Ways to Drive Community Engagement and 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

Hello @jevaaler - Congratulations on setting up your Community! I agree with @DannyPancratz on incentive, recognition on the on-boarding journey! Our community although not meant for only ticket-deflection

Some of the other things to look at :

• Where is community placed in the user-journey - how are we collaborating with other teams - whether Customer Support, Product, Customer Success, Sales, etc
• How consistent & frequent are you - whether with events. resources, etc
• Get to know your customers - Sometimes it can be a simple UI/UX experience or awareness is why they are not engaging within the community or platform
• How are you rewarding them - this is through recognition of the badges. personal notes, etc 
• How quick is your response time to the support queries - this is pivotal

These are some top of things that came to mind for me. To be honest, building a community is thinking long term and consistently delivering to your customers. There has to be a lot of internal alignment to give that experience to customers. In the beginning more of the push comes from the company and over time the shift happens with more peer to peer interaction. Hope this helps.

Hey Danny!

Thank you for the suggestions. At the moment, I’m not sure if we have the critical mass of engaged users for gamification and posting incentives to “work”? I’ve set up gamification tools as necessary, and users will earn points, badges and titles, but our community isn’t really there for those incentives, at least not yet.

I think onboarding might be the issue. We are marketing the community to our customers and working to get them signed up, I think they’re coming into it not really knowing how it will work and how they can use it.

Thanks @Acorrea!

I think it’s a mix between different things that’s going on, but mainly awareness and customer understanding of how to use the community. As mentioned, we recently rolled it out and our customers are used to reaching out to our support teams or their CSMs whenever they have an issue with our products. So while we have to actually tell them it exists, they also need to learn how to use it and that it’s an alternative to what they’re already used to doing.

​@jevaaler here’s what I would add:

1. Find out who the SMEs,superusers, or those with specific product knowledge are.
   1. ​​​​​​​Tag them (try not to overdue it) and others when questions or convos are asked and you don’t see any replies. Sometimes it doesn’t work and the pinged person doesn’t respond. But I’ve noticed that even then more often than not, others will. Sometimes they are just waiting for someone else to get the ball rolling. We make it a point to stress our Community is for “peer to peer” support.
2. Mixture of content that appeals to the different reasons for members to visit the Community (product updates, betas/previews, off-topic lounge discussions) and also keeps it fresh. I’ve also found that fun off-topic discussion starters will allow members to get to know each other a bit more. I’ve seen a 
3. Not overloading featured content. We’ve seen a reduction in communication and even views when we have too many featured articles on the home page.
4. Positive reinforcement when a member engages in behavior you want to see - publicly and by DM. Used to work with kids and this was huge for behavioral change.

Just my two cents from what I’ve seen after our first year.

Wow, really nice job 👌 I am going to build my own, thanks a lot for the idea!

Your story is just like mine - I havent done much, or at all, what comes to the onboarding. I know the  benefits from it and onboarding s on my to-do list.