For community managers and membership directors, keeping members engaged takes more than occasional updates or event invitations. It requires a clear strategy to encourage participation, build meaningful connections, and give members reasons to stay involved.
But with limited time and a diverse membership base, it can be challenging to know which engagement efforts work and which members need more attention.
The right community engagement practices help associations create more valuable member experiences, strengthen relationships, and encourage long-term participation.
In this guide, we'll cover 6 community engagement best practices and the metrics that show which ones work for your members so you work from a data-informed perspective.
Let’s start with a quick overview of the community engagement strategies that work best in member communities:
We’ll discuss each practice in detail below.
Community engagement in a member organization is the ongoing relationship that forms when your members interact with your organization as well as talk with peers and learn alongside them.
For example, when members participate in a discussion hosted by your association, answer a fellow member’s question, or share takeaways from a recent training session, they strengthen their relationships with both the organization and its community. Members who only open your newsletter, on the other hand, consume information without actively participating in the community.
But what does community engagement mean for your daily work?
Engagement has levels that members reach at their own speed. Quiet readers who apply a post to their work are also engaged, even if they don’t reply. Your most involved members usually start threads, lead groups, volunteer, and more.
Each member's level tells you which invitation to send next, such as a question for a reader or a role for a contributor.
Every renewal is a critical decision a member makes about whether your organization still matters to their work.
Here’s why community engagement is important to that decision:
Community engagement builds momentum as long as members keep participating.
However, you might notice the momentum breaking in the 3 places below:
The 6 practices below target these stall points, beginning with a welcome that gives newcomers a first step.
As a community manager or membership director, you can increase community engagement using the practices below, even with a small team:
You'll want to greet every new member with a personal message that points to a discussion thread that matches their role because one clear first step works better than a long list of options. Newcomers who aren't sure where to start often leave without posting or interacting with others.
At the end of the first month, you can ask each new member which part of the welcome package helped most. Their answers will show you the steps to keep and which ones to improve. For instance, if a member says they hoped to meet others in their field, you have an easy cue to introduce them to a peer with a similar specialty.
Direct each new and continuing member to the groups that match their career stage and specialty.
Use a community engagement solution with searchable directories and matchmaking to help members find peers on their own. You can also use the solution to automatically recommend groups based on profile and activity, pointing them to spaces they might otherwise miss.
You can keep revisiting the match when a member changes roles or earns a new credential because members need different peers at different career levels.
Start conversations around the learning you already offer, with a discussion thread before each webinar and another afterwards.
If your learning and community systems are disconnected, members who finish a course will join a community without context.
Ask your learning staff to add a discussion prompt to every continuing education track and link it to the matching group. Members can then apply what they just learned with peers who also took the course.
Invite your most active contributors to help you moderate the groups they know best because your online community moderation process is more likely to succeed with volunteers who already understand the culture.
For example, volunteers who understand your culture well enough can tell a lively debate from a heated argument and step in to neutralize the situation.
You can rotate duties to protect volunteers from burnout, and use member spotlights or elevated roles to thank them and encourage them to continue helping.
Set a regular schedule for posts or other types of content in a way that members anticipate when the next live webinar or discussion prompt will appear. The right rhythm varies with group size and members' time zones, so you might want to consider a trial with one group.
To keep your content differentiated and valuable, ensure you have a good mix of online community engagement activities such as expert Q&As and member spotlights. Fewer, better posts earn more attention than a crowded feed full of announcements.
Review your participation data after each cycle and adjust the days and formats that don’t perform as expected.
Tell members what happened after they offer some input, such as answering a poll or suggesting a topic. Your short update on which ideas moved forward and which won't happen shows members that someone read their input.
Try as much as possible to reply to individual suggestions with a status, including a polite no when a request doesn't fit your plans.
The recurring questions and searches can feed a member-driven roadmap for your learning catalog. You can even tell a member that a decision started with their question, which is likely to give them a reason to keep contributing.
Once the practices are in motion, you'll want evidence that they're working. Let’s review some metrics that provide that evidence.
A metric like the number of posts shows how busy your community is, but you can do better with sharper metrics that show whether your members benefit.
Here are 2 groups of metrics that cover participation and results:
Participation metrics show whether members take part and whether they come back.
Here are 2 key ones to consider:
While participation metrics show how active your members are, your board will also want to see the effect on renewals and revenue.
Renewal and revenue metrics show what participation means for your organization.
You can measure the following 2 key metrics to link your members’ activity to results:
You can use a return on engagement calculator, which combines multiple parameters into one main figure that estimates the overall value your community produces.
The practices above work better when your tools make them easy for members and manageable for your team. Associations and professional networks that act on member data early gain a competitive edge as members’ expectations rise.
To find the right community engagement solution, check the options against the 3 capabilities below:
At Forj, we offer a community and learning experience for associations and professional networks. We bring community and learning into one place and add insights that show which topics and activities keep your members engaged.
The 4 parts below support specific practices from the sections above:
Explore the Forj experience to see how community and learning can work together for your members.
Here are answers to common questions about community engagement best practices in associations and professional networks:
A small team can keep a member community active by sharing the work with volunteers and sticking to a schedule members can anticipate.
You can set up role-based permissions that let trusted members moderate their own groups, freeing up staff time for welcome messages and replies to member questions.
Community engagement and community involvement sound alike, but involvement stops at taking part in something you organize, such as an event or a committee.
Engagement goes further because members help each other and return by choice, drawn by how the community supports their work.
In an association or professional network, community engagement belongs with the team closest to members, usually the membership or community management team.
The exact owner depends on the size and leadership hierarchy in your organization.
To keep a community active, a community manager needs strong writing and moderation skills, plus the ability to review participation data.
Strong community engagement skills also include the ability to listen to member feedback constructively and knowing when a quiet group needs a nudge.
It can take different amounts of time for each organization to see results from a community engagement program, depending on membership size and where your activity starts.
Participation metrics, such as active member rate, appear first. Renewal and revenue changes follow once your members have had a full renewal cycle to respond.
The right community engagement best practices work because they begin with what your members want, which may be a peer to talk to or an answer to a work problem. When you welcome people well and answer them when they speak up, you can expect them to stay and interact with your organization and their peers.
You don't need a big team to do the work well, but you do need tools that work together. As a community and learning experience solution made for associations and professional networks, Forj prioritizes your members' needs, including peer-to-peer learning.
Our team works alongside yours on strategy and implementation and helps your learning staff design courses members will want to talk about with their peers. Between conferences, push notifications on the mobile app bring members back to the conversation. You also see early warnings about retention risk in time to reach out personally.
Let's build your member journey together and give your members reasons to return year-round.