Introduction
Communities that struggle to grow and thrive all seem to wrestle with one key, and that is building community engagement.
What is Community Engagement?
Communities that struggle to grow and thrive all seem to wrestle with one key, and that is building community engagement.
The number of people in a reasonably healthy community who you would expect to be active is about 20% to 30%. Therefore, about 80% of people in that community are not going to be active, and these are the people who are just going to be consuming and enjoying the content shared in the community. They are not going to be actively creating content/materials. But what we want to do is to zone in on the target number, i.e 20%.
Why You Need Active Members in our Community
Health: Highly engaged members of your community are essential for community health. if you want to have a highly thriving community then you need to have engaged members. So you need to generate your focus and energy into creating content for members of the community.
Value creation (members who create content): There’s a direct correlation between value and good experience. When members are constantly creating content/value (answering questions, creating materials, etc), they feel like they’re having a good experience and a positive impact on the community, therefore they want to keep coming back and that’s going to create sustainability in your community.
Grow / Scale: You need active engagement in a community to grow and scale, else the community is not going to survive.
How to Measure Active Members
What you would want to do to measure active members is to set a target metric.
Side note: Goals are just a fiction of the future, something we have to invent, plan and aspire towards.
- DAU/MAU: To measure active members in a community, you are going to take the number of Daily Active Users (DAU) and divide it by the number of Monthly Active users (MAU).
DAU / MAU * 100%
Example: A community has 10 daily active users and 80 monthly active users, calculate the measure of active members or users that the community have in a month.
10 / 80 = 0.125
0.125 * 100% = 12.5% active users in a month.
How to Build a Growth Mindset Around Engagement
They're basically four things in respective order.
Set Monthly Target: This might be 20% minimum or 30% stretch active users engagements. Be realistic about this. Every single week or month you want to measure and track this.
Members' Needs: Members will only engage in communities if they know they are going to get something of value out of it. The way to figure out members needs is to figure out their needs and pain points, what they’re struggling with right now.
Brainstorm Interaction Events: To do this, what you’re going to ask or figure out is “How do I resolve one of those points” in a way that generates something that’s interactive. Create something in your community whether it’s a content, conversation start, a hackathon etc. Do something that’s going to get people (members of your community) interacting on how they resolve the pain points aforementioned. The key thing here is getting people to interact, no matter how small.
Track what works.
What all the above-mentioned engagement will do when you apply the techniques and measure it effectively is you would build your engagement and get more members into the 20% active user slot. If you stop measuring things, they won’t get better.
Conclusion
In this article, we looked at what community engagement is, why we need active members in our community to keep it alive and not ghosted, how we measure active members in our community and how we build a growth mindset around community engagement.
PS: This article is a note from Jono Bacon's lecture on "What is Community Engagement and How do you Build it?"