“They join, but then they go quiet.”
Sound familiar? You’re not alone, and you’re not failing. Engagement and retention are hard to get right.
It’s easy to think the answer is more content, more events, more reminders. But real community engagement doesn’t come from showing up more. It comes from designing for behavioural momentum; knowing what brings people in, what keeps them there, and what nudges them into deeper connection.
Let’s break this down through three mentorship calls I’ve had with community coaching clients, Jembi Health Systems, Whimsy Forge, and The Bearded I.T. Dad.
Spoiler: None of them needed “more stuff.”
What they needed was a tool.
📌 Before you “boost engagement” you need good UX
Ask yourself:
Are notifications set up properly?
Can members find the right next step after joining?
Is anything confusing, overwhelming, or sending people in circles?
Take the Bearded I.T. Dad, Dakota Snow for example, after moving his community off Circle, he noticed a huge drop in engagement.
Why? After some investigation he learned:
Notifications were off by default.
New users landed on the billing dashboard, not his onboarding.
He didn’t launch another event or poll his audience. He wrote a script that:
Automatically turned on email notifications.
Took members directly to his onboarding course, no extra clicks, no login friction.
That’s what reactivated his lurkers.
Accessibility is the first step to engagement.
📌 So what is REAL engagement?
Let’s reframe it. Because engagement isn’t “more activity.”
It’s building a habit loop:
Trigger to Action to Reward
Repeat.
This is where your strategy begins.
Let’s use Whimsy Forge as an example, a community that gathers creators of all levels to make fantastical crafts. One of their challenges?
People would get excited about a pattern, say “I’m going to build this!”… and then disappear.
So we mapped the habit loop:
Trigger: New cosplay pattern drops.
Action: Member says “I want to build this!”
Reward: …nothing happens. No follow-up. No accountability.
No wonder they drop off.
So we designed a new loop:
Trigger: “I want to build this.”
Action: Immediately opts to get paired with a peer accountability buddy.
Reward: They feel supported, seen, and now have someone to check in with and reason to come back into the community!
📌 Engagement is a ladder
Not everyone’s starting from the same place, nor do they engage in the same way!
Each type of persona in your community will likely act differently based on what motivates them. And the more motivated they are by what they get out of engaging, the more likely they are to come back and do it again.
Here’s what a basic engagement ladder looks like for any one persona:
As you can probably guess, there are about a bazillion engagement tactics that you could brainstorm to “trigger” engagement in your community.
Here’s an example of what it might look like if you mapped out your engagement ladder for each level of engagement with all the member types in your community:
Member type | Light engagement | Medium engagement | Deep engagement |
|---|---|---|---|
Lurker | Reads, likes occasionally | Logs in after email digests | Posts intro once, disappears |
Light Contributor | Comments occasionally | Joins monthly events | Posts questions, shares wins |
Regular Poster | Weekly posts or DMs | Hosts events | Starts their own conversations |
Power User | Acts like a co-host | Runs programs | Ready for partnership or ambassador role |
📌 Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
This is where a lot of people fall into the “engagement trap.”
They see low interaction and immediately ask: “What tactic haven’t I tried yet?”
Do I run a new challenge?
Should I post more behind-the-scenes?
Maybe I need a podcast now??
But when you’re building a community-led business, your engagement strategy isn’t about activity. It’s about intentional momentum.
You don’t need more.
You need to know why engagement matters for your goals, and who you’re trying to engage.
Ask yourself:
Do I need more trust at the top of the flywheel?
Do I need higher retention inside my paid offer?
Do I need stronger connections between my power users?
The who always shapes the what.
For example, Zane leads all things “community and comms“ at Jembi Health Systems, a global nonprofit working at the intersection of health equity and open-source tech. Engagement is critical for them, but it's not engagement for engagement’s sake.
They needed:
Researchers to trust them.
Developers to contribute to their platform.
Governments to recognise their product’s value.
Funders to actually invest in their product development.
But they weren’t getting traction.
So instead of adding more posts or newsletters, we zoomed way out:
“What type of engagement creates credibility and builds connection?”
From there, we redesigned their value loop:
Case studies that spotlight partners.
A certification path that moves lurkers to learners to contributors.
A narrative hook that positions them within a known ecosystem.
Each engagement action became a step on a path, not a one-off idea.
When your engagement strategy is aligned to your business goals and community goals, the loops build on themselves.
NEW: MEMBER ENGAGEMENT & RETENTION COACHING
Tired of pouring “more” of yourself into your community?
Engagement should rather be about creating reasons for members to keep coming back.
So I have packaged the way I work on exactly that: Member Engagement & Retention Coaching. It is 1:1 coaching, not done-for-you. So, you keep your hands on your own community; I bring the system, the diagnosis and the honest second opinion, and I stay with you while you run it.
It is built for: founders who own the revenue a community protects, and the managers who run the room day to day.
I take ten people at a time, maximum, so the work stays close. And two seats have already filled up.
Let’s design your system. Together.
Always build community,
Member Engagement & Retention Coach
I help community and membership leaders keep the audience they worked so hard to get; measurably, in the channels they already own.
Claude was used to draft the first version of this article based on a transcripts from three mentorship calls I had with Community Coaching clients from Jembi Health Systems, Whimsy Forge, and The Bearded I.T. Dad.
Claude is well trained on my branding, business and professional context and the final draft of every issue is painstakingly edited and set up by a human.
