Community Engagement Collection: Plays to Get Your Members Involved
Community engagement is often a signifier or a healthy community — here are some ideas on how to jumpstart yours.
There’s nothing more satisfying for a Community Manager than witnessing quality engagement in your community — particularly when it happens organically among members.
Of course, interactions like these are often the exception rather than the rule (particularly in new or Minimum Viable Communities), and it’s a community pro’s job to light the spark that ignites engagement within — and provides value for — your community.
What is community engagement?
For our purposes, ‘engagement’ refers to people actively participating in your community in some capacity, typically spurred to action by something a CM has put in play.
Community engagement can take the form of people asking or answering questions, joining in on events, sharing content, creating content, participating in programs, or something as simple as reading something and acknowledging it.
Why does community engagement matter?
How engaged a community is can be a great indicator of community health and the value the community is bringing to your organization. It is usually a direct reflection of how much value members are getting from you and your community-building efforts.
With an engaged community, you can more easily measure impact on the organization’s goals and rely on members to lead or stoke conversation or initiatives without your direct involvement.
7 engagement plays for your community
Want to boost engagement in your community? There are a plethora of ways to ignite the spark of quality engagement within your community, such as (but certainly not limited to):
In our Community Engagement Playbook, we unpack all of the above and more with specific, actionable plays used by leaders in the community to successfully boost engagement within their own communities.
Scroll on for extracts from the book, or download it — and 53 quality engagement plays — here.
The power of pets
As many folks are animal lovers, encouraging your community to talk about their pets also offers a uniquely personal way to connect with your members, or for members to connect.
Alex Angel, Chief Community Officer at Commsor and The Community Club explains how.
Rally the troops
It’s a conundrum many CMs face: you know your colleagues have so much to offer your community and its members. But how the heck do you get them involved?
Erik Martin, now Vice President of Services at Commsor, turned it into something of a challenge in his previous role as Chief Community Officer at Teal, to great effect.
Start small
Nothing gets community builders riled up faster than the great ‘scale fast vs. build slow’ debate.
Krystal Wu, Senior Community Manager at Shopify, comes down firmly on the side of the latter — and believes that focusing on engaging a small group of members first will yield long-term results.
The stoplight method
Want to get more strategic about engagement? Meet the stoplight method. It’s one of Director of Community Education at Commsor Noele Flowers’s favorite low-tech engagement hacks, she says. “It’s a simple approach, but it can yield some pretty amazing engagement results.”
Let it snow
Snowsgiving is an annual holiday campaign that brings together all the communities hosted on Discord — for a good cause. Mindy Day, Senior Manager, Community at Discord unpacks how they run the annual event.
Weird talks
In her time as Senior Manager, Community Engagement at Atlassian, Erica Moss hosted regular Coffee Chat sessions. But as the novelty wore off, she started struggling to drum up attendance. Rather than ditching the sessions altogether, Erica went back to the drawing board to make a few tweaks — and struck gold.
Be a fan of the fans
Creating brand or community advocates is only half the battle. Keeping them in that place requires time and effort too — but doing so can yield some phenomenal engagement results, as Christina Garnett, HubSpot Senior Marketing Manager, Offline Community & Advocacy, can attest to.
On the hunt for more handy engagement plays?
You’re in luck — our Community Engagement Playbook features more than 50 of them! Head over here to download it for free.
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