Share rig and animations between multiple models?

I have a character which has a bone structure and a handful of animations. I will also have 5 more characters that will have the same dimensions. How do I share the rig and animations that I have for my first character so that the other five can use it. I could just manually have all of them have their own copy of the rig and animations but that just seems inefficient. And even Unity said on their Modeling Optimized Characters to "Create a rig which you can reuse. This allows you to share animations between different characters." So how would I go about doing that? Thanks in advance for your help!

Cheers!