4 Wheels That Run an Engaging Community
I had recently given an overview in my previous blog on “What is the mantra to keep your community engaged”. Now to take it a step forward, in this blog, I will be discussing the 4 wheels which drive community engagement.
- Rituals
- Weekly Sessions by Industry Experts or Influencers
- Events (Offline/Online)
- Community Catchups
Now let us quickly dive in to ensure how the above engagement activities can be planned and executed for a community.
First Wheel — Rituals
There’s a famous saying that ‘the secret of epic performers is their daily rituals’. Replace ‘performers’ with communities and ‘daily’ as per your convenience And BINGO, your community will be an Epic Community.
Here are a few examples of Rituals you can take reference from:
- In Weekly Rituals, you can fix a particular day in a week for sharing your events or posting some blogs which are relevant to the community, and this should be recurring.
- The monthly rituals can be an event wherein people from your community and people outside your community join and learn about your community. Along with the engagement, we also need to focus on the growth of our community!
- The yearly ritual can be a flagship event of your community, for example, a conference or a hackathon.
Now, you must be wondering how to ensure that these rituals are being followed? Let me keep it very simple to achieve this:
- Your community should have a very awesome and interactive moderator who can connect with people and post content according to the interest of the community.
- Plan a content calendar for your community for at least a month. It will help you to be consistent and set a reminder for the posting of content.
Second Wheel — Weekly Sessions by Industry Experts or Influencers
Plan and organise weekly sessions regularly, always be consistent. You can invite Industry Experts with the relevant interests of your community. Let’s suppose you have a community for community builders. You can ask someone who has experience around community building, and they can share their experiences and stories which would eventually create awareness of community building in your members. These sessions can be open discussions between the experts and the members. Ask the members to introduce themselves and then drive a healthy conversation.
There are things which you have to ensure while organising weekly sessions: The topic, speaker and the content should be relevant to your community, or else folks from your community might not turn up!
Third Wheel — Events (Offline/Online)
The events can be referred to the speaker sessions, panel discussion & AMA’s for offline meetups and webinars for online meetups. These events can be for folks outside your community as this would help your community to grow, and you would find a lot of relevant and new people for your community.
The events part helps you in ways; firstly, It becomes an engagement activity for your members, and secondly, You get to meet new folks and listen to their ideas and thoughts which helps your community grow.
Fourth Wheel — Community Catchups
The Community Catchups are solely for you and your community members. You can discuss your upcoming initiatives and take their feedback. This creates engagement in your community. The members start knowing each other and are more likely to share their ideas!
You can organise these community catchups over Dinner or Lunch but then in the current scenario where the whole world has moved online, you can decide a day and organise a virtual meetup and have a plan to discuss anything. Members can share what are the problems which they are facing and people in the community can give some suggestions.
While keeping all these points in mind, there is one more part which a community should focus on, Retention of the members in the community
Are you facing a challenge to retain members of your community?
The most disheartening part for any community builder is when the people of your community start leaving your group. How to avoid this?
Well, for retaining the members of your community you need to have quality content in your group/channel. The members should find it useful, and it should align with their interests. And not to forget consistency. This is really important for you to ensure your community members are retained.
For instance, You are a developer, and you join a developer community. The community starts sharing content which is not relevant. So, what happens after a certain period. You would eventually lose interest, and you wouldn’t want to be part of the community and then these folks silent in the group.
So, summing up all the points — You have to start from building your community, engage with them & should also focus on the retention of the members of the community.
I am very sure there would be a lot more points which could be added in this. I would love to listen to your thoughts and experiences!
