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Hey everyone!

I would like to open up a discussion on some of your best practices to drive community engagement and activity, especially for customers who may not be familiar with communities and discussion forums.

We’ve recently launched a customer community for our SaaS company. Our goals for it are mainly ticket deflection, but also to generate positive sentiment for our company through positive engagements and interactions.

Our main issue is that while we’ve been getting sign-ups (100+ now!) there’s not a lot of activity. We’ve been driving sign-ups by including CTAs in email campaigns and encouraging sign-ups at the end of webinars, but it’s not resulting in activity.

I’d love to hear some of your best practices or top tips on how to increase activity!

From what you shared, I would recommend investing in some solid onboarding that introduces the types of behaviors you’d like to see. 

But the key thing is the incentive. I’ve found that recognition (credentials like “Subject Matter Expert”, and/or shout outs off the community on Linkedin) can be incredibly motivating and impactful to users in their career, which drives engagement and successful outcomes on the community. I talked about it in my Pulse Conference session here. 

The Community Strategy Academy also just published a free course on this topic. I haven’t gone through it yet, but Max knows what he’s talking about. I’d also recommend the Gamification course, although you may have to pay for that one. In it, Brian says what I was trying to say in my Pulse session in a clearer, more concise way, along with a ton of other great strategy foundations for driving engagement. 

Finally, Scott Baldwin just published an evergreen reminder that the best way to drive engagement is to talk to your community members and understand their needs & wants, collaborating with them on how to build a community that serves them. 

I’m in the midst of a a holistic refresh of our Gamification, which includes this custom page that showcases most of the tactics I’ve developed to date. Most of the content should be accessible while logged-out. 

After I get the programs, tactics, and operations revised, the next thing I’m focusing on is onboarding. I haven’t done that much at all or anywhere close to well. My hope is that this custom over page is a solid resource I can point to at key points in the onboarding / adoption journey. 

some of my ideas beyond the 2-4 emails they might get after they join: 

  • after they ask their first question - email that level sets expectations, links to gamification/recognition incentives, links to best practices for asking questions 
    • something similar after they post their first conversation 
  • after they provide their first answer - email about gamification/recognition that plants the seeds for deeper engagement / pursuing recognition
  • as they get certified and level (rank) up - personal messages from me linking to this overview page, planting seeds for deeper engagement

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