A diaspora is registered nowhere. There is no graduating class, no employer, no registry that hands you the list: recruiting is not importing a database, it is building one. Three circles recruit in three different ways: the core, already there; the relays, who know people you do not; and the invisible, who will only come through someone they trust. A public announcement reaches only those who were already looking. What actually moves the number of sign-ups comes down to two decisions: what you ask for at registration, and the concrete service the first visit delivers. The tool comes afterwards, and it will not find anyone for you.
Invisible does not mean unreachable
An alumni network starts from a list. The school knows who it graduated, in which year, with which address at the time. Incomplete and out of date as it may be, the list exists, and the whole job is to refresh it. A diaspora association has no equivalent. No institution keeps a register of people originating from a region and living elsewhere, and none ever will. The starting point is not a database to clean up, it is a blank page.
That absence creates an optical illusion at launch. The first sign-ups arrive fast, because they are the founders' circle, and then the flow stops dead. The board concludes that the community is small, or uninterested. Both conclusions are almost always wrong: what stopped is not the interest, it is the reach of the initial circle.
So the problem is one of distribution, not persuasion. You are not trying to convince indifferent people, you are trying to reach people who do not know you exist and have no reason to look. Until that shift is made, you keep rewriting the message when what is missing is the channel.
Why the starting list will never exist
Geographic origin is not a database key. Nobody declares it to an employer, a bank or an administration, and in several countries collecting it for that purpose would be unlawful. A diaspora list is therefore, by construction, a list people give you themselves, one at a time.
Dispersion compounds it. A diaspora is spread across several countries, several time zones and several languages, so no local channel covers the whole. A message that works very well in one city does not leave that city, and the board overestimates its reach because it counts the replies, not the silences.
Then comes the generational question. People born in the host country do not always recognise themselves in the association's vocabulary, even when they share its purpose. Communication built around return or the country of origin sorts people without meaning to, almost always at the expense of the youngest. That is a recruitment issue before it is an engagement issue, and it carries over into how you make generations coexist.
The practical conclusion: there is no file to find. Counting and recruiting are the same operation, carried out member by member. The methodological side of that work is covered in how to map your diaspora; this article takes the other side, acquisition.
The three circles, and why they get confused
Treating every future member as one audience is the mistake that costs the most time. Three circles coexist, and a campaign designed for one does not reach the others.
- The core. People already engaged, or one handshake away: founders, their circle, event regulars. They sign up on a simple announcement. This circle fills within weeks, then it is exhausted, and that is normal.
- The relays. People who are not the most active, but who know many others outside your circle: a shopkeeper, a faith leader, a language teacher, a tournament organiser, the admin of an already active messaging group. They do not bring you a member, they bring you a door.
- The invisible. People who frequent no identifiable place, follow no page and have never looked for an association. They will not come through an announcement, however good. They come through one specific person who tells them it is worth it.
Effort should be split accordingly. The core is handled once and deserves no campaign. Relays deserve individual time, because each one opens a whole segment. The invisible are not handled directly at all: you reach them by giving existing members a simple reason and a simple way to talk about the association around them.
Recruit through relays rather than announcements
A public announcement reaches people who were already looking for something of the sort: the easiest to convince, and the fewest. Recruiting through relays inverts the logic. Instead of addressing an anonymous crowd, you identify a dozen people who each have access to an established group, and you talk to them one by one.
The work looks less like communication than like prospecting. It means spotting where the community already gathers without you: places of worship, shops, Saturday language classes, sports clubs, parents' messaging groups, professional collectives. None of those places is yours, and that is exactly what makes them relays.
What you ask a relay for must be small and verifiable. Asking them to promote sign-ups is asking for a favour whose result they will never see. Asking them to pass on an invitation to a dated meeting, with a place and a reason, takes a minute and produces a measurable effect. Recruitment therefore almost always runs through an event, and registration follows the meeting rather than preceding it. The same logic applies when opening a local chapter in a new city: you do not create a structure to attract people, you observe a core and give it a frame.
One note on existing messaging groups: it is tempting to see them as competitors to be emptied. That is a tactical mistake. The existing group is the most effective relay you will ever have, and it stays that way as long as you do not ask its members to leave. What each channel does better than the other is set out in our comparison of a WhatsApp group and a diaspora platform.
The sign-up form is your main leak
Once the person is reached, everything plays out in seconds, and this is where associations lose the most people without ever knowing. Every field you ask for has a cost, very unevenly spread: a name and a way to get in touch cost almost nothing; a postal address, an occupation, a year of arrival or a residence status cost a great deal, and not only in time.
In a diaspora, those fields touch on what people do not expose to an organisation they do not yet know. Asking in the first minute means demanding trust that has had no time to form. The same field, offered three months later to a member who has attended two gatherings, is filled in without difficulty.
Hence the rule: separate registration from the profile. Registration takes the minimum needed to contact the person again; the profile fills in later, and only where they gain something, such as giving a city to see who is nearby. A field the board could not justify is a field to remove.
Add an explicit promise about visibility. Many people hesitate less to give information than to not know who will see it. Saying at sign-up who sees the directory and what stays private removes a real obstacle, and it is also what regulation expects. It is one of the classic traps of a diaspora platform.
Give a reason to join that is not belonging
Joining a community is not a sufficient reason to register, because belonging requires no form: you can feel part of a diaspora your whole life without ever filling one in. Registration is justified by a service, and that service must be legible before sign-up, not after.
The services that work answer a question the person is already asking. Finding someone from the community in the city they have just moved to. Knowing what is organised next month. Asking advice from someone who went through the same administrative process two years earlier. Making their professional activity known to a network that may send them clients. None of those benefits requires identity rhetoric, and all of them are visible in one visit.
That imposes an order of operations. An empty space delivers no service, so it does not recruit, and a campaign launched on an empty space turns the first visit into the last. Fill it first with the core: the next dates, a few complete profiles, one useful discussion under way. This is also why free access is a strategic decision more than a budgetary one, as we examined in a diaspora without membership dues.
When the simple option is still the right one
All of the above assumes you need a platform, and that is not always true. A single-city group whose members know each other by sight, which holds one gathering a year and already shares a messaging group, has no recruitment problem: its address book is enough. Adding a tool does not create members, it creates one more place to keep up to date.
Three sentences tell you the address book still suffices. The board personally knows nearly every member. One person can reach everyone in an evening. Nobody has ever needed to look up a member they did not know. While those hold, the tool solves a problem you do not have.
They stop holding at identifiable moments: when a second city appears, when members start looking for each other without going through you, when the board changes and discovers the list was in someone's phone, or when an institution asks for a picture nobody can produce. That last case is often the trigger, since you then have to produce a credible report for a consulate or a local authority.
Recruiting the first members, in seven steps
- Write the service in one sentence. Not the mission, the service: what a new member gets within ten minutes. If the sentence does not come, recruitment is not yet the subject.
- Register the core first, and have them complete their profiles. A space showing real people and real dates converts; an empty space sends everyone home.
- List relays, not targets. A dozen people or places that already have an audience. For each one, write down exactly what you will ask.
- Offer a dated meeting before asking for a sign-up. An event is verifiable, a membership is not. Registration follows the meeting, it does not precede it.
- Cut the form to the strict minimum. Enough to contact the person again, nothing more. The rest is filled in later, field by field, when it serves a purpose.
- Say who sees what, at sign-up. One sentence on directory visibility removes more hesitation than a long argument.
- Follow up with those who never came back. A targeted reminder about specific content, not about the existence of the platform, recovers part of them.
What the tool changes, and what it does not
Start with what it does not change, since vendors are quiet on this point. No platform finds invisible members: it has access to no list you do not already have. Discovery remains human work, carried out through relays. A member map in particular is often expected to recruit, when it only displays people who have already signed up: it shows your network, it does not extend it, as we set out in what a diaspora map is really for.
What the tool changes is everything after the first contact: keeping the people you reached, making them findable to each other, and keeping the list from starting over at the next change of board. The directory, news feed and messaging, the backbone of a community that talks to itself, are in every Terrilink plan, from 69 € per month with the Starter plan.
The functions that serve event-based recruitment come next: the events calendar and its ticketing, discussion groups, the member map and membership management belong to the Pro plan, at 149 € per month. That is a limit worth knowing before building a campaign around a meeting, since the Starter plan does not include the events calendar. Member-to-member support features, hosting and services rendered, belong to the Premium and Business plans.
One last point, less visible and more decisive: the list you build belongs to the association, not to the person who built it. That is the only guarantee the recruitment effort will not have to be repeated, and it is settled when choosing the tool, not on the day of the board handover.
In short
Where do you start with no initial list?
With the core, then the relays. First register the people already close to the association and have them complete their profiles, so the space is not empty. Then identify a dozen people or places that already have an audience in the community, and ask each for something small and verifiable, such as passing on an invitation to a dated meeting. The methodological side of that work is detailed in how to map your diaspora.
Should you leave the existing WhatsApp group to push the platform?
No. The active group is the most effective relay you have, and asking its members to leave loses you both. Use it to announce what happens elsewhere, and keep for the platform what a chat thread cannot do: finding a member, keeping a record, registering for an event.
How much information should you ask for at sign-up?
The minimum needed to contact the person again. In a diaspora, fields touching on address, personal history or status are felt as intrusive while trust is not yet established, and they are filled in without difficulty a few months later. Also state, at sign-up, who will see the directory and what stays private: uncertainty about visibility holds people back more than the question itself.
Which Terrilink plan do you need in order to recruit?
The directory, news feed and messaging are in every plan, from 69 € per month with the Starter plan: enough to welcome the first members and let them find each other. If your recruitment relies on events, the calendar and its ticketing belong to the Pro plan, at 149 € per month, as do discussion groups, the member map and membership management. No plan will find members for you who are registered nowhere.
Method and sources. This is a method article: it relies on no external source and puts forward no market figure. What it describes comes from field observation among diaspora and alumni associations, not from measurement. We deliberately publish no estimate of any diaspora's population, no sign-up rate and no share of members reached through a given channel. The only figures quoted are Terrilink's public prices, and module availability follows the plan matrix: directory, news feed and messaging in every plan, from 69 € per month; events calendar, discussion groups, member map and membership management from the Pro plan, at 149 € per month; member-to-member support in the Premium and Business plans. The data collection and visibility questions raised here depend on the law applicable to your association and call for your own analysis, with your adviser where appropriate.