What is Digital Engagement?

One of the most effective ways to define something is to both define what it is and what it is not.  This is a common exercise to set expectations, understand the scope, and simply manage the direction you’re heading.  Digital Engagement is no different… it’s good to know what it is and what it isn’t.  So let’s take some time to map out our two lists. 

DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT IS

• Drive to Relationship - it should always be moving people from technology to personal relationships (much more on this in other posts).  

• Uniquely Personal - it should be unique to each person and tailored to who they are as a person.

• Grassroots - is should have the ability and grow from the bottom up (or democratized) so the community can own, shape, and grow organically.

• Guided Process - the overall experience should be guided and constructed by you to guide people well.

• Measurable Activity - it should give you the ability to measure how people are engaging, where things are falling off the map, and unique insights into your audience.

• Known & Intentional Next Steps - it should constantly be showing people their best next step and the easy ability to reach that.  

• Multi-Directional - it should include what you push out to your audience, means to respond back to you, and means to engage one another in the community. 

DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT IS NOT

• Simply Social Media - it’s not simply leveraging social media platform to be present and reach people.  

• Simply Pushing Content - it’s not just pushing out content (social media plus other means) to your audience.

• One Directional - it’s not just communication on directionally to your audience without abilities to receive feedback and connect with others.  

• Two Way Communications - it’s not just speaking to you audience and them speaking back with you… it must include them speaking with each other.  

• Purely Online - it’s not all online and in a digital format.

You’re probably seeing a trend here in what Digital Engagement is and is not.  In some ways, Digital Engagement is a tough strategy because ultimately we believe that the goal shouldn’t be digital at all.  We believe that life is all about relationships and the digital resources in life should be bettered our relationships.  

I heard a story once of a man who had over 700 friends on Facebook.  One day he decided to invite all of them to a party and to connect in person.  He set up an event and invited everyone… all 700.  A few registered to meet up at the park that day, but not as many as he had hoped.  When the day came, he sat on a bench waiting for people… not a soul showed up.  How do we begin to live in a world where we have “700 friends” yet not a single one of them shows up in person.  That’s why a clear definition of Digital Engagement is so important and how you as a leader should be helping people build a nurture true relationships.  

Cause Machine Solutions

The entire Cause Machine platform is designed around the principles expressed in this article.  The Cause Machine’s goal is to equip community leaders with great tools to connect with their audience and connect their audience with each other.  The greater goal for us at Cause Machine is to see your members making amazing personal connections because of the tools of the platform and your great engagement.  Schedule a demo today!

First, let’s quickly define these two words…

Nurture: taking care of someone

Leads: New people exploring what you have to offer

My goal here is to unpack how you can better engage your leads and walk with them to see greater engagement in your community.  This all starts with an attitude, a perspective, and an approach.  And it all comes back to being a guide.  The most significant way you can nurture people in your community is to serve them well as their guide. When you think of parental nurturing you think of someone taking care of a child for many years, showing them the way, and helping them mature into adulthood.  That’s exactly what you’re doing here - guiding people, walking with them, and helping them mature to where they can be guiding others.  

But let’s talk specifically about lead nurturing.  First, you need to have mechanisms to attract and capture leads.  Leads can come in many different forms - let’s unpack a few.  There are SO MANY ideas for lead generation so be creative and come up with your own unique idea.  

• eBook - a free short book that captures the attention of someone exploring what you have to offer (just make certain it actually provides value)

• Courses - similar to an ebook… make that content available in a free short e-course for someone to subscribe to. 

• Worksheets - create simple worksheets that help make workflow and life easier on your potential audience.

• Host a Webinar - host events that provide meaningful content and coaching for free as a means to generate interest.  

• Free Trials - offer a free trial to something to give someone a chance to come in and “kick the tires”.

• Discounts - offer discounts to one of your events or one of your resources to generate engagement.  

• Refer a Friend - ask people in your community to refer someone else who might fit well in your collective vision.

• Live Chat - offer live chat or a live chatbot that would capture someone’s email address to engage in the chat.

• Schedule a Meeting - leverage tools like Calendly to have the means to schedule a meeting with you

• Solve Problems - this is more philosophical, but focus your lead generators on solving the problems of your potential audience.  

Now that you have a lead generator or two created, let’s talk about what to do with those leads and focus on the nurturing part.  Here are some general rules of engagement.

• Stay Value Focused - it might feel like it’s the time to pounce and “close the deal” but they are still checking you out.  Stay focused on the lead generator’s value, the problem it’s trying to solve for them, and additional thoughts on its content.  

• Automate - when possible… automate.  Leverage tools like MailChimp, HubSpot, or ActiveCampaign to spin up an email drip campaign to kick out a series of emails (4-6 is reasonable).  

• Text + Video - remember everyone is wired differently so consider leveraging both text and video when you create email drip campaigns.

• Make it Personal - while you are leveraging automations, also do what’s possible to make it personal. 

• Next Step - always have something that’s guiding the person to what their next step might be… a Lead Generator is just a step in the process so don’t miss the clarity on where you’re taking people next.   

Don’t overthink all of this.  It’s enough work simply to put together your plan.  Here’s a quick checklist when getting started.

• Brainstorm Ideas

• Create a Lead Generator

• Make the Lead Generator look nice and branded

• Setup the Lead Generator

• Create a Drip Campaign

• Turn it all ON

• Tweak as needed

Cause Machine Solutions

Nurturing members is part of our DNA at Cause Machine.  We believe each community has a responsibility to carefully guide their members to a better state and that often begins with how you nurture leads.  Cause Machine has various “trigger” tools to help nurture new leads in your community so you can have the technology working for you.  Explore more ways how Cause Machine can help you nurture your leads.  Schedule a demo today!

So first off… what’s a digital funnel?  Basically, it’s the same concept of a marketing funnel just focusing on the context of digital resources.  This is how you are leveraging digital resources to guide people into a specific experience or towards a certain goal.  

And yes… you need a digital funnel!  Digital funnels take time to map out and configure but these can work very hard for you as you engage more members and potential members.  Let’s spend some time talking about pieces of your digital funnel and then explore how to order these in a sequence that’s beneficial.  

Goal #1 - Give more people exposure to you and the great things you are doing.

Goal #2 - Guide people into a deeper relationship with your community.

DIGITAL FUNNEL POTENTIAL COMPONENTS

• Social Media - being present in the world of social media for people to learn about you and make some first steps of connections.  

• Paid Social Advertising - similar to general social media but this ads the dynamic of paying for ads so more people have visibility on your community.

• Website - your online storefront to help people get to know you and what you have to offer - a simple place to cast your vision.

• Lead Generators - key assets that people can explore, download, and get to know you better as they explore your unique value proposition.

• Calendaring Tools - means for people to schedule a time to meet with you and learn more about what you have to offer.  

• Webinars and Videos - events or evergreen content available for people to gain a better understanding of you and your community.  

• Drip Email Campaigns - automations that help guide new people into a better experience with you by slowly “dripping” them content and value.  

Remember the most basic map for how you are guiding people: Public > Free > Paid.  This is your most basic funnel or pathway and digital assets are designed to help facilitate that at every step.  Digital tools help move this process forward and automate certain stages.  Of course, our end goal is always to bring people into relationships and personal connections with each other but these digital tools help us archive a greater scale of meaningful connections.  

BUILDING YOUR DIGITAL FUNNEL

• Assessment - assess what you currently have and what you need

• Brainstorm - dream about what you could potentially do

• Research - explore the tools that can help you make this happen

• Recruit - find the right people to help make things happen

• Create - build your content and digital resources

• Configure - get things set up on the various tools

• Launch - press the “on” button and let things start working

• Review - track what’s happening, working, or not

• Adjust - refine your process as you learn about what’s working or not

You will be amazed at how well these simple ideas and steps will work for you.  The most difficult part is the discipline and time to get these created… but you’ll be thankful once it’s all done.  And don’t forget to have fun while you build all of this!

Cause Machine Solutions

Cause Machine can be a critical part of your digital funnel - both in early introductions to new people and the place to hang out once they join your community.  Cause Machine has tools to help you build your website, create and host lead generators, customize sales landing pages, automate email sequences, welcome people well into a new community, and more.  Schedule a demo today!

Are you leading an online community? Maybe it’s through social media or through your own website.

Here’s the thing: whether you realize it or not, you are leading an online community. 

Let’s be honest, managing an online community is tough. How do you keep up with all of the changes? From how to engage folks to what’s the best time of day to post, it’s a crazy role that changes, literally, daily. 

There’s two ways to go wrong in thinking about community management:

1) Be the person who overthinks it. 
OR 
2) Be the person who trivializes it.

I think there’s a sweet spot somewhere in the middle where we can truly engage our people and create fans who truly connect, share, and help folks. Managing a community well doesn’t just happen without intention. If only you had a list of things to focus on? 

Here are 10 community management tips for authors and leaders:

1 Know your audience.

The easiest way to do this is through a survey. Create a survey. Keep it simple. Make it between one to three questions. Ask things like “what do you need most from this community?” or “what’s the biggest problem you’re facing?” 

One digital community I worked with shifted their event survey from asking about opinions on various pieces of the event to asking people how it helped them achieve their goals and what pain points attendees had. People naturally want to talk about their problems. My client also had greater success printing the survey out on paper and collecting responses in person. In this case, it meant a lot of paper. But, they increased survey feedback from 200 replies to over 10,000 replies.

2 Know the data.

The simplest way to know your data is through analytics. For example, do you know what pages visitors are clicking on your website? Study your page views to see what folks are looking at. Once you know the top-performing pages and you understand the content on those pages, guess what? Write more about those topics.

3 Set a clear value proposition. 

Do you clearly state what value you offer your community? Here’s a great test: Can your community state clearly what they get from being part of your community? They can if you’ve clearly stated it. If you haven't already done this, create a list of how followers might benefit from being part of your community. I saw one group post on their event site a section called "Here's what you get". Isn't that what people are asking? Make it clear. Just tell people what they’re getting.

4 Set clear expectations.

Have you ever been in a relationship where expectations are not clearly stated from the start? If you have, then you know, it becomes a horrible relationship pretty quick. Take a moment to write out what your community should expect from you and what you can expect from them. Yes, it’s okay to state what you expect from them as well. You might mention things like contribution and being helpful to the rest of the community, as one example.

5 Assign moderators.

You don’t have to do all of this on your own. Create a team approach by asking others to help you moderate your community, answer questions, and help take the load off of your shoulders. You might find your team members through this who contribute the most and help others in your community. I loved watching as one community engaged specific experts in each of their core content areas and trained them up as the moderators of each of those areas. This took a lot of stress off the main team and allowed for additional expert voices in the community to engage.

6 Encourage content and connections.

Often, we might just wait to see what people are going to do in our community before we engage much. Don’t do this. Take the lead and encourage content, shoulder tap subject matter experts you know, engage in content yourself, and help make connections with others in your community. This will be helpful to your followers.

7 Shoulder tap catalysts.

My guess is, you already have certain people in your community who you can shoulder tap to help engage others. Start by making a list of who can help you intentionally engage. Then, take your list of folks and consider what they are best at—or what they’re most passionate about. Ask them to help you with a specific content topic. 

8 Stay consistent. 

This is so important. It matters much less what your post frequency is. But, whatever frequency you decide, it’s important you stay consistent. Look for a rhythm that fits you. Whether you post daily, once per week, twice a month, let your analytics speak to you as you go.

9 Provide meaningful content.

Content isn’t worth much if it isn’t useful. You live and breath this because you realize how to monetize a blog. Make sure you have tapped in to your community for what they are interested in and what questions they have. Once you have that information, it’s time to talk about those topics. One community has an annual gathering of some of their key experts, partners, and advocates to help them design their content strategy. That group sits down for an entire day of brainstorming and planning. After that meeting, they walk out with an entire year of action plans.

10 Remove bandits. 

Sadly, there’s always a follower or two in any community who end up being malicious. Don’t sweat it. Consider your community and make sure you are intentional about addressing these types of followers. It’s your role to take care of any negative situation. There are times when you need to remove followers from your group. When that happens, see it as a teaching opportunity. Your true followers will thank you and be encouraged to engage even more because they will feel comfortable knowing you have their backs. 

These are the ten (10) tried and true ideas I’ve found helpful to think through related to community management tips for authors and leaders. What would you add? 

Need more help taking your community digital?

You want to have a dynamic and multi-dimensional community which thrives. In order to do that, you need a strategy of both online and offline engagement. This guide will help you think through your approach to engaging a virtual community. Download the free eBook: How to Take Your Community Digital.

About the author: Will Rogers is the Founder and CEO of CauseMachine. Will’s career has been spent leading organizations and helping to mobilize communities to shared vision. He has served in various leadership roles to build community engagement and movements teaching him valuable hands on skills and experience. Will has developed business and community engagement strategies for dozens of organizations in nearly 50 countries. He and his wife have two sons and now live in Kentucky after two decades in Colorado.

The vast majority of associations are run by fewer than ten people – small teams who already rely on, or could benefit from, association management software. The truth is that each one of those associations requires a lot of hands-on administration, even if it's small. That administration is expensive and time-consuming and is basically a time suck for the few employees a small association has. 

Despite that, it's still vital work – and association management software aims to help.

What Makes Association Management Software Different from Other Software?

A quality association management software platform can do everything from building a website to running a member database. They can automate email communications, payment collections, donations, event management, and make sure all the financial requirements of running an association are met. In short, they can free your team up to do the things that associations are really meant to do. 

The problem lies in choosing the right association management software for your association, but we can help. Culled from hundreds of association management software options, here are five of the best.

The Five Best Association Management Software Platforms Right Now 

1. Cause Machine

Up until now, we've introduced association management software options that are useful in a variety of situations – but Cause Machine is something different. The most versatile option by far, Cause Machine is an infinitely customizable platform that can meet all the needs of an association – large, small, or in between. 

Building a cost-effective and practical web platform to manage your association is key for scalability and experience. You can even create members-only areas with added benefits too. Cause Machine can supercharge communications, help maintain the day-to-day, and even streamline association events. Cause Machine starts by defining your objectives and helps you build the platform to meet your organizational needs. 

Great features include:

• Tailored software for specific association needs
• Drag and drop web builder 
• Free trial and dedicated support
• Event management
• Email marketing tools
• eCommerce, membership billing, managed tiers, and more
• Dynamic CMS
• Job Board
• Launch Mobile Apps
• Free trial available
   

Especially for the thousands of small associations that need a practical association management tool, getting off the treadmill of hands-on administration is as easy as trying out the right association management software.

Get a tailored solution to your organization's needs. Schedule a free demo with Cause Machine to get back to doing what your association is really meant to do.

2. WildApricot

\WildApricot has steadily become one of the most visible association management software platforms, and that's because it comes with many of the features associations need. From a (basic) website builder to a built-in email system and a mobile app, it can be helpful to organizations of all sizes – and comes with a free trial period.

Great features include:

• Build websites and member directories
• Event Management
• Automate payments and renewals
• Free 60-day trial

3. GrowthZone

GrowthZone is an association management software option that is focused on what its name implies – growth! The basic plan includes everything that others do as well – including member management tools, financial tools, and the like – but it can be scaled up with marketing solutions and added "modules" as your organization grows, which is ultimately the whole point, right?

Great features include:

• Website builder with member and event management tools
• Marketing tools and sales funnel 
• Payment processing
• Free demos and monthly payment plans

4. MemberLeap

MemberLeap is an example of powerful association management software that is tailored for one specific segment of the association landscape. Along with all the basic functions of member and financial management, it features a convenient integration with QuickBooks. With 26.5 million businesses using QuickBooks in the US, that could be very useful!

Great features include:

• Member database with plans
• Integrates with QuickBooks for accounting 
• CRM system
• Starts at $50/month, plus website setup packages from $1,800+

5.SilkStart

With SilkStart, small associations can get everything they need – and the "smooth" transition they hope for. This software is designed to be simple and easy to use for administrators, and its features are designed to get the job done. Features include job boards, donation pages, chapter integration, and mobile-friendly websites.

Great features include:

• Simple tools for website, members-boards, donations, and more 
• Event management
• Job board
• Email Marketing

Get Started With Cause Machine

Starting with a community engagement strategy is the secret to building a successful organization in the long term. Cause Machine helps organizations build the plan of engaging a community well and then begin mapping out the technology to help support that strategy. We're certain that you'll find some great resources and powerful tools in Cause Machine to better engage your community. Learn how it can work for you here.