Community Engagement Plan for Online Communities: A Comprehensive Guide

Communities happen when people who share the same values and interests gather. Great communities start when community leaders know how to engage and ensure community involvement.

To begin boosting community engagement efforts, you need a solid plan. This means building a strong strategy that anticipates active participation, fostering collaboration, and an open dialogue between the members of your community.

In this article, we will unravel what the magic of community engagement strategies entail: From creating an inclusive environment and getting all stakeholders involved, to formulating an efficient community engagement action plan for future participation.

If you're looking for tips on online community engagement - you are exactly where you need to be.

Alt: A hand puting together a wooden puzzle

Where to start with community engagement plan?

Any successful community engagement plan begins with a thorough understanding of its audience - in our case, the online community. You must know who your members are, what they value, what motivates them, and how they engage with your platform. This knowledge drives personalization, relevance, and success in a community engagement project.

First of all, you need to conduct research to get a deeper understanding of your community needs. However, collecting feedback goes beyond a mere data collection - it anticipates reaching out to disengaged members and discovering the painful truths of your weak spots.

In this section, we will discuss essential techniques for mapping member demographics and psychographics and community status quo.

Creating member personas

Creating member personas is similar to crafting characters for a novel. Each persona represents a segment of your community and target audience, complete with its own background information, including demographic characteristics, interests, behaviors, and needs. This helps you to visualize your community members as real people, rather than just statistics on a page.

To create these personas, start by analyzing your community data. Look at your community's age distribution, geographical locations (or time zones), occupations, education levels, and so on. Dig into their online behaviours, such as their preferred content types, posting and commenting habits, and the times of day they're most active.

Here's an example. Let's say you run an online community for Indigo, the popular bookstore. You might create a persona like "Emma, the Avid Reader." Emma is a 28-year-old woman who works at a medium-sized company, reads 1-2 books a month, often posts book recommendations in the early evenings, and loves participating in book discussions.

By developing these personas, you can tailor your engagement strategies to meet the specific needs of each persona group. In the case of Emma, for instance, you might schedule discussion threads for popular books in the early evenings when she's most active.

Semrush's persona template gives you a good idea of what details to think about when developing your customer persona.

Conducting surveys and polls

Surveys and polls are a must in your engagement toolkit. They are great for gathering quantitative data about your community's preferences, needs, and opinions. You might ask questions about their interests, why they joined the community, and what keeps them coming back for more. 

For instance, if you're managing a health and wellness community, you might conduct a poll to see which type of content members prefer: 'How-to' exercise videos or nutritious recipes? The results could surprise you. You could then steer your content strategy in a direction you hadn't anticipated. You could even follow-up after implementing changes to see how your members experienced seeing their input in action. Even the response rate alone could tell you something about your members

Remember, feedback data is there to help you in the decision-making process.  If your poll reveals a strong preference for exercise videos, for example, then it's time to do something about it.  Put on those gym shorts and start filming!

💡 Pro tip: Focus groups are another form of research to get to know your community. You can use this technique to complement the quantitative data you get from polls and surveys. 

Furthermore, you can calculate your community engagement rate and track the member satisfaction if you collect data on a regular basis.

User experience (UX) research 

It's helpful to understand how members interact within your online community. Do they find it  easy to navigate? Do they face any issues while posting or commenting? Is the platform's design intuitive or cumbersome? 

Let's say you're running a community for make-up enthusiasts and you notice members often complain about difficulties uploading their pictures. This feedback signals a problem with the user experience.

You can identify hiccups like this and iron them out by conducting UX research, which can include methods like usability testing. Remember, your platform should empower your members to engage, not stand in their way.

Understanding community status quo with a SWOT analysis

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This analysis will help you understand your community's current status and inform your engagement strategy.

Strengths: Identify the positive attributes specific to your community. What are you doing well? Are there unique resources or capabilities that your community can leverage? For example, a strength could be a highly active user base or a unique theme that differentiates your community from others.

Weaknesses: Know your weak spots - you'll be stronger for it. These are internal factors that may hinder your community engagement. It could be a lack of participation in certain community activities or an outdated community platform that affects the user experience.

Opportunities: Here, we examine external conditions that could benefit your community. An opportunity might be a trending topic that aligns with your community's interest or a potential partnership with a relevant influencer.

Threats: Lastly, you must be aware of external factors that could harm your community. This includes competitor communities, changing user trends, or changes in social media algorithms that might impact your community's visibility.

Let's go back to our book club example. A SWOT analysis might reveal something like this:

*   Strength: Highly active member base

*   Weakness: Limited participation in weekly book discussions

*   Opportunity: Collaborate with local authors for exclusive webinars

*   Threat: Other emerging online book clubs

By understanding these elements, you can build a strategic engagement plan that capitalizes on your strengths and opportunities, improves your weaknesses, and prepares for potential threats.

One of the best ways to gather feedback of this type can be through smaller discussion groups. Intimate setting will give you the opportunity to hear personal experiences of individual community member, and incorporate community feedback into your analysis.

Setting engagement goals and objectives

Now that you've spent some quality time getting to know your community, it's time to set some goals and objectives. This is when we connect the dots between community engagement activities and key business objectives.

Workshop: setting up your engagement goals and objectives

Okay, enough theory – it's time to roll up our sleeves. Here's a mini workshop to kick-start your goal-setting process:

Identify your key business objectives: This could be anything from boosting sales to increasing brand awareness. Write these down and clarify your highest priorities.

Define your community engagement goals: How can community engagement help achieve your business objectives? Write down broad goals that align with your business objectives.

Define your objectives: What are the specific steps you need to take to achieve your goals? Write down a few objectives for each goal.

Transform your objectives into SMART objectives: Add specificity, measurability, achievability, relevance, and a timeframe to each goal.

Engagement enablement 

Now that you've crafted your main engagement strategies, you have to define how you are going to enable engagement in the community. This is the process of providing the right atmosphere and giving our community members the tools and motivation they need to become active participants. It's all about making it easy and appealing for members to engage, adding sparks that prompt engagement, and making their contributions feel valued.

Gamification

Gamification involves using game design elements in non-game contexts, like points, badges, leaderboards, and challenges. It's a powerful way to encourage community participation and reward active members. For instance, a coding community might reward points for helping other members solve their programming problems, with a leaderboard showcasing the most helpful members.

📖 Check out this article for an in-depth look at applying gamification principles in your online community. 

Leaderboards are just one of many ways you can include gamification in your community engagement plan.  

Notifications

Timely notifications can keep members informed about the latest activities in the community, reminding them to participate. It could be a reminder about a new discussion, a response to their comment, or a notification about a community event. These little nudges can encourage members to return to the community, react to updates, or continue conversations.

Active participation is what differenciates your community from an audience. Send notifications that inspire them to get involved, and not just observe or react. Explore your options for in-browser notifications, instant or delayed email notifications, and sending alerts in the community itself. 

Celebrating success

Recognizing and celebrating the achievements of your community members goes a long way in fostering engagement. Whether it's completing a challenging task, reaching a milestone, or contributing significantly to the community, celebrating these successes brings a positive vibe to the community. For example, a fitness community could celebrate members who achieve their personal fitness goals, inspiring others to do the same.

Measuring engagement

A community engagement plans are not complete until you clearly define how you will measure levels of engagement.

Engagement metrics give you insight into how your community members are interacting within your community. It's important to choose the right metrics that align with your engagement goals and objectives. Let's discuss some of the key metrics you should be tracking:

Active Users: This metric refers to the number of members who are actively participating in your community, whether it's posting discussions, commenting, liking, or sharing. If you notice an increase in active users, it's a good sign that your engagement methods are working.

Content Engagement: Track how members are interacting with the content in your community. This can include likes, shares, comments, and saves. For instance, if you run a blog within your community, you might want to track how many comments each post receives or how often posts are shared.

Contribution Ratio: This metric measures the ratio of contributors (those who post content) to lurkers (those who read but don't post - you can read more about lurkers here). A healthy community should have a good balance of both. If you have a high number of lurkers, it might indicate that members are not feeling encouraged or comfortable enough to contribute.

Retention Rate: Retention rate shows you how many of your members continue to engage with your community over a certain period. A high retention rate indicates that your community offers value to its members that keeps them coming back.

Time Spent: This measures the average amount of time a member spends in your community. If members spend a significant amount of time in your community, it suggests they find the content and discussions engaging and valuable.

Engage your community members with Bettermode

If you are looking for a perfect online environment to get your community members to actively participate, Bettermode is just the place you need.

With a variety of features to foster engagement, you can design a community engagement platform where members can make meaningful connections.

Actionable strategies you can set to motion in Bettermode are:

• Discussion boards
• Sharing resources
• Welcome sections for new members
• Interpersonal features for effective communication
• Forums for public participation
• Spaces for social media posts
• Leaderboards to inspire gamification.

Moreover, with translation options you can overcome language barriers of your online community, and optimize the internal flow for you as a community manager. Plus, with our reporting system, you can leverage valuable insights to adjust your engagement initiative.

Budget and technologies - something to keep in mind

Implementing your engagement strategies will require some investment, both in terms of money and tools. These should be included in your engagement plan too. 

Creating a community engagement plan starts with understanding your community's nuances, setting goals that align with your business objectives, and tailoring strategies for active engagement.  The community engagement process is dynamic; you're always enabling your members, celebrating their successes, and refining your approach as you learn more about your community members and stakeholders.

If you plan to create a community website, start with a community-oriented tool such as Bettermode. Bettermode's community website templates can save you a lot of time and money compared to starting the whole process from scratch.

💡 To facilitate this planning process, Bettermode offers a community engagement plan worksheet. This template lets you focus on the strategic aspect, relieving you from worrying about the structure and presentation. Download it here. 

Conclusion

Turn your audience into active community participants - inspire inactive users to speak up and take part in games, competitions, and other engagement campaigns.

But first - create a friendly environment that guarantees privacy, moderation, and inclusivity of your online community. Build a unique community website where you'd be able to provide the space your community needs in order to thrive.

Are you ready to take your community engagement plan to the next level? Do so with Bettermode today - it's free!

This article was originally published on July 6th, 2023, and was updated on November 22nd, 2024.

FAQ

What is online community engagement?

Online community engagement refers to the process of interacting with members of a digital community to foster participation, build relationships, and encourage collaboration or discussions around shared interests.

What is a community engagement strategy?

A community engagement strategy is a structured plan for community building that outlines how to connect with and involve your community to achieve specific goals, such as increasing interaction, driving loyalty, or addressing their needs.

How to write a community engagement plan?

To write a community engagement plan, define clear objectives, identify your target audience, choose the right engagement methods (e.g., forums, events, content), set clear metrics for success (what successful outcomes would look like), and outline a timeline for execution and evaluation.

How do you make an online community successful?

To make an online community successful, focus on delivering value, encouraging participation in an interactive environment, fostering meaningful interactions, moderating effectively, and regularly analyzing engagement to adapt your approach.