Here at Fapuga News, one of our favorite topics is the symbiosis between the world of games and the world of business, which takes place in many ways. One of them is the transfer of tools commonly used by gamers to the corporate environment, and vice versa.
Among these tools, one of the most popular and with the most potential today is Discord. Originally created to make communication easier among online gaming teams, the service has, in recent years, been expanding into other segments, including the corporate one.
With more than 150 million monthly active users and four billion minutes of conversation per day on its servers, Discord consolidates its place among the giants of communication platforms more every day. And there are many reasons for that.
In this article, we will show why Discord, contrary to what many people still think, is a viable, suitable, and very efficient solution for communication inside companies. And to illustrate this, we could not use any example other than that of our own higher education institution (IES).
Discord is one of the official communication channels of both Fapuga, our college, and Nepuga, our specialization center in the field of aesthetics. The reasons why we chose this platform among so many on the market are what we will explore in the next paragraphs.
With more than 150 million users active per month and four billion minutes of conversation per day on its servers, Discord consolidates its place among the giants of communication platforms more every day. And there are many reasons for that.
In this article, we will show why Discord for business, contrary to what many people still think, is a viable, suitable, and very efficient solution for communication, using our own IES’s case as an example.
Contents
- What Discord is and how it works
- What sets Discord apart from other platforms
- Discord and gamification
- Discord bots
What Discord is and how it works
As we said earlier, Discord was a platform initially intended for interaction among gamers. However, for a few years now the company has changed its direction and positioned itself as a communication solution able to compete with established names such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack.
When we chose to use Discord as our main communication tool, two of the factors that weighed most were the ease of access and the enormous customization possibilities the service offers.
In addition, our Discord is 100% configured to meet the specific needs of Fapuga and Nepuga. Instead of us adapting to the platform, it is the platform that adapts to us.
Our main internal server is Nepuga/Fapuga Staff, with access restricted to employees. Everything related to our daily work processes is centralized there.
Through this server, employees can access all of the institution’s internal policies, including those related to the use of Discord itself (such as, for example, the policy of keeping your status as “Available” throughout the work day).
The main server is also the IES’s official internal means of communication. Within it there are several channels, conversation groups that serve different purposes.
The General channel, for example, is an open space for conversations and discussions of topics of collective interest to the team. The Administrative Announcements group, in turn, works as a kind of virtual bulletin board where everyone can instantly see the announcements issued by HR and by management.
There are also channels with access restricted to members of a given department or project. In these groups, the main focus of the interaction is to follow the progress of work demands and other conversations related to that team.
By now, you may be thinking that Discord is a communication platform like any other on the market. However, the solution’s differentiators are numerous, and we will show them in the next section.
What sets Discord apart from other platforms
One of Discord’s biggest advantages is its ease of access. With it, there is no need to create new users to access the communities of other companies or groups. With a single login, it is possible to access or be added to any server or channel. This is especially useful for us, since we use the platform not only for internal communication but also for interaction with students and partners.
For example: our employees have access to a series of online technology courses from Alura. Thanks to Discord’s conveniences, we can use the same user we use here to access Alura’s server and get in direct contact with the course platform’s team whenever we want or need to.
And since we are talking about ease of access to servers, we could not fail to mention what Discord was originally developed for: games.
One of our IES’s most prominent methodologies is gamification. We believe that games have a power that goes beyond simple fun, helping train the brain and develop soft skills of the highest relevance to the job market.
For that reason, we encourage games to be part of our employees’ routine. Our staff server even has specific channels where members of our team can play their favorite games together. In addition, they can use the same user they use at work to access video game servers and interact with other players.
Another point that sets Discord apart from the other options on the market is its great ability to work together with other platforms. Here at Fapuga and Nepuga, we use Trello to manage our demands and tasks. And thanks to the integration with Discord, every move made on any card in any Trello workplace is notified by a bot in Discord channels specific to each department. This helps us have even greater mapping and visibility of the work being done, in addition to removing the need to keep accessing another platform all the time.
Discord and gamification
The word gamification has come up a few times throughout this article. If you follow our blog, you surely already know what it means. If not, here is a brief explanation: gamification is the act of bringing the mechanics and elements of games into real-world activities, mainly educational and professional ones.
Gamification is part of our educational process. Through it, we closely follow our students’ academic progress. In the gamified system adopted by both Fapuga and Nepuga, progress in the course turns into points that generate rewards as they accumulate.
Discord is an important part of this process. Interaction on the servers is one of the activities that help students earn points. In addition, we have servers that are open to those who want to study with us and to enrolled students and alumni.
More than that, Discord is a gamified platform by nature. Within a server there is a level system very similar to that of games. The more a user interacts on the server, the higher the level they reach.
At the end of 2023, the Fapuga and Nepuga team took part in an integration project among departments, aimed at developing coexistence and strengthening ties among everyone.
Discord was also part of this initiative. Our IT department created an exclusive bot called “Nepuga XP,” which was used to gamify the project’s interaction forum.
Discord bots
And since we mentioned bots, why not dedicate an entire section to these tools that make companies’ routines so much easier? With them, it is possible to relieve employees’ workload by automating various tasks and processes.
Discord is a platform that is 100% ready for bot implementation. Today there are hundreds of options created by various developers dedicated to exploring the platform’s possibilities to the fullest.
In addition to Nepuga XP, developed in-house by us, our Discord servers also have other bots that make our routine smoother and faster.
One of these bots is Reminder, which sends notifications in the chat every time an employee has a birthday. Although it seems simple at first glance, this feature works almost like an internal marketing tool, since it helps the birthday person feel seen and welcomed by the team.
Trello Notification is the bot that ensures the integration between Discord and Trello that we mentioned in an earlier section. Also related to that platform, we have Nepuga TI BOT, another bot created by us that notifies the employees responsible for Trello demands when a task is approaching its deadline.
Xenon is the bot we use to back up everything that is said and shared on Discord. This bot is especially useful for the IT team, since it automates a process that often takes up time that, thanks to technology, can be used on other tasks.
Finally, we also have the Nepuga bot. This bot is largely responsible for feeding our content channels.
Currently, our internal server has 6 channels fed with content selected by this bot. In Redes Sociais Nepuga (Nepuga Social Media), the bot detects and shares when a new post is made on one of the profiles the IES maintains on Instagram. This helps the team stay on top of the work done by our marketing team and engage even more with the company.
As for the Hard Skills, Soft Skills, Tech Skills, and Health Skills content channels, the bot is programmed to collect videos from sites such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram and share them in the groups so that everyone can watch. In each channel, the bot is programmed to post only content related to that topic. Here, the main intention is to support our team’s professional and personal development by exposing them to content and knowledge that we consider relevant.
In the Promoções (Promotions) channel, the Nepuga bot is integrated with an X (formerly Twitter) profile that announces promotions, to alert our employees to product deals that may interest them, especially computer equipment.
Ease and free of charge
As you saw, Discord is much more than a complete communication platform. It is the solution, often unknown, to many of the problems and wishes of the people who run businesses today.
In a world where employees and partners come and go at an ever-faster pace, communication and engagement are key words for retaining them. When everyone involved shares a company’s values and purpose, a sense of welcome is generated that translates into lasting relationships.
As the coordinator of our IT department, Diego Evangelista, aptly put it: “Discord has proven to be an extremely versatile and effective tool, standing out from other communication platforms mainly because it can be customized to our specific needs. Compared with other platforms, Discord gives us a flexibility and an adaptation to the educational environment that are incomparable, making the exchange of information more dynamic and the user experience more integrated and satisfying. These benefits have been fundamental to optimizing our daily operations and continuously improving the learning environment we offer.”
In addition, Discord has another big differentiator: it is a 100% free service. Yes, you do not have to pay anything to use all the features and settings we covered in this article. There is the option to subscribe to paid plans, which offer some advantages such as greater file-sharing capacity, HD screen sharing, and more emoji options. However, the free version already meets everyone’s main needs very well.
This last benefit touches on a critical issue for most companies: the economic factor. By not having to pay for a good communication platform, it is possible to save money or even redirect resources to other areas of the business.
And you, did you enjoy learning about our success case? We hope so, and we hope it can become a reference for boosting your business’s communication.
