9 low-effort program ideas to engage your community

Most community creators have a big blind spot. I had it for 4 years and didn’t even realise until I interviewed Ece Kurtaraner.

We try to get all members to engage the same 1 or 2 ways - chat or live workshops. We keep trying to innovate across these same 2 dimensions.

1. Chat. We see the analytics and find out that only a fraction of the people talking in the chat. We freak out and try to fix it by coming up with new conversation starters or asking questions ourselves. All in the hopes of increasing the weekly engagement rate by a few percentage points.
2. Live workshops. We book a great guest and announce it to the community. But if only a handful of people register, we try to drive up the FOMO by tweaking the messaging, or sending another email blast.

The problem with this is that we look at low adoption of these 2 formats as a problem to be solved. But if you zoom out a little you’ll see the bigger picture. You’ll see how the low adoption rate is a signal from your community that it wants something different.

“Some members really like talking to each other, some engage via writing long texts and some prefer short texts, like it depends. So we can't expect everyone to engage in the same way.”

– Ece Kurtaraner

So you need to make a shift in how you measure engagement.

You need to stop trying to optimise the conversion rates for chat and attendance at live events. Start offering more programs for your members to find value in your community.

Here are 9 ideas of different programs you can offer to your members.

1. Automated 1-on-1 networking

Effort required: 30-mins on setup, one-time only

Every member loves it if you introduce them to another member that they should talk to. But why should they have to rely on you for making new connections.

You can automate this using a tool like Curated Connections to make these connections on autopilot. Members fill out a form and get introduced to new people based on complimentary interests.

Call it a virtual coffee chat club, a mentor-matching program or a cofounder dating program.

2. Searchable member directory

Effort required: 30-mins on setup, one-time only

It’s crazy how many communities don’t have a member directory. It’s probably the first thing that members look at when they join a community. And no, I’m not talking about the one that comes by default with a Slack or Discord - that’s of no use.

Your members need a directory where they can find someone that they should connect with. They should be able to filter member based on interests, skills or needs and there needs to be a way for them to see the contact info for the member.

Use a tool like Curated Connections to create such a directory. Or stitch something using a no-code tool like Airtable or Coda.

3. Accountability challenges

Effort required: 15 mins per week

Most people join a community to get the peer-to-peer camaraderie that may be missing in their lives. They need accountability for making progress on a personal goal.

A fun way to help them with these is by creating simple challenges like

• 100 coffee chats in 100 days
• 30 days of design
• Ship 30 in 30

Completing these challenges will be the reward in itself and your community becomes the support system for whoever takes on this challenge.

How does it work?

1. Create a challenge that your community members will care about
2. Member accepts the challenge. They post proof of their work each week
3. Maintain a leaderboard to give challengers have additional motivation

Again you can use a tool like Curated Connections to monitor your member’s progress on a leaderboard or stitch something using no-code tools like Tally, Notion, Zapier or Bubble.

4. Global member map

Effort required: 10 mins per week

The coolest part of an online community is it connects people without the limitations of the physical space. But sometimes your members just want to know who else is around them. It could be when they visit a new city or simply because they want to meet other people like them in their city.

Maintaining a shared Google Map that has the locations of members marked is helpful in these scenarios. Just have a form that members can fill out if they want to be on the community map. At the end of each week, take 10 mins to visit new entries and mark them on the map.

5. Async AMAs

Effort required: 15 mins per AMA

You’ve seen Reddit AMAs, right? A person is on the stage for a day, the community can ask them any question in comments and they reply asynchronously.

It’s the same concept but for your community. It’s easy because nobody has to reserve any time on their calendar.

A few tips:

• Pick a member and share what’s interesting about them so the community knows what to ask them
• Announce the AMA atleast 1 week before it happens
• Ask the first question yourself to kick things off

6. Member highlights

Effort required: <30 mins per week

This is a repeatable that will add value to your members while creating marketing content for you. So listen closely.

1. Ask your members they want to be highlighted on your social media, newsletter and the community. If so, ask them to fill out a form. Which form?
2. This is a form you create that includes questions about their work that other members will find interesting. Let's say if you run a community of teachers, one of the questions can be - “what is your best tip for engaging students”.
3. Now all you need to do is take the member’s answers and reuse them for your social media/newsletter/community.

The member under the spotlight is happy because they are getting attention, other members are happy because they learnt something new and you are happy because you just made everyone happy while doing marketing.

WIN-WIN-WIN!

(Note: once again, you can use Curated Connections to do this)

7. Virtual coworking sessions

Effort required: 1-2 hours per week

This one is simple. Assign 1 hour of the day each week where members join a call to get some work done. Ideally, it is something that no one wants to do but every has to do. Like doing taxes or writing a weekly newsletter or scheduling social media posts for the week.

The key here is to have all sessions at the same time, same day each week. This makes it a habit amongst your members.

“On Tuesdays, we write content.”

Best part? These sessions are easy to host. So after a few iterations, you may be able to ask a frequent coworker to lead one.

8. Book/podcast clubs

Effort required: 2-4 hours per month

Is there a book or podcast that a lot of your members are really into? Chances are that they don’t have people in their lives who they can discuss it with.

You can give them this by organising a biweekly club in your community. Just a 1-hour call where everybody geeks out on the book/podcast. How fun!

9. Local city meetups

Effort required: 1-hr per meetup

This is also something that I’ve seen members asking for in 100% of the communities I have ever joined. Everyone is interested to meet other members in their own city. They are ready to be the host and handle the big lift. They just need your community to reach other people in their city.

So, you have untapped energy in your community that you can channel into creating value for these members:

• give members a way to nominate themselves as a host for a city meetup
• get them registrants by helping promote their meetup in your community
• if possible, support the meetup by sponsoring their coffees or drinks

Did you notice the one thing that all of these programs have one thing in common?

They are all repeatable. You won’t need to come up with new ideas like you might if you were trying to optimise the engagement rate on chat. This makes them easy to execute.

This is not to say that all of them will be successful for your community. In fact, I’m sure that atleast some of them won’t be right for your community. That depends on the size of your community and the needs of your members.

The only way to find out is to experiment by running them. Don’t count the % of community members who participate in them. Count the number of members who love the program. If a small fraction of your community loves a program that costs you almost no time to run, keep it going!