shortener like bit.ly to create a custom one. DePaul Esports uses bit.ly/DePaulEsports for their permanent link.
  • When organizing channels, use Categories to keep channels related to one another, or in the same theme/type of topic together.
  • Trolling, solicitation, and other forms of malicious behavior can and do occur on Discord. As a student organization, you are responsible for managing and moderating your student organization Discord server. Here are a few recommendations for preventing and combatting this:
  • To help prevent this from occurring, we recommend creating an Introduction Channel to better review people before giving them access to the rest of the Discord server. Utilize an officer to manage this channel.
  • Keep an eye out for new members of your discord who have suspicious looking accounts, or accounts that have been made close to the same date that they joined. Ex: If an account joins the server on 2/22/24, and was made on 2/21/24, it could be a spam/bot account.
  • When malicious behavior does occur, ban the user and delete their messages.
  • Use roles! Roles can allow people to view certain channels, so that not everyone sees all the channels in your discord, only the ones they want to see or you want them to see.
  • Use the audit log to see who is making what changes in the Discord. If you have multiple admins, then you can see which of them deleted a channel, message, added a channel, changed the server icon, etc.
  • If spam is an issue, you can use Slow Mode in the Discord, to limit users to be able to send messages every so often, rather than constantly, such as every 20 seconds or so. There is also an Auto-Mod function to help with this too.
  • Generally, we recommend not overcomplicating your server. If you think you have enough conversation on a certain topic to warrant its own channel, then make one for that to not clutter the General channel. Otherwise, try to keep things in the General Channel, or utilize the Threads and Pins features.

Building Community Through Discord

Discord can be a great resource for student organization leadership to build community within their organization. A few ways to do this include:

Executive Board and Leadership Engagement:

  • Make sure that members of your board are interacting with members in the Discord. This can be done through engagement in general chats, answering DMs, helping with events, etc.
  • Start conversations with members by asking fun questions, sending memes, running surveys (after/before events to gauge interest), introducing new members, etc.

Respond to community feedback:

  • Sometimes it can be beneficial to create a channel for suggestions and feedback for the student organization leadership. This shows that the community has a stake in the organization through suggestions.

Executive Board and Leadership Engagement:

  • Make sure that members of your board are interacting with members in the Discord. This can be done through engagement in general chats, answering DMs, helping with events, etc.
  • Start conversations with members by asking fun questions, sending memes, running surveys (after/before events to gauge interest), introducing new members, etc.

Respond to community feedback:

  • Sometimes it can be beneficial to create a channel for suggestions and feedback for the student organization leadership. This shows that the community has a stake in the organization through suggestions.

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