We talk a lot about increasing engagement, but not enough about defining what meaningful engagement actually looks like. In this episode, I break down a smarter way to think about engagement beyond likes, posts, and comments.

You’ll learn how to:

• Identify what meaningful engagement looks like for your community
• Use live calls, events, and curriculum prompts to model and reinforce those behaviors
• Build flywheels that make engagement easy, intentional, and measurable

If you’ve been wondering how to move your members from passive to active participation, this episode will help you rethink your approach to engagement entirely.

Want to work on this strategy with my team? Book a discovery call here.

Mentioned on this episode:

• Jay Clouse's membership, The Lab
• Cheyenne Buttrey's membership, The Funnel Method

Let's be friends:

• Connect with Becky on Instagram or LinkedIn
• Read the newsletter at beckypierson.com
• Learn more about Affinity Collective

I talk to a lot of community builders about how to increase engagement, but the big question that we need to be asking is how do we want them to engage and what does meaningful engagement actually look like?

A lot of times it's such a vanity metric, like how many posts or likes or comments are happening in the community?

Are people, you know, engaging by commenting on other people's posts?

And yes, this stuff is important, but we're thinking about it the wrong way.

It's really important to define what meaningful engagement actually looks like.

Here's some examples.

Like maybe meaningful engagement means joining a mini mastermind and actually taking part in some of the community features you offer.

Or maybe it's just connecting with other members and it's.

It's that simple.

Maybe meaningful engagement looks like sharing their projects for feedback or like sharing results.

There's lots of different ways that people can engage in a program, membership or community experience.

And what people really miss out on is defining what, what the desired behavior is.

And I talk about this a lot, right?

Like how do we model the behavior that we desire for our communities?

That's how we can drive more engagement, by modeling that behavior.

But that isn't the only way to increase engagement.

We need to ask ourselves, how can we make it really easy?

And how can we facilitate that exchange for them to engage the way we want them to engage?

Everything is a flywheel.

So in order to get people to engage the way we want them to, then we can design flywheels to make that happen with our programming.

So programming is actually the number one way we can actually drive them to those results, drive them to share, to comment, to do the things that we want to do.

We have to tell them to do the thing as part of a loop that they're already in.

So I know this is kind of philosophical right now, so let me give you a really solid example.

So in Jay Clouse's community the Lab, I've talked about it plenty of times in lots of my content.

Everybody knows that I love the community.

I am one of the small group mastermind facilitators.

So something Jay added this year is the that he's grouping people into masterminds.

He's doing this enrollment period a couple times a year.

And I have a group where a bunch of membership creators, so we call it our membership mastermind.

And I facilitate our group.

So he asks people, members in the community to step up as facilitators and for somebody to volunteer to be a facilitator when, when he's organizing these groups So I am one of those facilitators.

And yesterday I ran our session a little bit different than usual.

So typically we mostly do hot seat sessions.

So we all go around and give an upd and then somebody's on the hot seat that day.

In yesterday's session, we did a Q4 goals and experiment sessions.

So everybody talked about what their goals are for the rest of the year in regards to their membership growth or engagement or retention or whatever they're focused on, and then designing experiments that they could run to basically improve that metric.

Now, the reason I designed this, and it's funny, I like texted Jay and I was like, hey, I have this idea, I'm going to test it in my Mastermind, but I think this could be a really cool community event for you.

So we talked about that.

And the reason is because the programming itself is driving toward the result the community's offering.

So the whole premise of Jay's community is that it's for pro creators to share their experiments, share their results, and basically share their notes of what's working in their businesses and what they're trying.

And so he has this area in the community called Share youe Experiments where people would post their goal, their hypothesis, the experiment they run, and the result.

And so once you've run an experiment, then you would share out what the results of that experiment were.

So I'm like, well, if we want people to actually share more of those, which he's always looking for, like, how do I get more people sharing these things?

And he's done a lot of work through social currency, like getting people giving people badges, like doing rewards, like that kind of thing, which is awesome.

But there's also the creating the environment for people to actually do the thing so that they can share the results.

So my hypothesis is that by in Mastermind group, having people write their goals, do their hypothesis form an experiment, so they're planning it out that way, then if they do this experiment, then they're going to have results that they can go share in the community with the broader community saying like, hey, I ran this experiment and this is how it worked and these were the results.

So just to recap, this is an example of a flywheel where the result is the desired result.

The goal is we want more people sharing their experiments and their results with the broader community in this community space.

Okay, well, if we want more people to do this.

And the whole premise of this is that they have to think about it from the standpoint of setting a goal, a hypothesis, and forming an Experiment, then what if we ran a session where people set these so then they were more likely to then go and share that result with the community.

We're creating the environment, the programming to facilitate that objective so that then they have the results that they can go share.

So this is a flywheel that we're creating.

Let's talk about another example.

So in the funnel method, my friend Cheyenne Buttrey's program where she helps people improve or build out their funnels in their online business, she wants people to do a couple of things.

One is as far as meaningful engagement goes, she wants people to measure each part of their funnel and see what's working and what's not and identify their leaky buckets.

So for example, if people are getting lots of downloads on their freebie, but then they're not converting from the sales email sequence that comes after the freebie into the product, then there could be improvements in a couple of different things, but especially that email sequence that's coming after the freebie.

So that is a leaky bucket and something that they can improve.

So first of all she wants people identifying that.

Then okay, they're able to identify that.

She wants them to then update that sequence.

So let's say she, they use her templates to update the post freebie sales sequence and they edit it, they write the copy and they share that in the community.

So this is the first point of engagement.

She wants them to share their updated copy for feedback in the community.

Cheyenne does her thing to copy edit that freebie, gives it back to them, then they update that leaky bucket and then they're going to measure it again.

And then the next point of engagement she wants is for people to share their results.

Hey, this improved sales by X percent or this, we've been enabled to improve this margin or this conversion, conversion rate or whatever the leaky bucket is, she wants to them to be sharing out their results and over time, like her goal is to help them improve their funnel so that they make more money, so that they get great ROI from their experience being in this community, but more importantly like share their progress along the way, which is an awesome benefit for other members to see as well.

So because Cheyenne has this incredible sort of backbone curriculum to her program that allows people to go through each step, update their leaky buckets in their funnel and then is constantly pointing them to then go share their templates, their, their working materials for feedback, she's constantly having them do these feedback loops in the public community.

Then that's going to keep in driving More engagement over time with all of the different members sharing their posts for feedback.

So the curriculum itself is driving the engagement that she wants.

And then in addition to the on demand curriculum, there's also live calls where people can come, ask questions, get unblocked, that helps them move forward.

And she can say things like, okay, now I want you to go and do this activity or work through this template, or work on this thing and share it in the community.

So she's constantly pushing them to do something to execute on some edits that they need to do and then share that for feedback.

So she's constantly increasing engagement of those feedback loops through her programming and through her curriculum.

So what I want you to do here, the next time you're thinking like, how can I get more engagement?

Is think about it a little bit differently.

What does meaningful engagement look like?

Actually write down a few things.

Like what?

Maybe there's two or three things that you really want people to do in the community.

And then ask yourself, number one, like, where are you telling them to do this thing?

Because we need to set expectations for people to actually do it.

And number two, are you creating an environment for it to be easy for them to encourage this behavior and give them direction to do the thing?

Are you doing the live event to set goals and experiments so that they actually share results from that experiment?

Do you have the curriculum where you're saying like, hey, now that you've filled out this template, go and share it here so that you can get feedback on it and are you following through with that so that they keep doing it again and they're having a positive experience?

This is how you drive meaningful engagement and it really is a new way to think about it.

Like you are creating these flywheels in your community.

But first you need to define what does meaningful engagement look like.

So I hope that this was really helpful, give you some good takeaways for thinking about meaningful engagement.

If you want help with this, if you want help thinking through strategy around this, please DM me.

I love working on this stuff.

And there really is an intentional way to increase engagement that actually means something in your community and it's not just vanity metrics.

So please DM me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me.

I'd love to hear from you.

And if you love the show, please make sure you like and subscribe.

Subscribe and share it with a friend.

It is really helpful to me.

This is a brand new show and I want to see it grow.

Thanks for listening.