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Despite backtracking on integrating crypto rails, Discord remains the lifeblood of the onchain economy. Like it or not, it fosters significantly more in-depth collaboration for crypto communities, so your channel & ops should be structured to accommodate. 

There are bad servers, decent servers, and excellent servers. Anyone can ascend from bad to decent using this guide. To achieve excellency, you’ll need to master community management and build a stellar presence across the marketing spectrum.

How do I set up a Discord server?

Step 1: Secure your account. I can’t stress this enough. You, as the server leader, as well as everyone who has moderator abilities should enable 2FA. 

Step 2: Click on Add a Server, select Create My Own, pick For a Club or Community, enter the name, and voila. You now have a Discord server. Time to populate it. 

Step 3: Let’s add some channels. Usually, a crypto Discord should have a variation of these different channels: 

• Announcements: read-only channel where you push important news. No shitposting - here’s where the really important stuff goes. Play around with Discord’s emojis and use the  @everyone tag, so all people from your server get  notified. 
• Rules: Basic, read-only section where you highlight the server rules. You know, the usual - be respectful, no inappropriate language, no NSFW material, no spamming, no shilling, and deets on the moderation policy. 
• Resources: Sort of like your Linktree, but on Discord. Add your most important links: all social pages, website, documentation, whitepaper, relevant announcements/threads/articles. 
• General chat: Main chat where everyone will be able to communicate, make frens, ask questions, and get in touch with the core team. Founders, marketers, biz devs - be active here, don’t just rely on your moderation team.
• Product-related chats: For more technical discussion, support on using the product, etc.
• Campaign-related chats: For instance, if you’re running a meme competition, an airdrop, or incentivised quests or testnets, this is where you want the discussion to be. Otherwise, your general chat will get flooded with the same old questions, making it harder for a newbie to understand your fundamentals or speak with a mod or the team. 
• Voice chat: Eventually, you’ll want to do AMAs or host other types of campaigns on your Discord.
• Additional channels, as needed: This depends on your strategy and where you’re at with your roadmap. Maybe a token-related channel. Or maybe a secret society for brand ambassadors. Or just a gm-gn channel. 

Whenever you create a channel, you have the optionality to set up who can view and write. For instance, if you have an ambassador-only channel, you can opt to only let that role in. The same applies for a validator-specific channel, or a token-gated channel. 

When you set up channels, make them fun. Use an emoji alongside the name for easier navigation. Write a description on what the channel is about. You’re also able to split channels into categories. For instance, “Official Information” could hold the Announcements, Rules, and Resources channels, whereas a Community category can hold the rest. 

Play around with the set up, adapt as you go, and remember the most important thing - keep things simple.

Step 4: Set up bots. There are many to choose from based on your needs, but MEE6 and Dyno are our go-tos. You get a dashboard where you can manage it alongside plenty of features - spam detection, auto-moderation, mod logs, autoroles, custom commands, joinable ranks, reminders, recurring messages, announcements, and more. Use them to amplify your community’s experience.

While Dyno makes set-up uber easy, it does take time, as it entails you figuring out a strategy. Start light first (with a captcha to access the server), then go from there as your community expands. 

Step 5: Brand your server. Set up a profile picture, description, and even a header image. You can also brand your own account, giving it a server-specific profile. 

Step 6: Set up roles. Core team members, contributors, founders, and community moderators should be labeled as such and be given the ability to delete messages, mute, and ban users. Users should also be given roles - say, the first 500 that join your server could be labeled as OGs. Holders could be labeled as such based on the amount of tokens they hold via CollabLand, where they simply connect their wallet, have CollabLand verify their holdings, granting them a special role that opens new channels and gives them street cred. 

You can get super creative with roles - even when there’s no “reward” associated with a certain role, it still works and keeps communities engaged. 

Step 7: Get a custom invite link and share it around! 

How do I actually keep it active? 

We’ll do deeper dives into this, but here are some fire pointers: 

• Get an excellent community management team that actually talks to your users. The worst you can do is have your community talk amongst itself. This is supposed to be a multi-way conversation, and members should get more info from your Discord than they would from your X - otherwise, what’s the point? 
• Be quick to ban spammers & scammers. Having spam messages linger shows you don’t care enough. Inform your community about staying safe - not everyone knows the best practices. 
• Run events - calls, quizzes, meme/design/video competitions, and more. Be there, always engaging. Be terminally online. 
• Be fun. Try to be yourself, don’t be boring, don’t feed trolls and don’t abuse your authority. You’re free to ban trolls, but don’t ban people who ask difficult questions - they’re the most interested in your success, so engage with them. 
• Build something people are excited about and hit the holy trifecta of partnerships, products, and marketing that take Discords from a few hundred members to hundreds of thousands. 

Note: GM Factory offers top-to-bottom Discord set-up & maintenance services - everything from bots, to branding, ranks, and more. Message us to learn more! 

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