How to Bring a Community Back to Life
The 6-Step Process for Growing Engagement in your Community
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Today we’re going to talk about one of the most common challenges I hear from companies...
Question: “Our community engagement has flatlined. How do we get engagement growing again?”
I’ll walk you through the 6-step process that I’ve used with my team and with clients to grow engagement in a community, or bring a flatlined community back to life:
Step 1: Zoom out - Identify potential macro issues
Step 2: Benchmark - Get a baseline for where your community is today
Step 3: Zoom in - Audit your community experience
Step 4: Brainstorm - Explore what you can cut or build
Step 5: Prioritize - Decide on which ideas to focus on
Step 6: Experiment - Implement solutions and track the results
It’s simple, but not easy! It takes time: anywhere from 1-3 months. But it works, I promise.
If you have any questions or want me to go deeper on anything, just hit reply or drop a comment.
Let’s dive in…
Step 1: Zoom out - Identify potential macro issues
These are things that are completely out of your control. When faced with a macro issue all you can do is change course and catch the next wave, or sit tight and wait for it to pass.
Three examples of macros issues that might impact your community are shifts in technology, culture, and the economy:
Shifts in technology:
If your community is built on a large platform like Facebook, Slack, or Linkedin then your community engagement isn’t totally in your control. A change to the algorithm will impact how many people will see your community content.
A larger cultural shift impacting the platform will also impact all of the communities within it. For example, we saw a decline in engagement in the CMX Facebook Group when Facebook was getting a lot of negative press and our members were quitting the platform.
This is the core risk in building your community “in someone else’s garden”.
Broad shifts in technology can also impact your community. For example, when mobile phones exploded onto the scene, traditional forums suffered. We didn’t want to type out long posts with our thumbs. We shifted to shorter-form content and emojis.
Solution: Change platforms, ideally to one where you own the data and distribution.
Shifts in culture:
Communities come and go as culture shifts. What feels cool and innovative one year can feel old and outdated the next.
For example, if you were building a Web3 community in 2020 you probably saw a ton of organic growth and engagement in your community. As things cooled in 2022, you might have seen your community engagement decline.
Solution: Sit tight if you think the wave will return, or reinvent your community if you think there’s a new wave worth catching.
Shifts in the economy:
If you’re building a professional community of practice, or a paid membership, the economy can impact the level and type of engagement in your community.
Obviously, if the economy is down, people will cut costs and may not be able to afford a paid membership.
But sometimes a down economy can lead more people to join a community because they need more support from their peers. For example, in this recent downturn, there’s been an explosion of communities built for job seekers and people who have been laid off.
Solution: Offer low-cost alternatives to help members weather economic shifts or design community experiences and content that help with new challenges that arise as a result of the economy.
Step 2: Benchmark - Get a baseline for where your community is today
Assuming you haven’t decided to shut your community down due to macro issues, you can begin the process of auditing your community.
Before focusing on where you’ll go, focus on where you’ve been.
You’re probably already tracking some analytics. That’s how you know engagement has flatlined. But if you don’t already have a dashboard where you can update your metrics (ideally every day), then start there. This will be critical for when you want to run experiments in step 5.
Aim to get data going back at least 12 months because you want to account for any seasonal trends in your community. For example, if you see a big decline in engagement from January to February, you can look back and see if that same decline happened in the previous year. If so, it’s probably just the seasonality of your community.
I recommend establishing three baselines for three types of metrics:
Engagement metrics:
I recommend tracking Total Active Members, Posts, Comments, and Traffic.
Track them Daily, Weekly, and Monthly.
You don’t have to get too fancy here. Some people will track a stickiness score or some other engagement score, but I think it’s best to see all of the raw data without obscuring it in a formula.
If you have the ability to track it, I’d also track new member retention rates. This will track the impact of experiments you run on the onboarding experience.
Here’s an example from Feverbee of what that might look like:
Content metrics:
Look at specific content metrics to see how well they’ve been performing.
Some common areas:
Emails (ie. What are the open rates on your welcome email?)
Onboarding and Rituals (ie. What % many people introduce themselves in your intro threads?)
Events (ie. How many people attend your events?)
Knowledgebase (ie. How many people visit articles in your community’s knowledgebase?)
Member satisfaction
If you’ve been running surveys like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Community-Member-Fit Score (CMFS) make sure you have the data organized to show how the score has shifted over time.
Step 3: Zoom in - Audit your community experience
Now that you have a baseline of where you’ve been, you can identify opportunities to improve your community.
You’ve been in flow with your community. This is where you stop, pick your head up, and get a candid look at what’s working and what isn’t working.
Three of the most common reasons I see for a community to flatline (aside from the macro issues I listed above):
Over-centralization
The distribution of power and influence has become too centralized amongst your core members. Often, these are members who have been in the community for a long time and are resistant to change.
This creates an experience for your new members where they feel like outsiders, and don’t see a path to developing their own influence within the community.
Solution: You need to work with your core members to design a culture and specific programs that make new members feel welcome and included.
Loss of novelty
When you first launched your community you probably did things differently from all the other communities you saw out there.
The community was fresh, new, and exciting. Members found a new place they enjoyed. They felt special for being there early.
But over time, the new becomes old. The witty welcome message you came up with starts to feel repetitive. People are asking the same questions that have been asked 100 times. Discussions are getting stale. You’re losing community-member-fit.
Solution: Your community needs a content and experience refresh.
Lack of structure
When your community started everything felt very organic. Lack of structure was a feature, not a bug. It was a blank canvas and you and your members filled it in with whatever felt right.
As a community grows, that lack of structure starts to become an issue. Your small team struggles to keep up with hands-on experiences. Some channels become too noisy while others become ghost towns. Information becomes harder to find. New members feel overwhelmed. Roles aren’t clear, creating uncertainty around responsibilities.
Solution: You need more scalable community operations, your community space and information need to be cleaned and reorganized, and you need to create more structured roles and responsibilities.
Now, how do you figure out which of these issues, or other issues, you’re dealing with?
I’d recommend doing four things:
Data analysis: Review the engagement, content, and member satisfaction data you gathered in your audit
UX research: watch 2-3 members go through the onboarding and community experience
Interviews: Conduct 1-1 interviews with 10 members (make sure to speak to both new and old members, active and members who went inactive)
Survey: Send a survey to the entire community to gather broader insights (and if you aren’t already, include an NPS or CMFS question)
Areas you should audit:
Onboarding experience: What % of new members are taking an action in the first day, week, and month? Are members opening the emails and clicking the links? Where are they getting stuck or confused?
Content: What posts have done really well recently? Which posts tend to flop? What themes can you identify about why some have worked and some haven’t?
Events: If your community is hosting events, which ones are well-attended and highly rated? Which ones are struggling? What themes can you identify?
Rituals: How has engagement changed over time on your daily, weekly, or monthly rituals? Which rituals are still working well? Which ones have lost all engagement?
Channels: If your community has channels or subgroups, which ones are doing well? Which ones have very little engagement? Why do you think that’s happening?
Roles: If you have formal roles in your community like moderators or chapter leaders, how active are those members? And how effective is their content or events?
Suggested questions to ask in your interviews and survey (please edit and add your own to make it relevant for your community):
What are your goals around [the topic that your community focuses on]? How are you using the community (or hope to use it) to accomplish those goals?
What challenges are you dealing with? What’s preventing you from achieving your goals?
How would you describe the vibe of our community?
What kind of people do you wish you could meet? What would you want to talk to them about?
What are your favorite part(s) of your community? What do you use the most?
What are your least favorite or most confusing parts of your community?
Why did you join our community originally? Did the community fulfill that promise? Why or why not?
What other communities do you participate in? What do you love about them? What do you feel those communities are missing?
What ideas do you have for making the community better?
Are there any programs or ideas that you’d be interested in working on in the community?
You’ll learn a ton from going through this process. It won’t all be positive but it will all be helpful. When I start, I try to put myself into a mindset where I thrive on getting critical feedback. I want ALL THE SMOKE. This isn’t a time to fan your ego. This is about getting to the truth.
You’ll probably immediately identify things that you’ll want to cut, because they aren’t working.
You’ll also be bursting with ideas for ways to improve the community. Don’t worry about prioritization yet. Just add all of your ideas in a note or doc and you’ll prioritize in the next step.
Keep an eye out for themes are you’re doing your research. Are you seeing one of the issues I covered earlier come up often in interviews? Are there specific parts of the community that are performing really well or poorly?
When you’re done with your research, create a slide deck to synthesize the areas of improvement into 3-5 themes. Include quotes from members and screenshots to give each theme context. Putting it in this format helps you organize the information in your brain, and makes it easy to communicate with your team. You’ll use these themes as your guide to come up with new ideas and solutions.
Step 4: Brainstorm - Explore what you can cut or build
You’ve identified the issues. Now it’s time to ideate and prioritize.
I break down this step into two stages:
Stage 1: Cuts
In this first session, present your findings from the research, walking through each of the themes.
You’ll already have your list of things you believe should be changed or cut entirely. Walk your team through the list and ask for feedback on anything you’re unsure of.
This can be done async if you prefer (you know I do). Send out a video of you walking through your deck, and the list of cuts you want feedback on. Then, only get on a call if you feel like you need to talk through any decisions.
Some things you might be able to cut entirely, like an event or a specific ritual. Other things will need to be changed or replaced, like an onboarding experience. Changes will be discussed in more detail in the next session.
💡A word of advice: Cut aggressively. Too often community builders hold onto rituals and content that aren’t working because they’re emotionally attached. Trust me, your community will be stronger if you focus on the things that are working really well, and cut the things that aren’t only working a little.
Stage 2: Ideation
Next, you’ll want to work together with your team and members to come up with ideas for improving the community.
I run a brainstorm session with the team to get everyone’s ideas down. To do this, I set up a whiteboard using Figjam, create a section for each theme, and have everyone add sticky notes under each theme with ideas for solutions, changes, and improvements.
It can be useful to also invite some of your community members to participate in the brainstorm, or run a separate brainstorm session with them.
Make sure everyone has watched your video walking through your slide deck with the findings from the research before participating in this session so you don’t have to spend time providing context, and everyone had time to come up with ideas before coming to the session.
The flow for this session will look something like this:
Choose the first theme and give everyone 5 minutes to add as many sticky notes with ideas for how to improve the community as they want.
Once all the ideas are down, take 5 minutes and have everyone organize the ideas into subthemes. Combine similar ideas.
Give everyone 2 minutes to vote (by adding stickers) on the ideas that they’re most excited about. This gives you a quick way of seeing what’s popular amongst the group.
With the ideas organized and voted on, take 10 minutes to invite participants to share an idea or theme that they’re really excited about.
Repeat for each theme until you have a board full of ideas and subthemes for how to improve the community.
Step 5: Prioritize - Decide on which ideas to focus on
Now it’s your job to synthesize the ideas into a format that will help you make decisions.
At this point, you should take off your facilitator hat and put on your project manager hat. Teams often get stuck at this stage because they want the group to collectively decide on what to do next and who will do it. You did the research, you got everyone’s input, and now it’s time for you to be a decision-maker.
Take all of the ideas and themes and put them into a spreadsheet. Highlight any ideas and themes that were really popular.
Then, create a set of criteria for ranking the ideas and themes. I like to use the following:
Impact: how effective do we believe this idea will be?
Time: how long will it take to implement this idea?
Effort: how difficult will it be to implement this idea?
Cost: how expensive will it be to implement this idea?
Team Fit: does our team have the skills required to implement this idea?
Go through each idea and rank them 1-5 for each of the criteria. Create a “total” column that adds up the scores (or weights specific scores more highly). Then reorder the spreadsheet by the totals.
This tool is meant to help you make decisions, not make decisions for you. It helps you organize the information and identify low-hanging fruit. You’ll quickly see which ideas are high impact, low time, low cost, and high fit. Those are obviously strong candidates for experiments you should run.
Ask one or two other people to review your work and confirm that you’ve ranked everything properly.
Next, you have to decide:
What will your team do?
When will you do it?
Who will own it?
What does success look like?
I’d recommend putting this all in a spreadsheet:
Send out the spreadsheet to the team and ask everyone for their feedback on what the team should focus on, to help fill in the details, and to tell you if there are any projects they’d personally like to work on. Again, I’d recommend doing this async first and then getting on a call to talk through any outstanding issues.
Step 6: Experiment - Implement solutions and track the results
If you test too many things at once, you won’t know what’s working so try to only run 2-3 experiments at a time.
In my experience your team also overestimated how much they can do, all the more reason to keep it simple.
Different ideas will take different amounts of time to test. For example, you can make a change to your onboarding email and immediately track things like open rates but it will take months to see if a change results in increased monthly active members.
Some changes will be really small and can be implemented in a day. For example, you could simply add a message under the post box that guides members on how to contribute. Other changes will take a longer time to implement, like designing a new event experience.
It won’t be perfect. You don’t have time to isolate every experiment. Everything in your community is connected. An improvement in onboarding open rates will hopefully have downstream effects on member retention.
And come on, we’re community builders, not scientists. Unless you’re a community-building scientist in which case, can we hang out?
Even so, you’ll usually be able to tell within 1-3 months if an experiment is working, so I’d recommend running a few experiments every 3 months.
Remember your three baselines:
Engagement metrics
Content metrics
Member satisfaction metrics
Now that you know what the ideas are that you’re implementing, you can track these baselines to see if your experiments are working.
For tracking and reporting, I’d recommend:
Daily: Update your metrics dashboard to keep your finger on the pulse of the community, and get an intimate handle on the metrics. Have your team do the same if they’re responsible for tracking their own experiments.
Weekly: Do member interviews to get continuous feedback and always have your members’ voice in your ear.
Monthly: Create a monthly report (I like to use Google Slides) to synthesize and share the results of your experiments. This will help you understand the results, share them with your team, and make adjustments.
Quarterly: Wrap up existing experiments, deciding what to keep and what to cut. Launch new experiments.
Bi-annually: Send out a broad community health survey (here’s a useful guide from Beth McIntyre)
You can also implement automated surveys. For example, I like to set up a survey that goes out to members exactly one month after they join the community to hear how their experience is going. You can also implement NPS or CMFS survey that automatically pops up on your community on an ongoing basis to get continuous and randomized feedback.
Remember: everything is an experiment. If an idea works, great! Keep that idea running and continue to tweak it to make it even more effective.
If an idea doesn’t work, great! You learned something. Cut it or revert back. Turn your attention to the next experiment.
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If you follow this process, you’ll give your community a great chance of thriving for years to come.
I’d recommend going through this whole process every 12 months. It’s a great way to keep your community fresh and to go into the new year with a clear plan of action.
If you try it with your community, let me know how it goes. And again, if you have any questions, please drop a comment or hit reply.
Happy community experimenting!
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