Congrats on your launch! I talked about this a bit in my recent session at Pulse: The Post-Launch Playbook. If you skip to 6 or so min in, I cover this. But the whole talk is my answer to this question. 
 

I’d also add to this: move to hybrid ASAP if you’re not there already. The forums can be private, but the main experience and navigation shouldn’t be behind a firewall. Doing that about 8 months in was valuable for us. It removed a ton of friction to one of the core benefits: community as integrated and consolidated launchpad (I talk about that part in the session, probably about 8-10 minutes in). 

Part two of the answer to this is to make your gamification actually mean something. A tangible impact for their careers. That was more my (less good imo) Pulse session last year. 

 

TL;dr I’ve found that if the community status can be beneficial for someone’s career, you can motivate many to adopt, engage, and contribute. 

Getting to a good level of adoption and engagement is hard work; we’re still in the process about 1 year after launching our community. Here’s some tactics that have worked for us:

• Ungate content. While people will often not immediately register and engage, they will perceive value from the community and may convert to registered members over time.
• Monthly newsletter. We fully tied our monthly newsletter (sending to all users) to the community, highlighting news items and top post and linking all event announcements to the community.
• Link to your customer event. We had a big boost during our customer event last year, which we rebranded to our in-person community event. We used groups in the community to give people the opportunity to ask questions during the event. This year, the landing page for the event will be a custom page on the community.
• Webinar recordings. We share our (training/release) webinar recordings through the community and link to these posts in the webinar follow up emails. This also means valuable content stays available on your community.
• Product Ideas. Launching Product Ideation on the community led to a clear engagement increase.
• Don’t compete with yourself. We still had in-app chat and product ideation tools live when we launched. Only when phased out, community engagement really started picking up.
• Community meetups. We just started promoting our first community meetup (registration fully through the community), which already clearly boosts the number of registrations.

In short, it boils down to putting your community front and center in all of your scaled initiatives, making it the go-to place for customers when they have questions or want to expand their horizon...

Thank you ​@DannyPancratz for your presentation at Pulse.  I just watched it, so many good ideas on how we can mature our Community.  Our next step will be to lean into your Wizard of Oz analogy to help us identify who and what to drive the WHY!  Can’t wait to see more of your journey in 2026. /debra