How to Build Engagement | A Series on Community Building (2/3)
In this second episode of the series, we dive deeper into the lessons learned on how to build an engaged community while scaling rapidly in different markets.
Today we keep on exploring some of the important milestones of our community-building journey. This time, we will focus our attention on engagement and what were some of the lessons learned on how we managed to reach an engagement level comparable to the most popular global platforms without an App with push notifications.
Our Monthly Active Users (MAU), a measure we take very seriously to monitor the community’s health, have reached peaks of 70% during the past months and it’s always stable at around 65%. To give you a benchmark, LinkedIn, from publicly available sources, has a 30-40% MAU.
So if you want to know how we got here, keep reading.
In the previous edition of the series, we dived deeper into the initial phase of building the Nova community and the early lessons we took with us. You can access all our previous editions here.
If we had to distill a community equation formula, from a Nova perspective, it would be the following:
Successful community = Trust x Members quality x Engagement^2
In previous editions, we reflected on the first two key components: trust and quality. We shared some reflections on how we got things off the ground and grew organically to more than 20.000 members, living across 70+ countries. Reflecting on the journey, growth alone could not have brought us this far, so the full picture of Nova’s community story is missing a key piece to the puzzle: engagement.
Think of it this way, you go to the most amazing event, but no one talks to each other, nobody interacts. While that event has the potential to be uniquely valuable the lack of engagement of its participants makes it worth 0. This offline example is a proxy of online dynamics and shows clearly why engagement is so important for a community to thrive. Without engagement you are not running a community you are simply running a database of names and emails.
Building engagement as the norm from day 1 is not obvious. You tend to prioritize engagement only after a few years when you start seeing early members of your community disappearing from the radar. We get that, and to a certain extent, we have also neglected engagement in the early days when we had the illusion that engaged members remain as such forever.
The ones below are 2 of the key lessons we’ve learned about community engagement.
1. The product serves the purpose, it’s never the purpose
A big aha moment, a negative one, took place when we forced the migration of the first hundreds of members from a Facebook Group, that had the highest daily activity ever recorded, to our first MVP of a proprietary community platform. We were very excited in the days before the launch as we migrated to our very own digital home, but the excitement was short-lived.
The moment we migrated to a new and unfamiliar platform that people didn’t regularly use daily, it was horrible. Our engagement metrics plummeted and the daily exchanges and conversations disappeared almost overnight. We have been blinded and naive to think that the same engagement would have remained intact despite the tool being completed new and not part of our member's daily routines.
The lesson we learnt stuck with us for many years, don’t build a tech platform until you don’t know exactly what you need to build and why.
As a matter of fact, we dumped our proprietary MVP and moved onto a white-labeled solution (Hivebrite) that allowed us to, on one side structure our members’ data much better than a Facebook group and on the other remove the headache of building and maintaining a proprietary tech platform in-house. That served the purpose, even though it never allowed us to reach the engagement of a simple and free Facebook group, simply because leveraging Facebook meant that we could enter our members’ daily lives as part of an already established routine.
During the Hivebrite time, we carefully observed our members, took notes, and did a lot of product research until the moment we felt we were ready to go for a second attempt and build another Nova digital house, this time compiling all the learnings and observations. The second time worked magic for a few key reasons:
We didn’t overdo it. We didn’t build a complex platform with too many features but started from the core essential features (i.e. Gravity). Our members loved it.
We kept the UX/UI as simple and intuitive as possible. Kudos to Jose for designing a world-class experience that is very intuitive to navigate without any product tour.
We built it in public, or at least we tried. Cristian and the team were involving community members very often when designing the platform and they have kept on iterating ever since following the community’s needs.
What can you bring with you from this first piece of insight:
Don’t build new tech until you know what you are building, for whom and why
It’s hard to compete against platforms that absorb 90% of your members’ online attention (i.e. Instagram, Facebook, etc.)
If you are ready to invest, involve your community from the get-go, and don’t present them with a ready-made solution they will find unfamiliar
2. Clarify your engagement rules and don’t be afraid to make tough choices
We have made yet another counterintuitive move in our early days. We announced to our members that every year we would assess members’ engagement and discontinue the membership of the least engaged members, those who didn’t give or take any value out of the network during the year.
You would intuitively think this is a stupid move, why would you want to reduce the size of your community when your goal is to grow it faster?
The reality is that we have quickly realized that a well-maintained community is linked more to engagement than to size. This is why in our formula engagement is squared. This exercise helped with establishing a norm and clarified what being part of Nova meant. We have also been defining engagement very broadly, as a mix of online and offline activities, therefore qualifying as a disengaged member wasn’t that easy. We have also been very mindful of members’ life stages and adapt our decisions based on that.
As much as it wasn’t easy, we did discontinue about 2.000 memberships since our journey started, and going back, we would do it all over again. The benefits of this choice have been very clear:
Members made an effort to meet the minimum requirements, which translated into more value created for other members.
Shaped the values and the norms of the community in a very early stage. Today, Nova members are always pointing out how open and supportive every member is. We like to take a small merit in that, and having a soft “threat” while not being the only lever, did contribute to such reinforcing good behaviors.
Enabled Nova to grow faster over the years. As we only kept engaged members who turned into brand ambassadors, the majority of the Nova members could recall special moments in their lives when other members helped them reach their goals.
These two key lessons underscore a universal truth applicable to any thriving community: engagement is the most important element. Through trial and error, at Nova we discovered that engagement cannot be manufactured through technology alone; it flourishes on the foundation of genuine interactions and shared experiences and more so on shared norms that you need to define as soon as possible on your community-building journey.
The strategic decision to expel less engaged members, though counterintuitive, was key in cultivating a rich, engaged community that values contribution and active participation.
Next week we will end this series on Community Building by sharing some lessons about growing a community organically.
You can learn more about how Nova can help you as a professional and as a company.
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