The Community Roundtable

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

45 Resources to Boost Online Engagement

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The number one challenge community managers as us about is engagement. How do we get more people to visit our community? How do we keep members coming back for the long-term? How can we convert casual viewers (fka lurkers) into contributing members? If you struggle with how to boost online engagement you aren’t alone.

We’ve been compiling engagement resources since 2009, and while a lot has changed in the online community world since then, the fundamentals of engagement haven’t! Below is a list of 45 online community engagement resources from the Engagement Resource Bundle in the The Network.

resources to boost online engagement

The Engagement Resource Bundle aka 45 Ways to Boost Online Engagement

Most Recent Entry:

  • All About the Ritual: Vicky Cumberbatch walks through the vitality of rituals as part of the engagement strategy, why, and how to go about brainstorming them..


Roundtable Reports
Communication:

resources to boost online engagement


General Engagement


Social Media


Specific Communities

  • Employee Adoption And Engagement In External Communities: Participants on this Roundtable Report were interested in discussing 3 main areas related to the topic of employee adoption and engagement: leadership and culture, content and programming, and metrics and governance.
  • Engaging Executives: The Power Of Content: A report of best practices and lessons learned on using content to engage executives from a Roundtable call with guest expert Roanne Neuwirth.
  • SMWG: Community -V- Audience & Engagement Kickstarters: On this Social Marketers Working Group (SMWG) call, members discussed various issues and best practices that are specific to social marketers, particularly community and audience engagement kickstarters.
  • Collaborative Solutions: Tackling The Engagement Challenge In Product Communities: This member-led discussion brought forth member challenges in the area of creating engagement within product communities, as well as various potential solutions to booth online engagement.
  • Internal Cohort Discussion: Engaging Employees: This call saw two case studies provided by Kosheno Moore of Jive and James Martin of Shepley Bulfinch, that explored what methods capture and retain engagement with internal communities. Read through the lessons learned to find methods of cultivating positive culture, how to excite new employees (without being overwhelming) and ways to keep the conversation going.

Discussions

Blogs

Case Studies

Other TheCR Resources

All the resources above (and literally hundreds more) are available for members of our private peer community, The Network. You can learn more about becoming a member here.

Authentic Engagement in Online Communities

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Episode #101 features Penny Schnarrs, Director of Community Relations and Strategy at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

Hosts Jim Storer and Shannon Abram chat with Penny about community building and virtual engagement with a medical organization. She shares strategies for authentic engagement in online communities, and highlights the need for innovation and connection beyond in-person meetings.

Listen to Penny Schnarrs on Authentic Engagement in Online Communities

strategies for authentic engagement

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About Penny Schnarrs

Penny Schnarrs is the Director of Community Relations and Strategy at the American Association of Medical Colleges. She is also part-time faculty at Point Park University, teaching first-year students.

About AAMC

The Association of American Medical Colleges is a not-for-profit association dedicated to transforming health care by supporting the entire spectrum of medical education, medical research, patient care, and community collaborations conducted by our member institutions. We are dedicated to the communities we serve and steadfast in our goal to improve the health of people everywhere.

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Five Tips for Community Managers Getting Started with ChatGPT

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Not every community managers is super tech-savvy – and that’s ok! It feels like there are always new platforms or services to try out – and you can’t really tell which ones it’s worth investing time in (remember Vine? Clubhouse? RIP!)

Generative AI is here to stay, and if you aren’t comfortable using it it’s time to learn. Below we’ve shared five tips for community managers getting started with ChatGPT (or any generative AI technology).

Five Tips for Community Managers Getting Started with ChatGPT

Five Tips for Community Managers Getting Started with ChatGPT

Familiarize Yourself with ChatGPT: Take the time to understand what ChatGPT (or an equivalent generative AI technology like Google’s Bard AI) is and its capabilities. Learn about its natural language processing abilities, its training process, and the types of questions or prompts it can handle.

Identify Your Use Case: Determine the specific purpose for which you want to use ChatGPT. Start with your community use case (customer support? brand awareness? employee collaboration?) and then clarify your objectives and how ChatGPT can assist you in achieving them.

Collect Relevant Training Data: If you have specific domain knowledge or context that you want ChatGPT to understand better, gather relevant training data. This could include historical chat logs, documents, or relevant articles to help improve the model’s performance in your desired area.

Experiment and Iterate: Start by asking the iterative AI of your choice a variety of questions or providing different prompts related to your use case. Experiment with different phrasings, instructions, or settings to see how the model responds. Take note of the strengths and weaknesses of the model’s output and iterate to refine your prompts and maximize the usefulness of the responses.

Provide Feedback and Adjust: As you use ChatGPT, provide feedback to OpenAI or the platform you’re using to help improve the model. Remember – we are at the beginning of this new technology, and it will (and should) evolve. Report any issues, biases, or problematic outputs you encounter. Additionally, adjust your own prompts, instructions, or guidelines based on the feedback you receive from users or community members to ensure responsible and effective usage.

Want to learn more about the impact of AI on online community management? Check out this post Four AI Prompts for Community Managers or search “AI” in the search tool above!

Behavior Modeling: Setting a Good Example in Your Community

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What is behavior modeling and how does this affect sentiment in communities?

First, let’s explore behavior mirroring. Do you ever notice how some of us tend to take on the quirks and mannerisms of others – or mimic each others words? This behavior is known as mirroring in which we subconsciously imitate expressions, speech, or actions of others. It is a thoroughly studied psychological concept, so we know that such behavior often manifests as a way to learn vicariously, build rapport and facilitate interactions in unfamiliar environments. Essentially, we are acting as chameleons – blending into our environment to observe, increase our relatability and keep safe. (Chartrand and Bargh, 1999)

Behavior Modeling: Setting a Good Example in Your Community

Given that this behavior can be found in abundance in all sorts of daily interactions, it comes as no surprise that the “chameleon effect” is observed in online interactions as well. For example, we see mimicking in social networks with the rapid adoption of jargon as participants use hashtags and acronyms. It explains why acronyms such as “bae” (before anyone else), “smh” (shake my head), and #tbt (throwback Thursday) quickly spread and are adopted as common expressions with unprecedented speed online.

Communities also see mirroring, but the effect is more subtle. Have you noticed that once one person starts ranting, it feels like the rest of a group joins in? Or when one person posts a complaint, suddenly a dozen more appear? It is mirroring, and it becomes a feedback loop. The more people exhibit a behavior, the more it is copied.

How can you use behavior mirroring to your advantage? Become a model for the behavior you wish to see.

Encourage community staff and other employees to interact with members in a positive way use the “mirror” to engage in behavior modeling – exhibiting the positive behaviors you wish to see in the community.

Here are three simple behavior modeling techniques:

  1. Post in the tone you want to see from others. This means maintaining a positive and neutral tone whenever possible even when the conversation is frustrating or confusing. Use the type of language you want to see in the community.
  2. Say thanks. If you see a member posting a great question or providing an answer, let them know you appreciate it. Say “thank you” for good contributions to the community.
  3. Freely giving likes to those who deserve it. Thrilled to see a “thank you” or “that helped”? Like it. See a great answer provided by a peer or customer? Like it.

The techniques proved to be good practice for community staff, but more importantly, they set a good example for members. Once you actively engage in behavior modeling techniques, you’ll start to see more and more positive member interactions with community staff, which in turn led to more positive interactions by employees. Instead of a negative feedback loop, we created a positive one.

This advice was published in our community case study Improving Community Sentiment. You can download your own copy here.

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.

5 Ways to Build Engagement with Padraic Ryan

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5 Ways to Build Engagement

Lessons from The NEW Community Manager Handbook is a limited-run podcast series, featuring the 21 community leaders showcased in the Handbook in conversation with Anne Mbugua.

Episode Six, 5 Ways to Build Engagement, features Padraic Ryan, Community Manager at eCommerceFuel.

Padraic and Anne Mbugua discuss 5 ways to build engagement that the eCommerceFuel team use within their private community. Padriac shares best practices for onboarding, creating community value for members, and how to get members’ attention in an increasingly noisy world.

Listen to 5 Ways to Build Engagement with Padraic Ryan

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About Padraic Ryan

In Padriac’s words…

I wanted to be an Architect since I was a little kid thanks to watching way too many episodes of the Brady Bunch. I took drafting classes in High School and even drafted up some plans for a new house for one of my teachers. I managed to somehow get into the prestigious University of Miami School of Architecture and where I learned from some of the world’s best Architects. Miami also taught me a LOT about the world which was even more valuable than the education.

I managed to score a great job, moved to Connecticut (not my first choice), and became a licensed Architect. Sadly, the profession wasn’t all that Mike Brady made it out to be, and I quickly realized it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing with my life. I learned a bit about website design in school and started building sites for friends and family on the side. It quickly turned into a lucrative practice, and in 2003 I founded Ryan Design Studio. In 17 years my team and I built over 500 sites for eCommerce businesses all over the world.

I’d been a member of eCommerceFuel.com for years, and when the opportunity presented itself in 2019 to become the Community Manager, I jumped at the chance. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

On the personal side of things, my wife and I live in a small, rural town in New Hampshire close to where I grew up. I enjoy travel (when there isn’t a pandemic), growing my own food, brewing my own beer, spending time in the woods/mountains, home improvement and I’m still as addicted to video games as I was when I was a kid (and can afford a MUCH better gaming rig now!).

About eCommerceFuel

eCommerceFuel is a private, 1000+ member community for experienced 7-figure+ store owners. Our average member owns a business doing $2.6 million in revenue and has been in the eCommerce world for more than 7.5 years. Members get real-time help with just about any problem they can imagine, access over 20,000 archived discussions, access to a proprietary review directory with10,000+ member-submitted software and service provider reviews, and invitations to exclusive members-only events and meetups, including our popular ECF Live annual conference.

You can learn more at: https://www.ecommercefuel.com

About The NEW Community Manager Handbook

The NEW Community Manager Handbook features 21 profiles of community leaders sharing advice and ideas on everything from accessibility, hiring, strategy, gamification, defining the digital workplace, technology, and more. Each profile is paired with research from the State of Community Management reports and includes tactical advice for implementing what you’ve learned.

Learn from community management experts at Easterseals, Glencore, Microsoft, UKG, the World Bank Group, Analog Devices, Inc., AAMC, Zapier, Doctors Without Borders, and more.

5 Ways to Build Engagement

Want more than 5 ways to build engagement?

You can find more resources for building community engagement programs here.

CMHandbook-Transcript-PadraicRyanDownload

Using Rewards Programs to Drive Engagement

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Rewards Programs

As organizations increasingly use community-led programs to connect with their customers, their online ecosystems expand. What may have started as one centralized community can extend into many brand- or solution-specific online hubs. Specialized communities can attract more engaged and enthusiastic participants, but whole ecosystem discovery can be challenging.

The Blue Prism Community is large — spread over several domains — and its users had this tendency to “stay close to home” without venturing to other areas of the Community.

Kevin Barnes, and the Blue Prism Community Team, used rewards programs to encourage a higher level of engagement from all their users which resulted in creating a more vibrant and interactive Community ecosystem.

Read the Blue Prism Story

About Blue Prism

Unifying workforces. Digital first. People enriched.

In the same way offshore workers changed the makeup of workforces 30 years ago, today Blue Prism intelligent automation is redefining the workforce and the work they do, helping customers realize the benefits of a digital first, human enriched operation. Imagine a world where people, intelligent digital workers in the form of software robots, and ever-changing systems come together seamlessly as a single, unified workforce. Businesses intelligently deploy the right workers to the right process at the right moment, around the clock. Transforming the enterprise into a carefully orchestrated, always-on machine. Easily managing unanticipated issues or circumstances. Handling workforce surges when needed throughout the year. And completely re-thinking traditional business models and job descriptions, across a connected enterprise – from operations to finance to HR to customers. All the while, businesses are creating better operational agility, productivity, competitiveness, and customer delight. They’re also creating happier people, that continue to grow and add greater value to the business. With Blue Prism, that world is here today.

Read more Community Case Studies

Interested in more online community management case studies? Learn how top community programs at organizations like Aetna, The Pragmatic Institute, Heifer International, The World Bank Group, and more use community-led programs to increase engagement, boost customer loyalty, improve the employee experience, encourage innovation, and more.

Five Ways New Member Programs Impact Long-Term Engagement in Your Community

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One of the most consistent findings in our State of Community Management research is on the impact of new member programs in getting increased long-term engagement. It makes sense – having someone welcome you, give you some ground rules on behaviors, give you a tour of the community, etc., makes new members more comfortable, and you’re more likely to dip a toe in a new community if you have ideas for how to do it.

One of the hardest things to remember is that while the new member process can seem boring and rote to the person conducting it, to the new member it’s all brand new.

Luckily, automation has come a long way in the last few years, allowing even the smallest community team (we see you, lone wolves) to have a big impact on the way new members start their community journey with you.

Here are five ways you can make sure your new member onboarding process helps your audience feel connected to your community and set them up for long-term engagement.

1 – Create a member journey: Start at the very beginning by designing a welcome campaign for new members. What do you want them to know about your community? How do members typically engage with each other? What are the most common questions new members ask? You can use these questions to draft a series of emails that are easy to digest and help your new members get acclimated to the details of your community. Delivering the information in small, easy to act on, pieces makes sure they don’t get overwhelmed and give up.

Another easy way to help members learn the norms of your community is to create a sandbox or learning space within the community. Once you identify what behaviors you want to encourage in your community, you can design ways for new members to engage in low-stakes ways as they get started. This could include introduction threads, quick-start guides for filling out profile details, or gamified touchpoints for exploring the community itself.

2 – Personalize the experience: Even the largest communities can provide personalized experiences for new members. You can use automated emails to introduce yourself (and/or your community team) and make sure new members how they can get in touch with you. Smaller communities or communities with a low volume of new members can even offer personal calls. If it’s larger, offer group calls at regular intervals. Next: throw out the canned emails. While automation is your friend, the template emails that come with a lot of platforms don’t convey the tone and culture of your specific community. You can use platform templates, but make sure you rewrite them to match the tone and voice of your community. The goal is to make all emails and automated messages to feel like they’re coming from a real person: you!

3 – Nurture member growth Just because you planted the seeds doesn’t mean these new members will sprout into active, engagement users. One way to stay connected is through drip campaigns in email, the platform, or elsewhere to keep in touch with new members. Use these regular touchpoints to encourage key behaviors, engagement in certain content and programming, or give access to new areas as they progress through their community journey.

Alongside that automation, make sure you’re personally checking in. Make time (even if it’s just 15 minutes a week) to monitor and measure their engagement and reach out at regular intervals. We’ve found it’s helpful to set up a reoccurring 15-minute (or longer) block of time on your calendar to do personal outreach each week.

4 – Celebrate and feature new members It can be tempting (and often easier) to recognize long-term community members for their contributions, but highlighting new members is equally important. Consider content that will spotlight new members to the rest of the community so they can get to know each other. Another easy way to get new members in front of the whole community is to tag them in regular programming, like a weekly work-out-loud thread.

Another way to engage and encourage new members is to celebrate their “firsts” – first posts, first questions, first events, etc. You can use their ”firsts” as opportunities to connect, reinforce behaviors, and get feedback – and this can often be automated within your community platform.

5 – Involve your community in onboarding Use your advocates, champions, or veteran members as a “Welcome Wagon” that can reach out and connect with new members. This creates connections as well as identifies members who can help each other as peers. Make sure you, and your welcome wagon members are modeling the behavior you want to encourage. Have veteran members welcome, like, ask questions, share, etc. around new members and feature/encourage that behavior to model the ideal engagement in your community.

This is the one area where automation will be least helpful. You may need to backchannel and prompt members to help or connect with a new member. If a new member shares a question and people aren’t answering right away, reach out to a veteran member who you know will have a great answer and ask them to respond and tag another member to get a conversation started.

The goal of all new member programs is to set your members up for success in your community, and that is going to look very different depending on your use case, the size of your community, and your ideal engagement goals. You want new members to have good first experiences and see how to engage and get valuable interactions to make their time in your community rewarding.

Community Conversations – Episode #78: Stephanie Weiner

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Community Conversations is a long-running podcast highlighting community success stories from a wide variety of online community management professionals.

Episode #78 of Community Conversations features Stephanie Weiner Director, Digital Strategy & Engagement at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

We chat about converting digital skeptics, using a playbook to scale community initiatives, and replacing email with community programs to create evergreen knowledge bases online.

Listen now:

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3 Ways to Increase Member Engagement From SAS, Cloudera, and National Instruments

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Need to increase engagement in your online community? Three companies share ways they increase engagement with their online audience.

3 Ways to Boost Members Engagement From SAS, Cloudera, and National Instruments

If you are struggling with engagement in your online community then you aren’t alone. Improving and maintaining online engagement is the number one challenge for community managers.

PowerPoint Presentation

There is a lot of discussion around what ideal engagement looks like in communities and the most often cited engagement rule of thumb is the “90-9-1 Rule” originally purposed by the Neilson Norman Group in 2006.

There has been a significant amount of subsequent research that has both confirmed and debunked that ratio. In reality, there are many of factors that impact engagement rates, including:

  • Community strategy
  • Community age
  • Management and moderation
  • Size and membership requirements
  • Member characteristics
  • Infrastructure, integration, and functionality

The State of Community Management research has consistently shown communities can generate much higher rates on average, but these rates still fluctuate considerably based on the community’s use case and management. What is true? Every community program can determine its ideal engagement rates given its goals, knowing that more of one of engagement behavior is not always better than another. It is critical to align engagement rates with business and member objectives.

Below, three organizations share a look at how community programs have had strategic, operational, and tactical on their business.

1. SAS: The Strategic Impact of Community

SAS has a mature customer community that delivers significant value throughout the customer experience. While its roots are in customer support, the community also drives customer satisfaction, brand awareness, and increasingly, a leading source of information on new solutions and innovation.

The community has become the hub of SAS expertise online and complements other channels like GitHub and YouTube. The community’s search results, in turn, inform and prioritize marketing content, which brings even more people into the SAS ecosystem.

As a mature community with a lot of captured knowledge, its rate of successful searches is a remarkable 74%. When combined with a monthly search volume of 17,000 inside the community – and 9x that comes from Google – the SAS community creates a pull that is hard to replicate with more traditional marketing approaches. This performance results is an impressive ROI of 1,026% even without accounting for public search referrals. Learn more.

2. Cloudera: The Operational Impact of Community

The Cloudera community has 1200 answers contributed monthly and the community sees hundreds of thousands of searches – 95% of which are successful. Because Cloudera has a complex product stack, which requires deep and broad business and technical skills, the average value of an answer is high – well above the industry average – making the value of the program impressive and compelling.

Now Cloudera’s community program has scaled beyond the support model and is also delivering on marketing-centric objectives; communications effectiveness, customer retention, and revenue growth. This is driving the need for business integration that often accompanies mature communities and suggests the community is a key enabler of the customer experience more holistically. Cloudera has achieved this maturity thanks to investments in both strategy and business management, which differentiates it from many of its peers. Learn more.

3. National Instruments: The Tactical Impact of Community

National Instruments’ community is designed to provide its customers with scaled peer-to-peer support – a well-understood and highly successful application of community approaches. Looking at its engagement profile, it fits the high lurker/listener to active member model of many support communities. And, when we break down the 1% that are actively engaging, we can see that the vast bulk of the 5,360 active members are asking and answering questions- and driving value for over 500,000 others, who can solve their issues without ever having to ask a question.

The maturity of the community and the continuing engagement of 1% of it results in a 93% click-through rate on searches. Given that the value of an answer is well over $100 – 50,000 searches a year results in millions of dollars in savings and opportunity for National Instruments – even if you assume only 5% of search results lead to a discovered answer. Learn more.

Want more details and tips on how to improve the strategic, operational, and tactical impact your community program has on online engagement?

This free ebook. Engaging to Unlock Retention, Trust, and Innovation, focuses on engagement, taking a deeper look at what drives engagement, the dynamics of engagement, its impact, and how engagement is being measured and reported in online communities today. Download now.