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The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

4 Ways Engagement Benefits Communities

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The most effective communities strike the balance of a well-crafted shared value. Communities help individual members feel seen and heard. That potent combination leads to members feeling empowered and more likely to engage; they ask more questions, problem-solve, and tackle leadership initiatives they might not have considered otherwise. In other words, when people feel their voice matters — they use it. This leads to a powerful cycle of benefit and contribution.

Empowered individuals are engaged, constructive, and productive, which contributes positively to the community culture around them.

Engaged and empowered members are also good for the organization that runs each community. A well-run community that provides real value to its members positions an organization as trustworthy, adaptive, and engaging.

Your community team challenge: maintaining this delicate shared value balance.

Engagement Benefits Communities

Creating engaged members

With great power, comes great responsibility (yes, we borrowed the quote from Spider-Man but it doesn’t make it any less true!), and there are huge opportunities for organizations here. Recognizing and nurturing the communities (and their members) that already exist create value for both the community member and the organization (we love shared value!).

If you’re unsure where to start, our Community Engagement Framework™ lays out the four stages of culture change in communities: moving from quid pro quo relationships to collaborative ones. As the transition happens, you’ll see the levels in which your members explore out loud — a core attribute of collaborative and innovative cultures — increase.

Community Engagement Framework

Mapping the stages of the Community Engagement Framework™ to the ways in which member engagement positively impacts communities is easy to see.

Four Ways Engagement Benefits Communities

  1. Validation leads to connections: Members find confidence in their decision to join the community by browsing, viewing, liking, and sharing content they find on the network. They will continue to expand their engagement as they become connected to the community and its members.
  2. Sharing leads to validation. The Care Bears got it right – sharing is caring. Members feel like they belong when they comment on threads, share their own content and thoughts — and get validation from others’ reactions.
  3. Asking leads to trust. Trust in the community occurs when members ask for help and get useful responses.
  4. Exploring leads to belonging and participation. When members explore the community they develop a sense of belonging by participating in open-ended discussions, sharing different perspectives, and being open to brainstorming. This is where the real value starts to build, as engaged members create engaged members.

Want to learn more? Download the Community Engagement Framework™ today to get started.

Four Ways Online Engagement Impacts Members

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All engagement is not the same…and different engagement behaviors generate different outcomes.

Engagement is challenging to measure because engagement is not a single action, but a range of behaviors. Without getting more specific about what kind of engagement is meaningful – and what is meaningful changes based on the objective of your community initiative – it is impossible to measure and connect to business value.

The Community Roundtable’s Community Engagement Framework is designed to help categorize, measure, and understand the impact of different types of engagement. We break engagement behaviors down into the following categories:

  • Explore
  • Ask
  • Share
  • Validate

These categories require different levels of connection, motivation, and cultural maturity and produce different outcomes.

Download this free ebook to learn more!

Community Engagement Framework

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The Work Out Loud framework is now the Community Engagement framework. Same great ideas, new community-focused title 

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder & Principal, The Community Roundtable

This week is ‘International Working Out Loud Week‘ or #wolweek – a week to highlight the growing practice of creating better organizations by sharing not just our work products, but our work processes. It’s fitting that this year #wolweek coincides with the release of John Stepper’s new book – Working Out Loud: For a better career and life, as John has been instrumental in applying the concept and documenting both how to do it well and its value.

At The Community Roundtable, where we focus on how to create healthy and productive communities, we see working out loud as a key behavior community managers can encourage and reward to establish connections and build trusting relationships. Depending on the context, working out loud can either be relatively easy to establish or it can be incredibly complex.

So what kinds of things make working out loud challenging?

  • No appreciation of why working out loud is valuable
  • Critical cultures
  • Cultures where knowledge is protected because it is the primary currency of power
  • Individuals’ perspectives and agency
  • Poor online communication skills
  • Lack of understanding of how to work out loud

Taken together, those barriers can be significant, especially inside organizations, and simply modeling behavior often isn’t enough. Because of that, we have deconstructed working out loud into four categories:

  1. Validate Out Loud
  2. Share Out loud
  3. Ask & Answer Out Loud
  4. Explore Out Loud

We believe that each of these pieces of working out loud is important to focus on independently because they incrementally create a more collaborative environment. Too often, community managers and their stakeholders try to jump straight to robust exchanges before a new or immature community might be ready for it. The Community Roundtable’s Community Engagement Framework gives structure to the process and provides community managers with the goals and metrics they should focus on as their communities evolve.

Community Engagement Framework

In each step, there are community management techniques to trigger, establish and reward the behaviors. For example, Sharing Out Loud can be triggered by having a regular thread where people share their priories for the week, like we do in TheCR Network. That helps community members understand the social environment, get comfortable with how people respond to each other and engage without fear of demonstrating a lack of knowledge – making the community a comfortable place for members to share.

Once created, the sense of comfort in the community makes it easier for members to ask other questions without fear of criticism or judgment, and those questions are typically effective social triggers for getting responses – and with them, hopefully, solutions. By measuring how the community is behaving in each of these areas, community managers can get a good sense of how programming should be prioritized and how much value is being generated.

Download the Community Engagement Framework here. 

Looking for more ideas about how to generate community value? Join TheCR Network or contact us.