Tying engagement to your organization’s goals.
Let’s bring this whole engagement conversation home, shall we?
It’s time to map out the direct path from an engagement action to whatever your primary goals are. We don’t want to ever focus on random “engagement.”
Grab a notepad (digital or paper), and write down your answers to these questions. You can do this exercise periodically to ensure that you're on track.
- First, what is your organization’s primary goal right now?
For example, launch new marketing software. - What is your community strategy? (See: Building an online community strategy from scratch.)
For example, gather feedback from early beta users of your software, via a private forum. - What is your community goal and objective?
For example, provide the software developer team with user-sourced stories of how the software was effective or ineffective, with the objective of finalizing the roadmap for your product. - What engagement behaviors do you want to encourage or incentivize?
For example, posting new forum topics to share user stories, upvoting other users’ product suggestions, and answering survey questions from the product team. - What tactics will you use to encourage these behaviors?
For example, respond quickly to new topics, set up the gamification to reward reactions/votes and survey completions, and recognize users whose suggestions get a high number of votes.
Once you’ve gone through these questions and answered with specifics, you’ll have a simple roadmap that gives meaning to your community project. You can use it to stay on track, explain it to colleagues, and guide decision-making.
Next up, let's talk about how to grow your membership.
Sparking Engagement