"Complete your profile" is the most common first step in community onboarding, and almost nobody says what a profile is for. So members fill in a job title and a city, and the profile sits there doing nothing for anyone.
A member profile has one job. Once you know what it is, most of the questions you are currently asking stop making sense.
A profile has one job
It exists so that one member can decide to talk to another.
Not so you can segment them, not so the directory looks full, not so the member feels onboarded. Somebody reads a post, wonders who wrote it, clicks the name — and in the next ten seconds either finds a reason to reply, message, or remember this person, or does not. That moment is the entire return on every question you asked.
Judge every field by that moment. If an answer cannot help a stranger decide to start a conversation, it is either something you need for your own reasons — which is fine, and a different kind of question — or it is decoration.
The test: could someone start a conversation from this?
Read a finished profile and ask whether a member who has never met this person could write a first message using only what is on the page.
"Product manager, Berlin" fails. There is nothing to say to it except "hello". "Rebuilding our onboarding and stuck on the first-week drop-off" passes immediately: three different people in your community can now reply with something specific, and one of them probably will. The difference is not the length of the answer. It is that the second one contains a problem, and problems are what people answer.
Ask for what someone is doing, not what they are. Titles and locations describe a person; a current project or a current question invites one.
Better questions, and what each one produces
Most profile forms are copied from somewhere that needed different things.
| Question | What it produces | Keep it? |
|---|---|---|
| Job title | A category, not a conversation | Only if the community is about careers |
| Where are you based? | Small talk at best, a privacy worry at worst | Optional, and never required |
| What are you working on right now? | Something another member can respond to | Yes — the best single question |
| What could you help someone with? | A reason for a stranger to message them | Yes, and it ages better than the first |
Two good questions beat eight adequate ones. Every extra field lowers the chance that the important ones get a real answer, because people fill forms from the top and run out of patience at the same rate everywhere.
Questions for members and questions for you
There are two different reasons to ask something, and mixing them is how profiles get long.
Some answers are for other members: they appear on the profile, and their only purpose is to start conversations. Others are for you: how someone heard about the community, what they hope to get from it, which course cohort they are in. Those are genuinely useful — they tell you who is arriving and why — but they have no business being displayed to everyone who clicks a name.
Decide, per question, who it is for. A question for you should be collected privately and actually read. A question for members should be shown, and should pass the conversation test above. A question that is for neither should be deleted, however standard it looks.
Short answers beat good intentions
People fill in profiles in the ten seconds after joining, when they are curious and impatient in equal measure.
So every question should be answerable in about ten seconds without thought, which rules out "tell us about yourself" in a large empty box. A blank that size produces either nothing or a pasted CV, and neither helps anyone start a conversation. A short, specific prompt — "one thing you are trying to figure out this month" — produces a sentence, and sentences are what get read.
Where a list of choices will do, use one. "Which of these are you here for?" with five options gets answered by nearly everyone and tells you more than an open field most people skip.
Required fields are a toll booth
Marking a field as required feels like quality control. In practice it is a gate at the exact moment someone is deciding whether this place is worth their time.
Every required field is a small test the new member has to pass before they can see what they signed up for, and some people fail it simply by being busy. The ones who stay fill it in with the minimum that will get them through — which is how you end up with a required "Bio" field full of single full stops.
Require nothing you would not refuse entry over. If you would genuinely turn someone away for not answering, require it. Otherwise make it optional and make it good enough that people want to answer it.
"Complete your profile" is the wrong first step
Telling a new member to complete their profile asks them to do admin before they have had a reason to care.
A better first step asks one question — the best one on your form — and uses the answer immediately, in public: a welcome post that says what they are working on and names somebody who has been through the same thing. That turns the profile from a chore into the first thing that happened to them here, and it is the fastest way to show that answering questions in this community gets a response.
A profile nobody reads teaches people not to fill in the next one. If you ask, use the answer somewhere they can see, within a day.
Use the answers, or stop asking
A profile question is a small promise: you are telling people this information will be used to connect them with someone.
The owners who get value from profiles read them. They notice that two members listed the same problem a week apart and introduce them to each other. They see that a dozen people can help with the same thing and ask one of them to run a session. They mention what somebody said they were working on when that work ships. None of this is automated. All of it is the reason the question was worth asking.
If nobody on your side will ever read an answer, delete the question. Collecting information you do not use is not neutral; it spends a little of the trust you need for the things you do ask.
What the software can and cannot do
It is worth knowing exactly what the tooling gives you, because most of the choices above are settings.
In Mateflow, custom fields live under Settings → Profile Fields, described on screen as "Create custom fields that members can fill out on their profiles". Each field has one of six types — Text, Textarea, URL, Select, Multi-Select or Date — plus an optional description, a Required switch, and a Public switch whose hint reads "Visible on the member's public profile". That last switch exists for exactly the distinction above, between questions for members and questions for you — and as with any privacy setting, check it from an ordinary member's account before you trust it with anything sensitive.
Public answers appear on the member's profile alongside their badge, level and access group, which is where a curious member will actually look — but only the first two answered fields are shown there, and the rest collapse into a "+N more" count. So the order of your fields is itself a decision: put the question that starts conversations at the top. Two honest limits: custom fields are not on every plan, and the number you can create is capped by plan — which, given everything above, is less of a constraint than it sounds. If you are running into the cap, the problem is usually the form rather than the limit.
Three things not to do
Do not copy a profile form from a professional network. It was designed for recruiters and search, and it will produce profiles that are complete and useless for starting a conversation.
Do not make public profiles indexable by default. Hundreds of short member pages are thin content, and people who joined a community did not sign up to be found by search engines.
Do not add a field every time someone suggests one. Each addition is small and sensible, and together they rebuild the long form you started with. Keep a short list and make every new question displace an old one.
The bottom line
A member profile is not a record of who someone is. It is a prompt for somebody else to start a conversation, and it should be designed from that moment backwards.
Ask what people are working on and what they could help with, keep your own questions private and read them, require almost nothing, and ask one good question at the door instead of handing over a form. Then use the answers where members can see it — because the fastest way to get a profile filled in is to show people that the last one led somewhere.