Great Community Engagement Starts With Asking a Different Question

Engagement isn't something that happens organically. It's something you design for.

In this episode of Dear Bri, we're diving into one of the most misunderstood topics in community building: engagement. Most community owners focus on tactics, posting more content, creating discussion prompts, or trying to motivate members, but those solutions often miss the real issue.

Drawing on BJ Fogg's habit-formation research, I walk you through the two hidden forces that influence member behavior in every online community. You'll learn how both affect participation, why members often stop engaging without realizing why, and how small design decisions can dramatically change community outcomes.

Finally, I'll share the three-question Community Engagement Recipe I use to diagnose and improve engagement issues in any community, no matter its size or business model.

If you're tired of posting into the void, wondering why your members aren't participating, or looking for a more strategic approach to community engagement, this episode is for you.

⏳ Timestamps

00:00:00 | Why "How do I get engagement?" is the wrong question

00:02:23 | The question you should ask instead

00:02:59 | Why community engagement is a design problem

00:03:42 | BJ Fogg's habit formation model and how that translates into digital community design

00:07:13 | A real community engagement case study

00:11:57 | The Community Engagement Recipe [Framework]

00:15:52 | Full recap

📌 Resources Mentioned

S3E1: https://youtu.be/6SvqnZJojTo 

4 Types of Community - The Masterclass: https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/775267/185716772091987335/share

52 Prompts for Engagement: https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/775267/151824965371429968/share

Designing for Great Engagement Miniseries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA_cxyCo_r0&list=PLOOwTnL2Q6sY84bv-3McIQWfygPwIpv2r&index=3

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

How do I get good engagement in my community is actually the wrong question. And I'm gonna prove it to you by the end of this episode. Make sure you stick around to the end because I'm gonna share a framework called the Community Engagement Recipe that completely changed how one of my clients approached her community, and the results that she saw were wild. Welcome to Dear Brie, an advice column for community conundrums, fiascos, and drama. Season three is brought to you by Ember Consulting. That's my community strategy agency, where we help coaches, consultants, and creators build paid online communities that are good for their people and good for their business. This season marks the first time Deer Bree is available in video on YouTube. So if you want to put a face to the voice, come find me there. The link is in the show notes. And this season is solo. No guests. Just me, Bree. And that's because after two seasons of hosting this podcast with guests and 10 years of doing this community work, I've been able to crystallize the most confusing conundrums and darkest dramas into a few simple insights and frameworks, which is what you're gonna find in this season. Simply put, I had too much to say and not enough time. So it's just me and you on this one. And finally, I usually record this podcast from Hawaii Island, so a special thank you to the Kanakamali people on whose land I currently reside. Welcome back to Dear Brie. This is a show where we talk about building intentional, profitable communities for your business. Embrie Lever, community strategist and CEO over at Ember Consulting, and this is season three. If you're new here, welcome. This show is all about the how behind community building. We started back in episode one breaking down the four types of communities. Everything in this season builds on that foundation, so go check it out next. Today is episode six, and we're talking about engagement, specifically why most advice you'll receive about engagement is pretty surface level and what to actually do to get to the core of influencing human behavior in your community. Let's get into it. I've asked hundreds of community managers what's their worst nightmare, and they all say the same thing. A community where the community manager is the only person commenting, creating posts, and engaging. This might be you. You've built your community, you've got members in there. You are posting consistently, and yet it's crickets. People aren't responding. Nobody is initiating conversation or interaction on their own. Or maybe there's some activity, but you know it could be better. And you're sitting there wondering, am I doing something wrong? Like, do they even like me? Do they even want to be here? If that's you, then I have some really good news, but also a bit of a reality check today. Here's the thing about engagement: most people approach it the way that you would approach climbing a tree if your nose was pressed up against the bark. This would be your perspective. You're too close. You can see the texture of the trunk, you can feel the roots under your feet, but you have no idea from this perspective how to actually get to the top. Asking, how do I get great engagement when you're in the thick of managing your community day to day is a lot like standing up against the tree. You need to take a step back and zoom way out before you can find the right path up. So here's the zoomed out question I want you to sit with first. What do I actually want my members to do in my community? And I challenge you to not use the word engagement to describe what you want to see and don't be vague. I don't want, I want them to be active kind of explanation. I mean real specifics, like what does your greatest member look like? Is it someone posting a vulnerable win, someone asking for feedback on their work, two members connecting in the DMs and becoming collaborators? Is it someone showing up for every live call? Before we talk about tactics, we need to talk about design. Because here's the belief shift that I want you to make in this episode. Engagement doesn't happen organically. People have to be shown how to have valuable interactions, especially online. Poor engagement is not a reflection of your content or your personality. And you don't get poor engagement because people just don't have time or aren't motivated enough. You get poor engagement by design. And it's by design that we can fix it. So once you understand that, everything opens up. Because instead of waiting for engagement to happen, I'm going to teach you how to start designing for it today. I want to introduce you to a framework that I've come back to constantly when I'm working on engagement issues inside of any community. It comes from habit formation research, specifically from BJ Fogg, a behavioral scientist at Stanford and the author of Tiny Habits. BJ Fogg talks about how any action we want a person to take requires the right balance of two things, motivation and ability. Here's what that means in practice. If a task is super easy to do, even if our motivation is low, we'll probably do it. Like scrolling your Instagram feed. If a task is really hard, we'll only do it if our motivation is really high. In BJ Fogg's model, anything that falls below what Fogg calls the action line, this green line here in the graph, that's where the ability is too low and motivation isn't high enough, and the action simply won't happen. Now, translated into digital community design, there are two things that strongly predict whether your members will actually engage, i.e., get them above that action line. Number one is unnecessary friction. Unnecessary friction is anything that decreases your members' ability to take action, pulling them below that action line. And it shows up in ways that online community builders often don't even notice. Like you build on a platform that's clunky or not intuitive for your members. You require your members to log in every single time they want to see or respond to something, or even a community culture of toxic positivity where everything is sunshine and nobody talks about what's actually hard. This is creating friction for the person who wants to show up honestly. These things quietly kill engagement. Your members probably can't even articulate why they stop trying. It's such a silent killer. And community owners don't even realize what's happening until it's too late. The second thing is what I call a lack of strategic tension. Strategic tension is the opposite of unnecessary friction. It's the stuff that increases motivation and ability. Pulling your members above that action line into a place where action actually happens. Strategic tension looks like this: creating rules in your community, like having a space that is feedback-free or shame-free, which makes people feel safe enough to share. Introducing community sayings or mantras that help guide the behavior, like it's okay to be a beginner here, or Bragasaurus, it's okay to brag about yourself here. Or putting intentional limitations on access, like a specific enrollment window that makes people feel like they're going to be a part of something special. Tension is what creates transformation. It's what makes your community feel unique and special. And without it, your community will feel flat, even if your content is great. The key is learning to tell these two things apart in your community. What's creating unnecessary friction that you need to remove? And what strategic tension do you need to introduce? And here's a really important point. In order for you to know the right answer for your community, you first need to understand what type of community you're building. So again, I cover that in episode one of this season. I also have the free full masterclass on it linked below in the show notes. So that's the best place to get started. Okay, we're halfway through. We've covered the why behind engagement, the friction, the tension, the habit formation model that is really the underpinnings of all of this. But now I want to show you what this actually looks like when it goes wrong in a real community and what it looks like when you fix it. After I tell you about my client Carly, I'm gonna give you a three-question framework called the Community Engagement Recipe. You can use in your own community this week. So stay with me. Carly runs Fast Pitch Power. It's a community for softball players and parents built around education and coaching feedback. She came to me with an engagement problem that is so, so common. She had members in her community, they were not talking to each other. They were consuming content and they got a lot of value from getting feedback from Carly and her sister. Then they would disappear until the next piece of content or feedback. When we dug into her setup, it was clear there were two big problems happening at once. The first is that unnecessary friction problem everywhere. Her educational content was hosted on a custom-built WordPress site that was clunky and buggy. Members were experiencing technical friction every time they tried to access their lessons. And then to actually connect with other members, they had to go into Facebook, a place that most of her members were actively avoiding. So right out the gate, the path to engagement had multiple hurdles in it, and people were just dropping off. Neither of us were that surprised by it. The second was more subtle, no strategic tension. And here's the sneaky part, because Carly's community was education-centric. People came for the coaching videos and pitching feedback from her sister. And there was no real structure designed to get members talking to each other. Carly and her sister were the only experts anyone turned to. The members were not being prompted to share their progress, give each other encouragement, or celebrate wins together. The community was used to consuming, not connecting. And there was no strategic tension in place to shift that. So here's what we did. We migrated everything over to Circle, one centralized home for community conversations, courses, and events, with no more tab hopping between buggy WordPress sites and Facebook groups. That friction was eliminated overnight. Then we completely redesigned the onboarding experience to introduce strategic tension from day one. We built prompts that encouraged members to introduce themselves, share where they were at in their journey, and we really doubled down on explaining why being a part of this community created more value for them. We gave them a way to connect with each other that wasn't just waiting for Carly to show up to provide value. And the result? Well, in the first couple of weeks after migrating to Circle, Carly saw more engagement than she had in the previous two years in the Facebook group with roughly the same 100 members. Same people, different design. That's the power of removing unnecessary friction and introducing strategic tension. It's not magic, it's design. This season of Dear Brie is brought to you by Ember, my community strategy agency. Most of our clients come to us for one of two reasons. Either they are launching a brand new community and they need it done right the first time, or they're ready to make a significant change, either because they've outgrown their old model or they're getting ready to migrate to a new community platform. Either way, every project runs through the same five-milestone roadmap. We look at discovery, making sure your value proposition aligns with your business model in your community and your customer needs. We look at your community business model, the tech you want to use. We dial in your onboarding strategy, and create a robust launch or pivot plan. Every project with us starts with two initial strategy sessions where we get clear on your model, your platform, and exactly what needs to happen next. You walk away with two things. First, a customized ecosystem map. This is where we get aligned on your model, your value proposition, and really wrap our hands around what's going to happen in this community. Second, you get a personalized roadmap scoped for your specific community. We assess where you're at with each of our five milestones and lay out the steps for what you'll need to do to work through each of them. Two calls, two deliverables for $999. When you're ready to stop throwing spaghetti at the wall and start building with an intentional plan, book a discovery call. The link is in the description. And when you're ready to find someone to run it, Ember Fractionals can help you find and even certify your next perfect community manager for the job. Link is in the description. Now back to the show. Okay, so how do you apply this to your own community? I'm gonna give you the three questions I come back to every single time I'm working on an engagement issue. And here's the thing these questions are not random. If you're paying attention, they follow the classic habit formation recipe: prompt action reward. Every habit and every community behavior needs all three in order to happen. So start here, brainstorm every action you want your members to take, like I mentioned in the beginning. And before you ask any of these three questions, make a very detailed list. Ask, what are all the things you want your member to do in your community? Start simple. Like a post, leave a comment, attend a live call. Then challenge yourself to go a little bit deeper. Maybe you'd love to see someone share something in your community they've never said out loud before. Maybe it would be amazing if they admitted a mistake that they've been feeling shame about. Or maybe making a friend in the community would be a huge step. And here's my secret for making this exercise work. If an action feels big, break it down. Make a friend in the community sounds great, but it's actually made up of dozens of smaller actions. First, they might read another member's intro post. They might say something vulnerable in a breakout room. They might see another member on more than one call. They might find things in common with that member. If you want a big action to happen, you have to design pathways for all the small actions that lead to it. Once you have your list, run every action through this community engagement recipe. It consists of three questions. First, how do I prompt my members to take that action? A prompt is a cue. It's something that tells your member now is the time to do this thing. It could be a notification, a welcome email, a pinned post, a live call invite, or a ritual. Without a prompt, even motivated members forget. Now, a prompt can be both indirect and direct, and you can be prompting the initiator or the receiver in a community, which means you have a lot of power to cue your members to have meaningful interactions, which is why I created the 52 Prompts for Engagement resource. It's a free download with a full year's worth of engagement prompts built around this exact habit formation framework. Link is in the description to get that. Question number two is this How do I support my members to make these actions easier? This is where we reduce friction. Is the action easy to find? Is the instruction clear? Is the platform intuitive? Is there a template or an example that they can follow? How can we provide examples or model the behavior that we want to see from our members? Are there any tools or skills that would make it easier for them to take that action? You ultimately need to ask, what does my member need to value to be ready to take this action? The easier you make it for someone to take an action, the more likely they are actually going to do that. We're moving them above the action line. And question number three is how do I reward my members for taking that action? Rewards don't have to be elaborate. Sometimes it's a direct message from you. Sometimes it's a community shout out. Sometimes it's an intrinsic reward of connection. Someone else commenting, oh my gosh, I've been there. I found in community design we either hyperfixate on this ingredient of reward and we make it the only ingredient, like when we get obsessive about gamification, or we don't think about it at all. There's a sweet spot where we consider the reward in the context of these two other questions, and you're going to be much better off. Now, I have an entire mini-series on YouTube about designing for great engagement, and I do a video for each of these ingredients: how to prompt, how to support, and how to reward. Okay, let's recap what we covered today. Asking, how do I get better engagement is the wrong question because it keeps your nose pressed against the tree. We need to zoom out. The real influence here comes from habit formation design. Remove unnecessary friction, anything that's making it hard for your members to show up, and introduce strategic tension, that intentional structure that creates transformation and connection. And finally, design for every action you want your members to take by asking, how do I prompt it? How do I support it? And how do I reward it? This is the work. If this episode was helpful for you, hit subscribe. This season is packed with strategy for building a community that actually works for your business. Thank you so much for sharing some space with me on this episode. Please like and review wherever you listen. It genuinely helps more community builders find the show. To stay connected between episodes, sign up for the Ember newsletter. That's where I share what I'm building, what we're learning, and the things that don't make it into each of these episodes. It's also where you can hit reply and let me know what community conundrums are haunting you right now. Link is in the show notes. Aloha, and we'll see you in the next episode.