Discord Server Partnerships: How to Find and Pitch Them
Partnerships are the highest-converting traffic a small server can get, and most owners burn their shot with a copy-pasted DM. Here's how to pick targets, write the pitch, and set terms.
A partnership is two servers recommending each other to their members. Done well it is the highest-converting traffic a community under 5,000 members can get, because the recommendation arrives from somewhere the reader already trusts. Done badly it is two dead announcement channels full of ads nobody reads.
What is actually being exchanged
Be precise about this before you approach anyone, because vagueness is why most partnerships produce nothing.
The common forms, roughly in order of value:
- A written recommendation posted by the partner's owner or a moderator, in their announcement or general channel, in their own words. Highest converting by a wide margin.
- A listing in a partners channel. Low effort, low return. Most members never open that channel. Useful as a permanent footnote, not as a growth channel.
- A joint event. A shared game night, tournament, art jam, or AMA. Highest effort, and the only form that reliably produces members who stay, because people arrive having already done something with your community.
- A cross-posted announcement using Discord's follow feature, where your announcement channel appears in their server (announcement channels need Community enabled on both servers). Powerful and easy to abuse. Only ask for this once you have a relationship.
Decide which one you are asking for. "Want to partner?" with no specifics is the message that gets ignored.
Find servers that are adjacent, not identical
The instinct is to approach servers exactly like yours. That is the worst target: you compete for the same members, and their owner knows it.
Aim one step sideways. A Rust server partners well with a survival-games server and a PC-building server. A programming community partners well with a technology news server and a design community. A fandom server partners well with the servers for adjacent fandoms in the same genre.
Where to find them:
- Open your own listing on TheDiscordList and check its Similar servers panel: those are adjacent communities by definition. Then browse the directory categories next to your own and shortlist servers whose description shows real activity, not just a big member count.
- Look at who your own most active members are also in. Ask them directly which other servers they use.
- Check the partner channels of servers you already like. Partnerships cluster, and one good relationship introduces you to five more.
TheDiscordList also has a Partnership category for servers that are actively looking for partners.
Server categories on TheDiscordList. Start with the category next to yours, not your own.
Before you pitch, join and lurk for at least a few days. You need to know whether the server is actually alive, and you need one specific true detail about it for the message.
The size rule
Partnerships work between servers within roughly a 3x size band of each other. A 300-member server pitching a 20,000-member server is asking for a gift, and the answer is silence.
If you want to punch up, bring something other than size. A joint event you will do the organising for. A bot or tool you built that their members would use. A moderator willing to help cover their timezone gap. Access to a creator or a guest for an AMA. Value is not always audience.
The pitch
Send it to the owner or a partnership manager, not to a general channel. Keep it under 120 words. Structure it like this:
Hi, I run [server name], a 600-member server for [specific thing]. I've been in yours for a couple of weeks, the [specific channel or event you actually used] is great.
Our members overlap on [specific reason], but we're not covering the same ground, so I don't think we'd be pulling from each other.
Proposal: we each post a short recommendation in our announcements this week, written in our own words rather than a copy-pasted ad. Happy to go first so you can see what mine looks like before committing.
If partnering isn't something you do, no worries. Either way the [thing you liked] is worth keeping.
Why it works: it proves you are a real member, it names a specific overlap, it makes one concrete ask, it removes their risk by offering to go first, and it gives them an easy out. That last part matters more than owners expect. A pitch with no exit reads as pressure.
What kills a pitch instantly: a copy-pasted block, an invite link with no message, a message that opens with your member count, or anything sent to five servers in the same minute where the moderators know each other.
Terms worth agreeing up front
Write these down, even informally, in the thread where you agreed:
- Who posts, where, and when. Same day if possible, so you can compare results.
- How long the post stays up. A permanent partner-channel entry is different from a one-off announcement.
- Whether pings are allowed. Default to no. An @everyone for someone else's server costs your partner goodwill and they will resent you for it.
- A dedicated invite link each way. This is the entire measurement system. Without it you are guessing.
- An exit. "Either of us can end this by saying so, no drama." Servers die, owners burn out, and a clean exit clause means the relationship survives it.
Write the post so it actually converts
The post you write about your partner determines what you get back. A generic ad gets a generic ad.
Write three or four sentences in your own voice explaining what the other server is, who in your community would like it, and one specific thing that happens there. Name a channel or an event. Post it once, at a time your server is actually awake, and pin it for a day.
A good partner post reads like a recommendation from a friend. A bad one reads like it was generated, which is exactly what most partner channels are full of, and exactly why members stopped reading them.
Measure, then prune
Two weeks after the post, check the dedicated invite: joins, and how many of those joins sent a message. A partnership that delivered 40 joins and 2 posters was worse than nothing, because you spent your announcement channel's credibility on it.
Keep the partners who send members who stay. Renew with them quarterly, and consider a joint event, which is where the real compounding happens. Drop the rest quietly and without announcement.
Cap your active partnerships at what you can genuinely maintain, usually five to ten. Beyond that you are running a link farm, and every additional partner post makes the previous ones less visible.
Pick three adjacent servers this week, join them, and spend seven days being a normal member before you send a single message about partnering. If you want more ways to build the pipeline that feeds those relationships, the guides library covers the acquisition side.