Online community engagement issues fall into two general buckets: tactical engagement issues and strategic engagement issues. If you don’t have people coming to your online community at all, you have a strategic issue; if people are coming but not engaging, you have a tactical issue. (Still not sure? Watch this quick video.) Either way, you need to improve online engagement, and quick.
If you’re struggling with engagement you’re not alone.
Engagement challenges make up the majority of questions we get asked. They tend to fall into the same buckets over and over:
- How can I get lurkers to participate?
- How do I write to increase community engagement?
- Why aren’t people staying on my site?
- Why aren’t people visiting my community/intranet/social support site at all?
- How do I improve online engagement?
The good news is, engagement is an issue you can solve.
We’ve spent the last 10 years helping all sorts of communities tackle their online engagement issues. Maybe you’re a new community that is just launching and having trouble getting members to engage? Maybe you’re a mature community whose interactions have started to lag? Been there, done that.
Don’t reinvent the (online engagement) wheel
It’s pretty much text-book that great engagement starts with a well-crafted Shared Purpose. (Learn more about Shared Purpose here.) Sure there are quick-fix tactical things you can do to boost engagement, but for long-term online engagement success, you need to lay the foundation. In addition to drafting a Shared Purpose statement to get you on your way, you can take the temperature of your community to identify what actions will yield the most returns. (Although, let’s be honest, you probably already know where your community is lacking, but you don’t have the time, resources or support to make a real difference. Use our community scorecard to show your stakeholders and executives why it matters.)
More Resources
- Online Engagement Resource Bundle – Get access to 25 resources (think: reports, case studies, templates, etc) that will fast-track increasing engagement.
- Community Score Assessment – This fast (and free!) tool plots your community strengths and weaknesses against the Community Maturity Model.
- Strategy Workshop: We typically deliver this strategic workshop on site for clients, but once a year Rachel Happe leads an online session. Join her in January 2019 to build a community strategy, develop your community use case and define an ROI model for your program.
