How to create an engaging community?

TogetherCrew

Published in

TogetherCrew

3 min readJun 13, 2024

Author: Katerina, Co-Lead, TogetherCrew

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Everyone talks about it, but nobody really knows what it is: Community engagement. The knee jerk reply to What is community engagement, is, people posting, but that’s not enough for projects to be successful.

What is community engagement?

Engagement is an umbrella term that is popular in a lot of contexts. The ones I came across are employee engagement, student engagement, and, of course, community engagement. Umbrella terms like engagement are dangerous. Everyone thinks they know what it is, but that’s a lie.

It’s a lie because of what engagement is, is different for each community and is closely tied to the goal of the community. The type of engagement an NFT artist wants to see in their community is different to the type of engagement I want to see in my community of community managers.

Community engagement is

“an action community members do, that has a positive and direct impact on the project’s success”

How to find out what type of engagement is right for your community?

This is going to be an iterative process. Best is to not overthink it at the start. You’ll gonna tweak it anyway.

Step 1: Know your project metrics

To know what type of community member behavior is key for you, you need to know what metrics are key for your project. Here are some examples

number of mints — typical for NFT artists
number of subscribers or sign-ups — typical for writers, media companies, event organizers
number of listeners — typical for podcast/video creators
number of transactions — typical for defi apps
number of downloads — typical for (d)apps, podcast hosts
number of projects — typical for protocols
number of donations — typical for public goods grant foundation

Your project metric could also be an event. For example

live on mainnet
listed on an exchange
speaking at a conference
sign a big partner

Step 2: Know what influences your project metrics

Now, starting with your project metrics reason backwards to figure out which member actions have an impact on your project metrics. Ideally use data. Humans are great at lying to themselves. If you don’t have data, talk with others about it.

Here are some examples:

People listen to a podcast/watch a video/read an article after it has been discussed by someone else

It’s nothing new that social proofs via word-of-mouth are important for any creator or company. That means the type of engagement you want to incentives is members talking about your creations. Yes, it’s posting, but not every post drives the engagement you like to see. You need to narrow down on posts that talk about your creations

Make it easy for your members through sharing assets, one-liner, or sentences they can customize (e.g., TIL from [show name] about …).

People are more likely to use a product if good documentation is available or the customer support channel is active.

Again, you want members to post in the support channel, but not spam it. Low quality or irrelevant posts will make new users shirk away from your product. Keep an eye on who is answering questions and reward those who do it. Make it easy to update and translate your documentation. Get the core team to be present in the support channel.

Step 3: Make it easy for people to engage

And finally, now that you finished your prep, it’s time to create processes and incentives to increase community engagement. Your goal is to make it super easy for members to do the behavior you want to do it. Take decision fatigue away from them, and make the benefits super obvious. That kind of things.

Continuing the examples from above

To get people to talk about your creations, they need to have read/watch/listen to it.

Here your goal is to make it easy for people to know about your creations. You can do watch parties, share snippets of your creations on different channels, incentive sharing favorite quotes, or voting on the best piece.