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5 Principles of Community Engagement
5 Principles of Community Engagement
5 Principles of Community Engagement
As community professionals, we know that it is never that simple. Attracting and maintaining a vibrant,
active brand community doesn’t happen on its own. Building a culture of engagement among your
members takes intention, careful planning, consistency, and hard work.
In this blog post, I’ll share the five principles of engagement that we embrace on my team at
BigCommerce. These best practices will help you create an environment where members are giving and
getting value from your brand and each other.
How your brand measures engagement may differ based on what activities and programs you offer. At
BigCommerce, we define engagement in our online community as the number of posts, comments,
reactions, badges, and events attended. When building efforts to increase engagement, we focus on
tactics to encourage and facilitate member-to-member conversations.
Great engagement is all about building value and connections among members. Our job as community
leaders is to continuously hone and innovate what we offer so the community is always bringing value to
the overall customer experience. To guide our efforts at BigCommerce, we reference these five
principles of community engagement.
If you are new to a team or launching a new community, start by researching your customer base. Work
cross-functionally with your friends across the organization and learn about any established customer
personas. Personas are profiles that help you and the business understand users' needs, experiences,
behaviors, and goals.
Beyond personas, one tactic that we’ve used at BigCommerce to better understand our members are
community surveys. Through surveys, we’ve been able to learn what job titles our members have, what
motivates them to join and participate, and what their values and needs are.
Gathering this data is key to uncovering the value that your community brings to its users. Ask yourself
— what is the glue that binds our group together? Why should these individuals care about each other?
The clearer you can get on your ‘why’, the more intentional you can be about your ‘how’.
A sample survey question from our last BigCommerce Community User Survey
Last but certainly not least, build personal relationships with your members. Actually get to know them!
The more that you can get to know your members on a personal level and connect with them one on
one, the stronger the foundation of your community will be. At BigCommerce, we frequently DM
members to introduce ourselves and set up calls to simply get to know each other better. Our goal is to
find out what makes people tick! What do they need to be more successful at their jobs? What areas of
our product do they feel really confident with? How can we help?
A template we use when DMing community members to introduce ourselves. Must be customized!
This next principle of engagement is one of my favorites. I strongly believe that in a community, the
focus should be on the people and their connections.
At BigCommerce, we let our members shine by proactively looking for opportunities to highlight
individuals, their expertise, and successes. We want the spotlight to be on them! This could be as simple
as giving someone a public shout-out for their contributions or achievements. When we can make our
members more visible, the more likely it is for them to find connections and build genuine relationships
with people like them.
The power of community is being around people just like you — people that are having similar
experiences, going through the same issues and challenges, want the same information, etc. Our mission
with engagement should be to bring those people together and help them find the connections and
answers they need. Focus on empowering and elevating the members with everything you do. When
creating opportunities for engagement, ask yourself, “Does this center our community members,
empower them, and/or help them build connections with one another?” If the answer is yes, then
you’ve got a great idea for engagement!
When brainstorming tactics to encourage engagement, start small. A great hack for spurring
conversation is to begin by offering discussion prompts in your online community spaces. These prompts
should be fun questions that any member can answer regardless of their expertise level.
In the BigCommerce Facebook Community Group, we have a weekly engagement ritual called 'GIF
Wednesday'. Each week, we publish a prompt asking for a gif reaction. Our members get a kick out of
finding the perfect gif response and it helps build a sense of togetherness in our group.
Engagement opportunities don’t have to be time-intensive for your community. Some members may not
have time to participate in an hour-long webinar, but do want to contribute to a simple group question.
The nature of your community will help dictate the direction for your prompts and, over time, you can
increase the amount of vulnerability and time that you’re seeking.
Your contributions should be supportive, welcoming, and helpful. Saying “thank you” and
acknowledging great questions and responses are easy ways to be supportive and a cheerleader for your
members.
Finally, don’t be afraid to let your personality shine through! The more that members feel like they’re in
a safe space, and that they can be their true selves, the more they will identify with your community and
care about fellow members. Introduce authenticity into your group by being YOUR authentic and
genuine self.
To make engagement part of your community’s DNA, you need a plan. This is not something you want to
wing or try to accomplish on the fly. Make life easier on yourself (and your team) with a content
calendar of thoughtful, well-crafted engagement touchpoints. I recommend building out an engagement
plan 2-3 weeks ahead of time. At BigCommerce, we use Airtable to coordinate our plans across multiple
team members and platforms.
Within your plan, it’s important to also track and measure results. Is the community interacting with
your discussion prompts? Is webinar attendance dropping? Looking at the performance data behind
your activities can be a great way to evaluate what’s working and what’s not.
From here, you can test and learn. Experimentation is part of community life. We won’t know if
something works unless we try it. If your GIF Wednesday posts consistently get low engagement, that’s
OK. Go back to the drawing board with these five principles and try something new.
And finally, give your engagement initiatives time to work. Not everything is going to be a smash hit the
first time you try it. Sometimes it can take a while to build momentum and give members experiences
they can consistently expect.
I hope these tips and best practices are helpful and can guide you when looking to boost your
community’s engagement. I’d love to hear what you think and what you have tried in your brand
community! You can find me on Twitter at @Laurenfaye512.
Lauren Clevenger