How much of your energy is focused on growing your community by adding new members?<\/p>\n
If the answer is \u201cmost of it\u201d, you\u2019re used to feeling overwhelmed. A big part of that overwhelm is likely the feeling that you can\u2019t add new members fast enough, or that your hard work doesn\u2019t seem to be paying off.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to focus on increasing the headcount, meanwhile forgetting about the critical factor that can put a strangle-hold on all of your growth projections: retention<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Retention is the community metric that describes how long a member is actively participating. And like everything in communities, the value of retention is in noticing patterns to predict the health of your community.<\/p>\n Community member retention can be measured most simply by choosing the most valuable factors of \u201cfirst participation\u201d and tracking the start date (like first attendance, first signup, first post etc), then subtracting the start date from the related \u201clast participation\u201d date.<\/p>\n Note, the \u201clast participation date\u201d doesn\u2019t mean that they\u2019ve necessarily ended their membership \u2013 that date could be the most recent participation (with the assumption that they are still active).<\/p>\n You might be tempted to work with more detailed member stats, like the exact number of days between their participation start and end \u2013 it\u2019s useful to have this data but it can create distracting, confusing patterns.<\/p>\n Unless you\u2019re adding thousands of members or more a day, tracking members activity statistics within a given month will provide more valuable insight because you can group people within monthly cohorts which will give you more data to sample into a meaningful average.<\/p>\n Keeping this calculation simple will give you an average membership lifetime<\/strong> for your community, which will provide context for your other membership metrics.<\/p>\n Churn is specifically focused on the \u201cturnover\u201d of members during a period of time.<\/p>\n If you look at your entire community as a bucket of water, members joining the community is like adding more water to the bucket. But what if that bucket has a hole in it?<\/strong> Depending on the size of the hole, water will leak out at a certain rate.<\/p>\n If water is leaking at the same speed you\u2019re adding it, the two cancel each other out but you\u2019re still doing the work of adding water<\/strong>. If the water leaks out faster than you can add it, the bucket will never stay full no matter how hard you work. The only sustainably leaky bucket is one that leaks slower than you add more water to it.<\/p>\n The truth is that your community is a leaky bucket. You can work harder to add more member to the community but if you don\u2019t know the \u201csize of the hole\u201d, a.k.a. the rate at which members stop participating, you don\u2019t know if your work is being cancelled out or negated completely.<\/p>\n The only sustainable way to grow a community for the long term is to make sure that you\u2019re increasing participation faster than you\u2019re losing it<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Working to increase membership lifetime<\/strong> – effectively, increasing the average duration that a member participates \u2013 is like patching the hole in the leaky bucket.<\/p>\n Everything your invest (your money and your energy) into adding a new member to the community becomes a more valuable investment the longer that member continues to participate.<\/p>\n Retention can seem like a complicated variable to address in the community growth formula because it\u2019s not always clear why people drop off.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re already gone \u2013 how am I supposed to find out why they left?\u201d<\/p>\n The fact is that if you\u2019re waiting until after people have gone, you\u2019ve waited too long to address community member retention.<\/p>\n Here are 2 proven techniques to address community member retention long before people are looking for the door:<\/p>\n People are more likely to stay active when they have a relationship with another active member. If you notice a lone wolf joining the community, look for ways to help that person bond with two already active participants.<\/p>\n Why two? Because in their eyes, forming a bond with one person in the community could be an accident. By the second person, they notice a trend in their ability to bond with people in the community and will more likely continue that trend on their own.<\/li>\n Members who join for access to \u201cstuff\u201d are more likely to end their participation when they no longer need for the \u201cstuff\u201d.<\/p>\n It might be tempting to use benefits that play to the short-term wants of community members (a.k.a. extrinsic motivators) to draw them in, but those members are unlikely to stay active in the first place. But worse, the presence of these short-term benefits actually decreases the sense of fulfillment that people who came for the participation will get.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n Here\u2019s a quick case study in extrinsic motivators: Do you know any children? Do they like coloring books?<\/p>\n Back in the 70\u2032s, researchers asked two groups of children to spend time with their coloring books.<\/p>\n The first group was promised a reward for their work \u2013 a cookie \u2013 while the second group was simply given the assignment \u2013 no incentive or benefit for their participation. Both groups were given the same coloring books and crayons, and the researchers watched the results.<\/p>\n The same groups returned a second time, but this time \u2013 no rewards were offered to either group. New coloring books and crayons were handed out, and the researchers watched the results.<\/p>\n During the second session, the children who had previously been rewarded for their drawings spent significantly less time on their drawings compared to the children who\u2019d never been rewarded.<\/p>\n The truth is that extrinsic motivation is simple and often effective, but in the Community Builder Masterclass<\/a> it leads to a community anti-pattern we call \u201cThe Honeypot\u201d. The problem with The Honeypot is that it has a predictable result that stems from focusing people on the reward rather than the action. When the reward is no longer available or of interest to them, they\u2019ll stop the participating because the sense of fulfillment tied to the action itself has been dulled by the short-term benefits.<\/p>\n Instead, spend the beginning of 2013 learning how to rethink your approach to community building.<\/p>\nHow to measure community member retention<\/h3>\n
Don\u2019t forget about churn<\/h3>\n
What measuring retention can tell you<\/h3>\n
How to fix a leaky bucket<\/h3>\n
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How Cookies Ruined a Coloring Book<\/h3>\n
Avoid being the honeypot or the leaky bucket.<\/h3>\n
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