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 for the chapter. Some activities included:
- Attending events
- Hosting an event
- Joining a Forum
- Moderating a Forum
- Volunteering for the chapter
- Opening the newsletter
- Clicking on links in the newsletter
- Liking posts in our private group
- Commenting on posted in our private group
- Creating their own posts in our private group
- Resharing content
- Attending regional events
- Attending global events
I then took each item and gave it a score of 1-10 based on the difficulty to accomplish:
- Attending events – 3
- Hosting an event – 5
- Joining a Forum – 5
- Moderating a Forum – 7
- Volunteering for the chapter – 5
- Opening the newsletter – 1
- Clicking on links in the newsletter – 2
- Liking posts in our private group – 2
- Commenting on posted in our private group – 3
- Creating their own posts in our private group – 4
- Resharing content – 2
- Attending regional events – 9
- Attending global events – 10
After scoring, I built a system to help measure the activity on a daily/weekly basis.
When coming up with a measuring system, here are three critical things to remember:
1) Automate When Possible – The less measuring you have to do by hand, the better. Find ways to automate measuring so all you have to do is generate a report when needed.
2) Don’t Measure Everything – Some things are just too difficult to measure. So for those items, unless they are really important, let them go and don’t worry about measuring everything.
3) Give Yourself Grace – If you are doing any kind of assessment on engagement, chances are you are already doing way more than has ever been done. So give yourself some grace when starting out. Of course, your system for measurement won’t be perfect, but that’s ok as it’s a start.
After doing this, I used a simple Google Spreadsheet to give members points once a week based on their activity. As the weeks went by, our top members became very clear.
A bonus side effect of collecting engagement data on your members is that you also get to see who are your least engaged members. Once you’ve identified them, now you can give them additional support knowing that they are at high risk of dropping out.
Don’t have an engagement measurement system in place for your community? Try out the process above and see how it works.
