How introductions work

An introduction is the smallest useful thing a community can do for two of its people. It is also the easiest thing to get wrong: sent to the wrong person, sent at the wrong moment, sent without asking. This is the whole life of one, from the moment it is considered to the moment somebody says whether it was any good.

A proposal has to clear two checks before a member ever sees it. The first is the cadence limit, which caps how often any one member hears from the agent across every kind of message, not one flow at a time. A member who has already had a message this week is not queued for another because a different job happened to fire. The limit is on the person, not the mechanism.

The second is the do-not-contact list. A member can say at any time that they would rather not be contacted, or not on a particular channel, and every send path checks that before anything goes out. A stated preference is never overridden.

A proposal that fails either check is not sent, and nobody is told it existed. A suggestion that clearly misses what a member has already said they want is stopped the same way, before it becomes an introduction you have to apologise for.

Proposed means the agent has decided that two of your people should meet and has written the reason each of them would care about. Pending means it has been put to both of them and is waiting on their answers. From there it ends in one of three ways: completed when both said yes and they were connected, declined when somebody said no, lapsed when nobody replied at all.

Nobody is introduced cold. The agent explains to each member privately why it thinks the two of them should meet, and then waits. Only once both have agreed are they connected to each other. If either says no, nothing happens and nobody is told who declined. That is what double opt-in means here: a yes from both people, on every introduction, with no version of the flow that skips it.

An unanswered suggestion gets one gentle follow-up rather than silence or a queue of reminders. The moment a member replies, any nudge still scheduled for them is cancelled. If the suggestion goes nowhere after that, it is retired rather than repeated. Nobody is chased past the point of usefulness, which is most of the difference between a community manager and a mailing list.

The agent knows what it should not decide on its own. When that happens the conversation and everything it knows about the member go to your team, and your reply reaches the member in the same chat, so nothing restarts and nobody has to repeat themselves. A member can ask for a person at any point too. A human is always one message away, and never a dead end.

A while after two people are connected, the agent asks each of them a short question in the same chat: did you meet, was it useful. The answers are recorded against both people and feed into which introductions are proposed next. Every yes and every no teaches it who to connect after that.

Three phrases turn up whenever introductions are counted, and they are worth pinning down.

The introduction lifecycle is the sequence above: proposed, then pending, then completed, declined or lapsed.

A completed introduction means both people consented and were connected. It does not claim they became friends or did business together; only that the connection was made, with a yes on both sides.

Reached a decision means completed, declined, or lapsed without a reply. Introductions still sitting in pending are excluded, because one that is still waiting has not told anyone anything yet. When you see a rate quoted for introductions, that is the denominator it should be measured against.