Engagement Is A Process, Don’t Push It
I never thought knowledge about plastic recycling would be the reason to get more engaged. Those who know me now may find it hard to believe that I hardly participated in any school-sponsored events before college. I was the student who ignored or declined pretty much every extracurricular activity. I thought that was something “those” […]
Celebrating E-Board Members Increases Engagement And Retention
I never thought putting numbers into an excel doc would win me an award, but that’s what happens when you do the job no one else wants. For the past two years, I sat on the executive board of the NYC National Speakers Association. By the time I joined the board, the only position left […]
Growing a Community is Never Passive
What started as the magic ingredient needed to save their community became a logistical nightmare. Through a mutual connection, the head of a large community of e-commerce sellers invited me to lunch. The purpose of the meeting was to see if we could help them buck their negative member retention rates. The organization had steadily […]
The Three Core Principles of Member Engagement that Apply To Every Community
Even though I can hold my breath for over three minutes, what could I possibly teach the U.S. Military about engaging their Marines? Marines are known for swimming for hours in freezing cold water while holding heavy weights above their head. I’m known for Free Hugs and my love of peanut butter. So when the […]
How To Measure Member Engagement
My role as Member Engagement Chair for the NYC Entrepreneurs’ Organization was to come up with a way to celebrate our most engaged members. Coming up with prizes was easy, but determining our top members out of 300 people was difficult. I started by listing out all the activities that a member might engage with […]
How Often Do You Talk To Your Members?
We recently took over management of the Member Experience from orientation to renewal for a private community of venture-backed start-up founders called www.OffTheRecord.org. While we have many exciting initiatives planned, I knew the first step was to reach out and have a conversation with as many community members as possible. For each conversation, I asked […]
Who Wants To Go Bowling Naked?
Would you be interested in joining a group of strangers for a round of bowling…naked?!? What about naked yoga? The Baltimore Yoga and Meditation community currently have 582 members who are passionate or curious about the idea of doing normal social activities like bowling, yoga, and swimming… only, they want to do it in the […]
How To Engage Your Super Users
SAS is a massive global analytics software and solutions provider with just over 380,000 users engaged in their community. However, within those 380,000 users, only 23 members get the official title of “Super User” each year. That’s right, only 23 people per year! The invite-only application to become a SAS Super User is based on […]
Experience Based Values Creation
Our climbing instructor took out a small hammer and tapped it against the rock. She leaned in with her ear to hear the noise the hammer made against it. “Nope, we can’t climb here.” She then repeated the process in three more spots until she finally turned back to the group and declared an excellent […]
Tom’s 8 Predictions for 2021
Strategic planning is so much easier when we can make some decently good predictions about what will happen. That’s why 2020 was so difficult to plan because EVERYTHING seemed so unpredictable. Just when an organization would sign off on a plan, something in the world would change, and the plan would be deemed useless. We […]