TL:DR – Engagement gimmicks never solve the real problem. At best, they give you a blip of activity. To sustainably drive more engagement, you need to solve the real problem.
I spent last week talking to associations about their community efforts. Many struggle to sustain good levels of engagement.
When this happens, many tend to get desperate and resort to gimmicks.
“Why not try an AMA?”
“How about hosting an event?”
“What about asking members to post their questions in the community?”
These aren’t bad ideas – they’re just not going to solve the problem.
If people aren’t participating, it’s not because you didn’t find the right gimmick to engage them (and it’s certainly not because they’ve forgotten about the site).
It’s because they don’t see or appreciate the community’s unique value.
If you want to drive more engagement, that’s the problem you need to solve.
Let’s explore how.
The Member Motivation Model
Here’s a quick caveat: You shouldn’t be looking to drive more engagement. Your goal is to find the optimal level of engagement.
That said, if you’re struggling to sustain any level of engagement, you need to go back to the member motivation model below
Just focus on the left side of it for now.
If people aren’t engaging, you have to diagnose which of the four problems you need to solve.
- Are people aware of the community?
- Do they see the value of the community?
- Do they believe they will get that value from the community?
- Does the community deliver that value better than any other channel?
Let’s go through each.
Are People Aware of The Community?
No one can engage in a community if they don’t know it exists.
A common mistake is to send out an email about the community and assume:
- The majority of the audience opened the email.
- Those that opened the email remembered the contents of the email.
Neither is likely to be true. You need a sustained and ongoing effort to grow your community (and select the right tactics for your community type).
There are four areas to cover here.
- A proper launch plan that includes multiple touchpoints staggered over a long period of time during the community launch. Don’t rely on a single interaction. A community needs to be promoted via:
- A staggered series of messages on the organisation’s mailing list.
- Mentions in the organisation’s newsletter.
- Collaborations with known figures in the sector.
- Community-centric events to attract registrations.
- Social ads/promotion.
- Inserting the community into the customer/topic onboarding flow. Once you’ve promoted the community to your existing audience, you need to promote the comunity to new audiences. This includes:
- Ensuring customers receive invitations/messages about the community on their onboarding flow.
- Ensuring the community is featured in the product support flow, linked within relevant help centre articles, featured prominently on the organisation’s website, etc…
- Or (if non-customer) Ensuring newcomers to the topic are likely to find the community when they search for relevant terms, visit related topics etc…You need to find out what the newcomers’ journey is and how you can embed the community within it. Find out where newcomers go and what they do – then make sure the community appears there.
- An ongoing plan with multiple touchpoints to remind people about the community and communicate its value. Again, don’t leave this to chance. You should know what percentage of members are aware of the community and consistently aim to increase this over time with multiple touchpoints.
- Mention community milestones in the newsletter and at events.
- Feature case studies and stories of members who solved a problem via a community.
- Host events which encourage people to subscribe to the community to attend.
There are plenty more options here – the key is to know what percentage of members are aware of the community.
- Embed the community into the ecosystem. Identify where your audience goes to learn, get support, feel a sense of belonging, and exhibit influence today. Map out all the groups and person(s) in the ecosystem. Then, create mutually beneficial partnerships with each.
The goal is to ensure people engaging in the broader ecosystem will frequently find their way to the community through multiple channels.
The vast majority of your audience is unaware the community exists. Make sure you track this at the organisation level (i.e. polling the entire customer base where possible) and then aim to improve over time.
Does Your Audience See and Appreciate The Value The Community Offers
Once someone knows the community exists, the second question to answer is whether they care about the community.
This comes down to the value proposition and positioning.
This is the very core value of the community. Many organisations have value propositions which are organisation-centric vs. audience-centric.
You see this in broad statements like:
[Community] is a place to connect, solve problems, and share your expertise”.
When people don’t participate, it’s usually because the community concept has failed. If you get this right, everything else often clicks into place.
This is where you need to ask the five specific questions:
- What does your audience need?
- How severe is that need?
- How frequent is that need
- Where do they go to solve that need today?
- What can the community do better?
The answers to these questions guide you to the kind of community you need to create.
You want to be very specific here about the community’s unique value. Here are some (made-up) examples.
Community Type | Bad Value Proposition | Good Value Proposition |
Association for Urban Planners | A place to discuss best practices in urban planning. | A searchable archive of zoning interpretations and project approvals in your region. |
SaaS Customer Community | Join to share tips and ask questions. | Download, remix, and rate real project workflows built by teams like yours. |
HR Professionals in Tech | Connect with other HR leaders and discuss industry trends. | Access live benchmarks on hiring, churn, and DEI metrics from similar companies. |
Health & Wellness (Autoimmune) | Support, share stories, and talk to others with your condition. | Discover and contribute symptom-management routines people like you are using right now. |
Internal Enterprise (ERG) | Meet colleagues, join discussions, and attend fun events. | Get matched with mentors and discover internal career paths from people who’ve done it. |
Indie Game Developers | Get feedback and promote your game in a friendly community. | Receive structured, peer-reviewed feedback on every game build within 48 hours. |
You get the idea—the value should be clear and unique. It should be something that many people either urgently want or want frequently enough.
It’s critical to build the community concept around severe or frequent issues to your audience.
Does Your Audience Believe They Will Efficiently Get That Value From The Community?
This comes down to the community experience.
This is one of the few areas where you can have a big impact on engagement.
Part of this comes down to the right onboarding journey for your community type.
There are three parts to this.
- Is it easy to join the community? If your community is behind a registration wall, solving this challenge is about 100% harder. Can members see what’s in the community and quickly register to join? Every extra click or hoop someone has to jump through reduces engagement by 20% to 30%.
- Is it easy to participate in the community? Older forum-centric platforms can struggle to attract participation from younger audiences used to optimise social-media-style experiences. We often find the wrong experiences have been selected for each purpose.
- Is there visible activity in the community? If the community seems quiet and inactive, most people won’t participate. Social density is essential – or at least masking inactivity briefly. Feature upcoming events and centrally created discussions.
- Did they have a good experience in the community? Finally, it comes down to whether they got the value they wanted from past experiences. Was the quality of information good? Did they easily find what they wanted? Did they get a good, quick response to their first discussion?
Is The Community The Best Place To Efficiently Get That Value?
This is where things get spicy.
Is the community the best place in the eyes of members to get the value that your community is offering?
We live in an era where engagement is increasingly happening on third-party platforms, private groups, comments on influential figures’ social media accounts, and many other channels.
What does the community offer that these channels don’t? And it’s essential to be realistic about this.
You can spend countless hours fighting clear trends when you might never win.
The biggest challenge here is to accept when you can’t win. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Increasingly, the best strategy isn’t to compete to build your community but collaborating to create the ecosystem. You trade control for participation.
You can still achieve the same results and great success – but you will do it by connecting with and supporting the ecosystem around your brand – rather than hosting the community yourself.
Gimmicks Don’t Work (solve the real problem!)
The key lesson from all of this is that gimmicks don’t work.
You don’t have an engagement problem; you have a value problem.
Members don’t believe they will get enough value from the community in the most efficient way.
To resolve the value problem, you must return to the beginning and find out what members value. Then, rebuild the community concept around that.
Good luck!
