Events are often considered the lifeblood of a community. They set the narrative and allow new members to familiarize themselves with the new environment. They also keep community engagement up. If you’re running a community right now, then you would have probably hosted a couple of events already. Eventually, you'll realize that you need to run three types of community engagement events. These include:
1) For newbies
2) For existing members to keep deriving value
3) To sell your products (SaaS "webinar" style)
Now let’s dig into what each event entails and how you can go about conducting them.
1) How to uplift engagement for newbies in the community?
For new community members, the introductory events set narrative and tone. We did an introductory event 2x a month and even made a "Newbie Zone" channel for new members of our community for 24x7 support. When new members feel a sense of warmth from old members and moderators, they're more inclined to recommend the community to their friends. Remember that one very important need your community is fulfilling for your members is alleviating their loneliness.
A lot of people join communities not just for the mission (that they may or may not believe in), but to battle isolation, loneliness, and for identity (this is why granting people public roles works so well, and why young children become activists for causes they don't know anything about). When these needs are fulfilled, your new members become long-term evangelists and referrers. If you're more mathematically inclined, a good introductory event increases the viral factor (k).
Pre-recorded events or videos don't work. Neither do text or image onboarding pages. These are impersonal. Until that first event happens, these new members are casually strolling through your community rather than true members. They also have poor attention spans and are only mildly interested. If not inducted properly, they'll just leave or worsen your ratio metrics by becoming inactive.
2) For existing members to keep deriving value
Only a fraction of your existing members will use chat and forums. The rest will make their appearance only at events that make sense to them — they typically become dormant members if an interesting event hasn't happened in a while.
If you aren't sure what kind of event to run every weekend for this section of your community, bring an interesting guest in your community domain. Allow one or two of your members to get on stage and talk to the guest (builds loyalty).
Like creators on YouTube, you should also be collaborating with other communities and cross-pollinating community members.
As an aside not related to events, NFT drops do collaborations very well!
3) How to drive engagement to sell your products in the community?
If you're building community engagement to sell something, it's best done over an event rather than chat or forums. If done over text, you give a small section of your community that's toxic a chance to publicly attack you (it happens all the time). This is much harder over an event because only people who are interested jump on.
You can also sell by being very clear that the event is a sales webinar. In fact, this sets better expectations and does some lead qualification too. A sales event should be run by a different team than the general community events, preferably someone with product expertise in whatever is being sold.
From our experience, conversions after a community sales event are always very high. Our product was a $300-500 course, and we'd sell pretty much right after the event was done. Discord didn't have a shop so we'd have to redirect people outside (this can sometimes lead to scams, please beware). To solve this, Graphy Community Platform has an inbuilt shop channel so people need not travel elsewhere and risk losing their money. You also improve conversion because people aren't clicking out and away.
💡Graphy Community Platform allows an unlimited number of listeners and watchers concurrently on stage, even on mobile! Please check your plan to see what limits you are eligible for.
We hope this article helps you get a clearer idea of how to engage with your community in the best way possible. So, wait no more and host great events to keep your community engagement in check. After all, it’s extremely simple because we’re here to help.
