5 Tips for Creating Engagement in Your Community

Too often, we focus on member count, engagement rates, or growth metrics. Yet behind every healthy community lie simple but powerful mechanics: rituals that bring people together, spaces where everyone can contribute, moments where members feel truly useful to one another.

A vibrant community is one where a new member dares to ask their first question, where an expert spontaneously shares their experience, where collaborations naturally emerge between people who didn't know each other.

Here are my 5 essential tips for developing a framework conducive to engagement.

Tip #1: Build Your Community Around a Common Totem

What do all the communities I've contributed to have in common? Their ability to capitalize on a shared need. I call this the "community totem." A binding force that federates and unites members around a common cause/desire/objective. It's around this totem that members will gather, because it's what brings them value.

In Magma's case, the totem is exchange and reciprocity. The application allows organizations to provide social proof of their quality, prospects to get testimonials from people who match their profile, and ambassadors to receive recognition that can be intrinsic or extrinsic.

The ABC of community building is also and above all about giving before asking for anything in return. This is notably the recipe that allowed Eduvoices to gain momentum. By starting to share tools and letting my members take ownership of them, the community was able to deploy.

Partnerships built around the project, as well as resources, then nourished member engagement and created a virtuous cycle of mutual aid.

Unlike the corporate model, community building involves bringing value without systematically monetizing it. Shared content and created exchanges can be 100% free (at least initially).

From a sales perspective, this model is even more interesting as we're witnessing a transformation in sales models: acquisition costs are exploding, follow-up and decision-making time is lengthening, and showing logos or customer reviews is no longer enough. Community allows you to highlight ready-to-use practices, guides, or experience feedback and acts as a laboratory for collaborative content.

Tip #2: Think in Community Building Blocks

If communities gather around common totems, then what's the difference between community grouping and the exchange practices we can observe more spontaneously?

For me, everything can be community-oriented. In my view, a community is defined by a group of people driven by a common goal. It also organizes itself more formally to achieve it.

A totem is built with several ingredients:

• A shared vision and objective: These can be linked to fundamental needs (or not), depending on the nature of your community
• Values: The driving force that pushes a member to join your community and prioritize it over a similar community
• Rules and norms: To enable and preserve living (well) together
• Communication: Tools to facilitate achieving the common objective
• Leaders and engagement drivers: Concentric circles with first the core team, then ambassadors. And then, the nebula that occasionally gets involved in community life.

This is a very Anglo-Saxon vision of communities. We find it notably in American electoral campaign playbooks (particularly Bernie Sanders').

Tip #3: Create an Intra-Community Value Flow

More and more companies cannot function without their community's support. They are first Research & Development laboratories, to better understand their clients' needs. But also an exchange gateway through which to offer value that isn't just transactional. And thus create a real trust relationship with their audience.

I take the example of WordPress, which managed to transcend its users' status to transform them into contributors. These now participate in creating new plugins, share feedback to improve the interface and user experience.

A real open-source wave in Artificial Intelligence is deploying thanks to Hugging Face where thousands of developers contribute to improving LLM models around the world.

Same for communities like Tupperware and WeightWatchers, which participate in training their members, in exchange for enriching their content (with new recipes, for example) and perfecting their products and services.

This value flow, coming from members, the community, and the brand alike, enriches the common totem and meets everyone's needs.

Tip #4: Deploy Your Community Engagement Loop

It's essential to create contribution pathways for community members to allow newcomers to integrate well and offer older members progression within the community if they wish.

It's not uncommon to invest heavily in communication to bring as many people as possible into the community without thinking about a community member's lifecycle.

Salesforce managed to deploy an entire experience by gamifying this cycle to allow new members to benefit from advice and answers via the forum, but to quickly share their own advice to finally become real ambassadors.

The impact is enormous for the company: they estimate that adoption of their solution is 35% faster, they save millions of dollars on the Customer Support department, and drastically shorten their R&D time.

Tip #5: Think About Continuity

The last little secret ingredient I'd like to share concerns one of the primary causes of community mortality. This cause is making the community rely too heavily on its Community Builders. It's an essential role but shouldn't be the community's central point. A Community Builder should foster connection and not be the totem itself.

For this, you must already think about people leaving this role to make room for others and allow continuity of what they've created. The ingredient for this is documenting, sharing, and transmitting to others. Nearly 45K TEDx events have been organized thanks to this swarming logic and documentation setup.

Here again, it's up to the leader who initiated the community launch to show empathy. And provide the right tools to foster engagement that's sustainable for members (often volunteers).

I hope these tips from my experience will help you create more engaging and sustainable communities! Feel free to share your feedback and experiences with me.