The Top Reasons For Not Getting Community Engagement – Episode 118

Melissa: So Pam is the first question. So we'll hop over to you. 

Pam: Yeah. hope this is not too general, but since we're all talking about memberships, this is my question as I'll pose it and I can narrow it down if you suggest that I do so.

But what I'd love to know is, you know, people who have memberships, what are some of the things that have really, really gotten super engagement from your members? 

Melissa: Excellent. 

Paul: So super engagement. Are we looking at like a community-based element? 

Pam: Yes. yeah, I have a slack community, but I also host six events each month. And I have, you know, probably a third or a quarter of the people are engaged and I'm also actually attending the events and, or posting in slack. And maybe that's good. Maybe that's normal. I mean, that's another thing I'd be interested in knowing, you know, is what, you know, what are the numbers?

Do I just need to have a bigger membership in order to feel like I have engagement. Cause right now I just have 18 people. Okay, excellent. Yeah. So there's four or five who participate really regularly. And others who don't. And I'll just say that what I have begun to do is to reach out individually to them by phone, by Facebook messenger, by texts.

 And that has helped some yeah. That has helped. 

Paul: Excellent. 

Melissa: I love that. 

Paul: So I see Carrie has, I think it's a handclap.

Melissa: So open this up to the group. Anyone have any feedback on engagement, things that you do in your communities, or maybe things that you've seen happen to get better and more 

engagement. And I wanna go back to Carrie real quick and then I'll go to Sharon. Cause I I know your little handclap

Carrie: so I'm going to say if you're getting like 25% engagement, that's actually phenomenal.

Pam: Okay. I wonder if my standards are too high. 

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, even take a look at some of like the really big memberships or even you could even look at what we're doing on, in "ADaptive" (Adaptive Membership), look at how many people post on a regular basis. And, you know, it realistically is probably five to 10%.

It doesn't mean other people aren't reading and doing that, but it's just not huge. So, you know, I think sometimes we beat ourselves up because everyone says, oh, you should have like this huge engagement number. But the reality is, and, and I used to beat myself up, but, and I go, oh, it's because my group's an . Older group.

They don't post. I actually think they probably are fairly typical looked at it. So I would say, you know, don't, don't sweat it because there probably are a lot more people reading the stuff. They just, a lot of times people like to stay invisible until they feel more comfortable. Right. And that just, and that takes time.

So. 

Pam: Right. 

Paul: Love it. Thank you so much, Carrie. Let's go over to Sharon. 

Sharon: So I also have a small group. I have 26 people in my group. First of all, I have about eight out of the 26 who don't appear to participate. But everybody else did, but a huge thing that made a lot of difference was I stopped being the first commenter in posts. And I made a, I made a post to say, you know, I'm here, but you know, this is about community, so it's not, you know, it's not the Sharon show. 

So, you know, please respond to everybody else's question and I didn't respond first. So I deliberately held back and waited until a couple of other people responded before I put my response in. 

The other thing that's really helpful is to ask multiple choice questions that gets a lot of engagement because it's easy for people to engage that way.

And I also . Send the occasional I'm bout to send an email out to my membership, just to remind them that, you know, the, their memberships ending in January, you know, lets you know, this is your last couple of months, get in there and get going. So hope that okay. 

Pam: No, that's very helpful. It's very helpful.

Cause I always am at the first commenter because I want people to the people who posted to feel heard, but that's a really good take on. Yeah. 

Paul: And the follow-up when I can. Sharon's right on point is when you are the influencer of the program, a lot of people, number one, out of respect, they don't want to come and counter act any opinion that you might have posted, but also is like, everybody's paying you for your insight, but what it does, it then disempowers the rest of the community to be a community.

You could have almost like. posts and lock the comments because a lot of people won't go behind because it's like, they, they almost feel and think like, oh, well I have no more to contribute. 

 So, you know, I'll just like kind of lay back and maybe there'll be a different post. 

Now it takes a little bit of time because initially everybody is groomed and used to you commenting first and quickly. So you're going to have to give you, it's going to, it's going to take a little time. You might want to hesitate, like initially we have to wean ourselves off of it. Maybe like an hour to two hours, like allow other people to be able to jump in.

Then later you might wait like a half a day , most of the things that you're helping with is probably not a 911 emergency. So it does give people enough . Time to reply. 

Jocelyn, you had your hand up for a second. I wasn't sure if you, if you had something that you wanted to contribute, 

Jocelyn: So I have a fairly large now when I say fairly large, this just means to my little world pre Facebook group. And then I have my members. 

Pam: Right 

Jocelyn: now I'm up to 4,000 members in my free group and nobody ever posts. And I dream about, oh, all these people posting. So this is what I did. Not only did I take your tip of don't post because I'll scare everyone away that I heard on the last podcast, but what I also did was I had one of my members post and I just ask a question and she got, she texted me today and she's like, I have 40 people who commented in this place where nobody was even ever saying anything.

we've got to kind of like, we set the stage for like what's appropriate in this party, you know? So I hope that helps. 

Pam: It does. And I have had. You know, I do have a couple of people who, who, who comment regularly, maybe two. And I always Facebook message and, and thank them.

That's in my group, in my, I have a Facebook group that's not paid. And then I have my membership where we use slack instead of Facebook. But yeah. 

Paul: So real quick Sharon, did I forget to take your hand down or did you have another thing 

Sharon: I did. I just wanted to say too, she's producing a lot of content. So I, the other thing I would just say is like, is your group membership about community or is it about content? And it sounds like you're going heavy down the content road. I thought that's what I would do in my membership. But when I asked my group, what was it that they love. Every single one said community.

So it's not about the content it's about the community. So you're, you're thinking that that, because I said I have four experiences a month, that that would be content based. Is that what you're thinking? I'll let the experts speak to that. 

Paul: So what I would say is that we all have to be careful because a lot of us think more is better and more is better because this is our main thing.

This is what we're doing. This is what we're promoting. So like, if we owned a gym, we would show up every day and we'd be available and we would be available to do personal coaching and everything else because we're at the gym all day because we own it. 

But then it's like the average person though, They're not thinking they don't wake up and think every single, like Monday through Friday nine to five, like, they might go into the gym and spend their half hour their hour, and then they leave and they do other things in their life.

And the challenge is sometimes is when we over deliver, we actually overwhelm. So you just want to be careful cause it's like if you're doing four to six events, like people actually have to schedule that out of their life, out of their day and like attend. Like if you're looking for people to attend the live elements of it.

So that might be why you have a select group of people that do have the time. 

Pam: Yeah

Paul: the space to do that. And they're in a rhythm and they do like it because it's, it's like, I didn't think I had all this extra time to watch Melissa watch bachelor and bachelorette all the time. You know, it's like, but somehow she carves out that time, no matter how busy we are, there's an hour or two hours that she can watch this, this, this craziness.

Sharon: But it's like, some people get into a rhythm, you know? So it's, it's like they, they will shift things around and they'll get into that rhythm, but we have to be careful because if you think coming back to the analogy of the, you know, we use planet fitness as a great example that, you know, the average planet fitness has about somewhere between six and 8,000 numbers and a planet fitness, but they can't even fit 800 people in there at any one point in time.

So they basically bank on a lot of people being card carrying members and not utilizing it every single waking moment of every day, because it wouldn't be able to service everybody. It just wouldn't be humanly possible. 

So it, and I'm just going to very openly. I was on a call earlier today where everybody on that call over 130 people spent $25,000 this year to get access to this zoom call, which is twice a month, 33 people on the call, 33 people like seriously, like you just spent $25,000 and you're not even making the time.

you know what I mean? So you think it's going to be price point. That'll be different just for all of us. We had to keep in mind also, is that not even though we have the same sales page, we have the same messaging. There's something specific on that sales page, that one member want it, that the other members could care less about.

It could have been a checklist, could have been a recipe. It could have been a system that could have been the live call could have been the community. We, we try to homogenize a lot of people, put them all in the same group and assume that they're all there for the same reason. And a lot of the people there, you know, again, they just wanted some, just want to be a card carrying member.

Pam: Yeah. I, I really, I think in there, you know, there was some thank you for all the comments too. I am going to save that. I've been thinking that I need to do a, a survey about, you know, what are the pieces that you're enjoying and are there pieces that you feel like are missing? And how satisfied are you with the membership, I guess would be just on a scale of one to 10.

 So that, that seems like, and I did in my last group course before I had a membership halfway through, I did that halfway through, I did a survey, like just a Google form and, you know, ask people what they were enjoying. And I shifted things a little bit. So I think that maybe that's my next action step, but I so appreciate all of the comments and yeah. And if you ever think of anything after the call, you can find me on Facebook. 

Melissa: Excellent. And I will add with the survey before we just switch to the next question. Another great question again, if this is all anonymous, one-on-one like don't post in the group, but another great question is like, if something were to disappear from the membership, like, and you wouldn't miss it, what would that be?

Cause then you can figure out what the things that they're really not utilizing. 

Pam: Right. That's a great question because what would you not miss as exactly? Cause there's one event that I'm actually thinking of either transforming or just eliminating, because they're just after the first one, there hasn't been that many participation, much participation.

It's a Q and A so. 

Melissa: Excellent. 

Paul: We did that. We did that years ago and we were so misaligned with our memberships. This is many years ago, we spent a lot of money and a lot of energy to bring some really cool whizzbang things into a membership many years ago. And we wasted all that money and all that time and all that energy, because it was not why the members were there and that allowed us to let things go because we were afraid to let things go, oh, everybody's going to think of it as like, they didn't even care.

They weren't there for it. And I was like, wow, we spent like $50,000 on, on something inside of a year. And nobody used it. There was like three people that used it. It's like, so surveys are great for all of us surveys are always great.

Pam: Thank you very much. 

Melissa: Welcome. You're welcome.