I’m considering increasing engagement to make specific categories (feature requests, for example) only available to users who have signed up.
Have others attempted this strategy?? If so, what was its success??
Thanks!!
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It’s a fairly common strategy but whether or not it works depends on a number of other factors…
If you can give us more details about your community and the issue that you’re trying to solve we can probably advise further.
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@HAWK it’s a Community for a SaaS Users with ~200 users. Users are invited as they start using the platform to share how the platform is used, solve problems they’re facing, and stay up to date on post product releases.
Let me know if additional context is needed!! Thanks for your help.
At the moment people can only request features (or post at all) if they sign up, so I’m not sure that you’ll see increased engagement by hiding those until they do.
What is the purpose of wanting increased engagement? And what kind of engagement specifically do you mean?
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@HAWK makes sense.
The main reasoning for wanting to increase engagement:
- Populate the Community with enough information for it to be useful to future users running into similar issues by posting Support questions
- For Users to get ideas on how else the tool is being used as it’s a tool tool that has many different use cases
By engagement I mean users interacting (Posting, Liking, Replying, etc.).
Let me know if this is helpful for you to make recommendations and if you need more context. Thanks!!
Have you tried live events? Like doing video or chat interviews or AMA-style events within the community?
These usually help pull together members and help them connect. You can do these with very active product users or the knowledgeable ones, the transcript from these can serve as user generated content and help with both points you mentioned.
Also, how responsive is the community to questions or needs of the members? That is when someone wants a reply or help, how quickly do they get it?
Increasing responsiveness helps members get to their needed value quicker. This is generally called time to value and reducing it helps improve the community’s ‘stickness’/engagement.
And lastly, how easy is it for members to navigate through the community on their own? Are the topics easy to find or are there a lot of duplicate topics and similar search terms? Making it easy for members to walk through the community on their own also helps them stay longer, and this helps engagement.
@osioke awesome, thanks for all this.
To answer your questions:
- We are doing live events on a regular cadence: Office Hours, User Advisory Council, Webinars, etc. Getting the transcript of these events on Community is next on the docket.
- The ‘User:User’ engagement is still quite limited (it’s mostly ‘User:Organization’). Users from the organization are diligent and prompt in responding, but User:User engagement is limited (which is what we’re really trying to foster).
- Typically < 2 hour response time on most posts business hours EST.
- IMO it’s fairly easy to navigate and information is readily available. But I’d be curious to hear your thoughts: https://community.tulip.co/.
Thanks again for all your help!!
Sorry for my delayed reply, it has been topsy turvy over here.
Those transcripts will be very useful. They’d help increase the available content on your site and people can link to and share excerpts they like.
I’ll suggest getting active members to host these events and also share the transcripts. You can help them create these transcripts, but they share them with their accounts to help show member participation. So when other members see fellow members take lead, they’ll be willing to jump in.
Also, start rewarding activity no matter how small. It can be shoutouts on Twitter or the community, shipping swag or doing virtual swag. I love how https://cottonbureau.com/ works for creating and shipping swag, and virtual swag can be a link to images of discounts, coupons or gift cards stored somewhere on the internet.
Basically, these live events help a lot. They help build connections between members easily. And it is this connections that enable User:User engagement.
Other ideas for live events can be games like https://codenames.game, or a video call while playing Among Us in a private room. We the Discourse team use these a lot, and I feel way more connected to my team now than I have ever felt when working with people in the same physical location.
Leveraging on activities and events that allow users connect directly can help here. Do you welcome new members frequently? Maybe an active member can do this interchangeably?
I see the community is not so large, so 1 - 1 events and activities between members is really key and helpful. Basically, try to see how you can reduce the Organisation in this equation. Say one member asks a question, you tag another member who may know the answer, or a member helps another member, you PM them saying thank you.
Generally, just ask, how can I improve member’s ability to feel connected to each other, how can I remove barriers to this. Repeating these prompts as you come up with a strategy can be helpful.
Less time is better. If members get answers faster, they are more likely to stay within the community. And when they stay, they’ll find other things to do, like 
posts, replying here and there and sharing opinions.
I’d say BradNichols gave some good points here: Initial Community Impression - Tulip Community. Looking through each point they shared.
Send @support a PM here, and we can help you change the AgileMFG part of the email to something more personalised.
While the pinned post is there, it is not that helpful in terms of an intro/welcome guide. See https://experts.feverbee.com/tags/introductions for ideas.
A getting started or introduction tag or category that you link to somewhere prominent is also very helpful, see here
Asides that, I’d suggest looking at the Top Referred Topics and Trending Search Terms in your admin dashboard https://community.tulip.co/admin to give you an idea of what members can’t find easily. This should start you on your information design or redesign journey.
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This is fantastic, thank you very much @osioke!! A really insightful post.
Some of the features mentioned in the post have since been upgraded, but point taken on listening to members 
. I actually updated the email template and we should be in business, but I appreciate the offer.
Well, thanks again and I’ll be sure to post an update with results we find.
Gio
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