How to handle engagement

It’s Wednesday, October 4th, and today we’re talking about the nuances of community engagement and some really bad ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ scenarios.

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How to handle engagement

Petition to abolish the word “Engagement” 🙋🏻‍♀️

We need to reframe the way we think about community engagement.

It’s our biggest fear: getting a bunch of people together and sitting in awkward silence. But in our attempt to incentivize, entice, demand, and throw pennies into the engagement wishing well, we are missing the mark and doing more damage than good. Today I want to teach you:

• What to realistically expect your community to look like

• How not to incentivize engagement

• Three real-life examples of thoughtful programming

Much of your community should be passive.

One of the first questions I ask new clients is “What’s your biggest community fear?”

99.9999% of the time, the answer is the same: engagement. More specifically, lack thereof.

Many will ask how close they can get to 100% engagement.

Engagement is such a nuanced topic. It feels like folks use the word as a gauge for interest or whether their members are finding value in their day-to-day interactions. But that’s a problematic interpretation, mostly because it dismisses the variances of learning types and personalities inside of your community. A healthy community has a lot of passive users.

Note: I’m trying not to get mired down in language because it’s all a bit off. Passive is the wrong word, lurker is the wrong word, and even “power member” is a very strange phrase—but for our purposes, passive means those who enter your community and hang out, but don’t speak up

There is a really common community framework called the 90-9-1 Rule. It states that you can expect 90% of your community to be passive, 9% active, and 1% power. There is a lot of questioning as to whether this is still an accurate framework, but even anecdotally, you can observe these rough ratios at work in most healthy communities. Telling a new community builder “90% of your members will probably be quiet!” seems like tragic news, but…

Let’s play a little “Choose Your Own Adventure.”

You’ve been invited to a party. When the big day arrives, you carefully choose a great outfit, spray on a little fragrance, head out the door, and drive just outside of the city, arriving at a large, beautiful estate home. The door is already open, and you walk through….

Which scene do you want to walk into?

Scene #1

👀 The house is eerily quiet. There are a few murmurs or whispers, but it’s mostly a few hundred people standing around staring at each other.

Scene #2

🥱 There is mild chatter everywhere, but the only topics are the weather, what you do for a living, and the phrase “living the dream.” Nothing else.

Scene #3

🗣️ Everyone is yelling over and interrupting each other. No one is paying any thoughtful attention because they all have a point to make.

It’s likely that none of these scenarios are particularly enticing—they’re all off-balance somehow. But they are what a community of all passive, active, or power users would feel like.

Every member type depends on the others.

Power members need passive members in order to be heard/read.

Active users level-set the hum.

Your priority, then, is to make sure those who are actively engaged are quality, heard, and incentivized to continue—not to get to 100% engagement.

Do Not Do This

Let’s go to another party…

I’m having a dinner party for about 100 people and you’re invited.

Which of these is most interesting to you:

1. As soon as the party starts, I’m going to clink my spoon against my glass and tell everyone what my stance on abortion is.

2. I’m going to put one of those old-school trick buzzers in my palm and go around shaking everyone’s hand, zapping them, then loudly say, “HAHA, ASSHAT, YOU FELL FOR IT.”

3. We’re going to sit in a circle, all 100 of us, and go around the room telling everyone what our favorite color is and the last dream we had. No time limit.

(Sidenote: I really enjoy coming up with lame scenarios. Is there a world in which I can get paid to do this?)

In each scenario, engagement is high, but at what cost?

I was once working with a company whose leadership didn’t understand the importance of community strategy. While on a call, I was trying to get them to work through community goals and outcomes. Exasperated, one responded, “Take your pick—it doesn’t matter, because the end goal is engagement.”

Oh, yeah?

If that were our true goal, then the strategy would be simple:

Boobs. Post boobs. Post ‘em every day. All kinds—doesn’t matter. Every morning: boobs. I guarantee I can rock those engagement numbers.

There are innumerable terrible ways you can get lots of people to engage, a few that seem perfectly logical but will backfire: incentives. In a desire to guarantee people will talk, community leaders will offer swag, special recognition, free gifts, and a myriad of other rewards. It’s a bad idea. Appealing to members’ extrinsic motivation is a losing game. What small burst of energy you may get will fizzle, because they were only modifying behavior to get a prize, not because they inherently find participating in your community valuable.

Want better engagement? Real engagement? Be invested in their outcomes.

Three real-life examples of thoughtful programming

I have thrown quite a few parties, both personally and professionally, and here are three ways I’ve thoughtfully handled engagement:

1. 2X: In 2021 I ran an event called 2X which highlighted women founders. I spent $60 on Moo and had custom cards made, each with different conversation starters on the back. Stuff like:

a. Do you believe that anyone can really be self-made?

b. Who is the last person who truly inspired you?

c. What is more important: justice or forgiveness?

The cards were sprinkled all over the venue and they took all of the awkward small talk out of the room.

2. Salon Series: In 2018, I ran a series of community dinners in SoCal. They were quite small (max. 15 people), all attendees were carefully selected, and three rules had to be followed:

a. You weren’t allowed to ask about vocation until after the meal was served.

b. Cell phones must be left in cars or at the door.

c. You were asked to bring one homemade dish that reflected a culture or tradition in your life.

One of my favorite moments came when a guy brought mac and cheese with cut-up hot dogs in it. He said, “I didn’t have a healthy family life or much money growing up, so this was considered a real treat. To this day, it feels like a luxury.”

We did, indeed, eat the hot dog mac and cheese. Happily.

3. Infuse Dance Camp: In the fall of 2019, I took about 40 dancers up into the mountains of Arrowhead, California, where we rented cabins on an old YMCA campground for a three-day camp trip.

No cell phones or laptops were allowed.

Each camper had to have a bunk adjacent to at least one person they didn’t know well.

When they arrived at camp, they each drew the name of one person to whom they’d have to write a letter a few days later. This made them pay a special kind of attention to each other.

It was such a special time.

In each of the scenarios, the first planning questions were simple:

Who is this for, and what are we trying to do?

These are not universal strategies. Entrepreneurs and marketers, for example, are a bit less enamored with the warm fuzzies as a whole. It’s a terrific problem to tackle; to understand what makes a community come alive and how to make it happen.

Engagement in itself is a meaningless goal. But engagement driven by data, empathy, and purpose? That’s the stuff of excellent communities.

Marinade

A few things I’ve read this week that are worth soaking in:

• Josh Spector on Doing a month’s worth of a work in a day.

• An oldie but a goodie by Stephen Guise on why Tomorrow is not your friend.

• Speaking of engagement, check out Commsor’s playbook for achieving effective, purpose-driven community engagement

Onward,

April

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