Seven ways to increase your members’ online community engagement

Looking for ways to increase your members’ online community engagement? Here are seven effective tips.

There are multiple ways to drive member engagement with your association. One of the most effective channels for member engagement is your organization’s online community. 

So, let’s look at what online community engagement is, why it’s important for associations, and how your organization can increase online community engagement – even with a small staff.  

What is online community engagement for associations?

Online community engagement is all about getting your association’s members actively participating in your organization’s online member community. It goes beyond just getting them to occasionally hop onto your online community for a few minutes. It involves encouraging your members to regularly interact with each other and your association’s staff through the online community.   

Why is online community engagement important for associations? 

Your online member community has the power to inspire and enable members to connect with each other and gain access to relevant content from the convenience of their home, office, or wherever they are. Increasing online community engagement helps your members feel more involved and connected with each other and your association – not just a few times each year, but all year long. This increased engagement leads to a better member experience and more loyal members, ultimately improving member retention for your association. 

Seven tips for increasing your members’ online community engagement

Here are seven effective ways to boost member engagement through your online community:  

1. Keep your online community feed active. 

Your members are accustomed to reading a continuous stream of information in their social platforms’ feeds, and your online community is no exception. Frequent updates entice users to visit the platform more often, soak up information, and share with others.

Make your online community THE place to go for information and boost engagement by feeding members a steady supply of useful and relevant content, such as industry news, reports, commentary, job tips, and career opportunities.
 

2. Create discussion groups.

There are virtually endless ways to use discussion groups to improve engagement with your online community. For example:  

• Set up a new member group to help new members get to know each other and feel more welcome.
• Create interest-based discussion groups for members to talk about specific subjects, such as upcoming industry regulation changes.
• Promote one of your association’s upcoming virtual or in-person events, inviting attendees to talk with each other and share content before, during, and after the event. 
   

Make sure someone from your association’s staff or a volunteer member participates in the discussion groups to answer questions and keep the conversations going.

3. Encourage connections. 

Use your online community technology to promote one-on-one connections and opportunities to network, all based on details you collect through the platform.  

There are multiple ways to encourage connections among your members. For example, connect new members with a volunteer ambassador to help the new members feel more welcome. Or suggest member connections based on similar interests. 

4. Recruit online community volunteers.

Get members more involved by creating volunteer opportunities within the community. These can be simple, one-time opportunities. For example, volunteers could sign up to get a conversation started or write a content piece to be promoted in the community.
 

5. Keep an eye on activity in your online community. 

Regularly review data about your online community to understand how member engagement is trending. For example, watch dashboards to understand member activity and what posts are trending. Then, use this information to build more content in the most popular areas of interest. 

6. Get feedback.

Use your online community to better understand what members want. Pay attention to what members are talking about in your online community. Set up online surveys and polls, and promote them in posts to your online community to gather member feedback.

7. Use an online community engagement checklist. 

Perhaps the most important aspect of increasing online community engagement is to keep it going. Here is a sample online community engagement checklist to keep members actively involved:

Daily

• Review and respond. Dedicate time every day to review new posts and engage in the community.
• Post fresh, relevant content. There are countless types of content your organization can use to drive engagement – such as industry news and research, blog posts, newsletters, and so on.  

Weekly

• Review engagement analytics. Pull data to see what’s happening in your online community, and consider the insights it gives you into how you can make the community more valuable to members.
• Verify your to-do list. Dedicate some time at the end of the week to review your weekly activity. Verify that you posted everything you planned on posting, and that you replied to comments and questions. Also, double-check that your ambassadors are participating in conversations.
• Plan for next week. Plan and make your to-do list for the next week. Consider what content you are going to post to the online community. Also, will you create a new discussion group? And how much time will you spend reviewing and responding to posts?

Monthly

• Check-in with ambassadors. Check-in with your volunteer ambassadors. Discuss their activities and what they believe is working and not working. Don’t forget to thank them and let them know how important they are to your organization.
• Promote two-way communication. Make sure there’s two-way communication, and not just your organization delivering messages. Having your ambassadors ask questions or putting out a call for suggestions can assist in engaging your members. You can also use surveys or polls to get feedback from your members. Keep the conversation going by communicating the results and next steps of those surveys and polls.
• Reflect and evaluate. Take time to reflect on the past month’s activities. You’ve been looking at data on a weekly basis. Now, look at it for the past month as well as month over month. Are you on track to meet your strategic goals for your online community?