Inside Community Building, engagement is a big word.
There are many things that will trigger a higher engagement, in this article we will walk you through some of the best practices to create a high engagement community.
Goal Setup and Planning
There are two concepts that you need to learn when working with a community.
First in community building you have to understand what is that you have to offer and what your audience wants. This defines the community goals.
Second, it comes to the planning phase that even adding the right tools you must have a good planning strategy.
Understanding your Community Goals
As part of building a community, you must set your community goals. These goals are key to bring more engagement and interact with members.
In Innovation programs these are some common goals:
- Offer a good list of professionals and experts to get mentoring from.
- Find relevant content for building companies.
- Having Perks and discounts available for companies.
- Organize events for networking.
- Send Newsletters with a summary of activities, events and news.
- Provide regular updates about news and accomplishments.
- Provide specialized courses.
Plan your week (or even your days)
Planning is key and I will re-iterate constantly that this makes the most of you in the community.
The plan helps you to "be consistent". Make sure to have a proper planning of all publications, events, meetings, and announcement so that your community engages.
Tips to grow engagement
We will go through some tips that will help you to engage more and more your community.
Be Consistent
Communities, in general, die because of lack of consistency. If members are seeing low traffic, people start dropping off and reducing interest. One of the major causes of dropping member engagement is for communities that are not consistent on their deliveries and does not provide the right interest to their members.
Set up a schedule, book events in advance and have a plan week by week on how you will engage your community.
Ask questions
Asking questions to your community is the best way to maintain a conversation with them.
You will be thinking that this is for members to do, but in a community you must flip constantly the roles to stand on their shoes.
Asking questions, shows your members that you are a real person like them, and you are also here to learn from them.
Looking open and vulnerable, makes your community realize that you are real. That helps you build your trust with them.
Diversify your content
When building a community from a particular topic or area of interest, it is always nice to diversify into different topics not directed related to the area.
That helps your community and members interested when you deliver different content.
Sometimes you can just diversify on the type of content delivered such as visual images, blog post, carrousels, etc.
This can benefit you when creating content too, as it is getting boring to focus in one area so that you can explore other common areas of interest that your community might be interested.
Next level onboarding experience
This starts with your goals and objectives. Creating an onboarding experience is what makes the difference.
Onboarding is the practice to introduce all the benefits, tools, and takeaways to your members in a quick and simple way.
Onboarding has to be easy and simple to go through. You wouldn't want your members to drop out at the first intent of using your community.
Simplicity is difficult to achieve, that is why we constantly iterate that it must be clear your goals and objectives of the community.
Moderate
Moderation is key, closed communities make it easy to moderate as you are limiting your members to interact.
Members should be oriented on what are the best practices in the community. It is always nice to have your member present and being active at the same time that controlling and checking the community behavior.
When you have good moderation practices in place, it creates a good vibe in the community and makes people feel safe.
Best communities help your member to interact each other with as minimal friction as possible.
Create Dedicated Events
Events and working session with members of your community that are closed each other it shows that you are dedicated to them.
An accelerator that is agnostic to the industry can create events per industry or stages.
This makes the community more interesting and help members to connect independently afterwards, making the community mature in its own.
Share stories
Stories are what engagement means in books and movies, why will a community be different?
Members will always have some story that they would like to share, don't limit this to successes but also to failures.
People love to hear the successes and the failures in business as such so many popular shows have emerged to highlight them.
Another method is to ask your members to share feedback of success stories that companies using their product caused in their daily routines.
In summary, these are the key stories to share:
- Member's business success and failure stories: this is one of the best ways to support your community and engage them to participate. Everyone likes to share success stories, and few likes to share failures, however, highlighting the failure shows the learning curve of such person.
- The member's customers sharing success stories: your member's products will have a lot of success and possible even more bad feedback. Sharing them shows how the product has grown and what is the key objective being vulnerable to feedback.
- Your own successes and failures: as the owner of the community you can also share your own stories within the community if the same is old enough of by you presenting ways on how this community was built.
- Other success and failures publicly published: you can look and create content from podcasts and blogs to highlight other successes and failures that might interest to your community
Live streaming
Live streaming gives the WOW sense to your community showing great commitment to share with your member.
We have even written an article about it.
Tips to Create a Successful Live Streaming
Going Live is a beautiful sentiment, and you show the reality behind it. Don't forget to invite your members to join the conversation and interact with them in the comments.
Ask for feedback
Ask how what your members want.
Your members are the core of your community so you need to listen and execute so you can deliver better solutions.
Question and Answer events are really good to collect a collaborative feedback from your members and engage frequently.
Team Coaches works for you
Team Coaches is a community software that provides an unified way to maintain an engaged entrepreneurship community, offering tools for managing all the aspects of running an innovation program and maintaining prospects and companies' track.
A community for them and a solution for you!!!
If you like our product, you can book a demo, and we can discuss how we can fit into your programs.
