What Is a Community Engagement Strategy?

Basically, it is an action plan. It helps your brand connect with a community and encourage active participation through regular feedback, attending events, sharing experiences, etc.

Want to keep your employees, customers, or fans close? Then you need to constantly facilitate interactions between you and them (as well as among them). However, you can’t just wing it, and that’s why you need a strategy.

We’ve already written a detailed guide on what community engagement is. Now, let’s show you what it takes to develop its strategy.

Why Every Brand Needs a Community Engagement Plan

American entrepreneur Pat Flynn argues that the most effective marketing strategy is to build a community and turn followers into superfans, people who “are gonna market for you without even asking”. He says, “It’s the cheapest marketing team that you could ever ask for, and the best one, because they’re gonna tell stories better than you could, about your product and how that actually serves people.”

Surely, any business will want to develop a strategic community plan that nurtures superfans and helps:
1.    Build trust: The more users actively engage within your community, the more they’ll get to know, like, and trust you. All that will only improve their engagement over time.
2.    Activate more users daily: Nobody hangs out in boring places. Your plan will ensure cool things happen around your (digital) place and lure members to check up frequently.
3.    Increase retention: While your community gains popularity, the number of Daily Active Users (DAU) will increase. Through continuous engagement, you’ll keep your old users and attract new ones.
4.    Naturally produce UGC: Repeat engagement fosters trust, making people more confident to participate. User-generated content will surge simply because people feel comfortable within the community.
5.    Improve lifetime value: As participants settle in, relationships grow stronger, people better understand your offerings, and even experience a sense of belonging. Ultimately, they buy more over time.

Deloitte Digital’s recent State of Social Research report shows that brands have, indeed, increased investment in community management by 9% year-over-year in 2024.

DID YOU KNOW?
A 2021 study of over 600 members of online brand communities revealed that increased engagement led to a higher willingness to spread positive word-of-mouth and co-create with the brand, thereby indirectly boosting brand loyalty. At the same time, mere participation, on its own, didn’t significantly impact these metrics. In other words, the quality of community engagement is what marks the difference and the reason why brands need to really think through their engagement plans.

The overarching reason for having an engagement plan is to satisfy your community’s fundamental human need: the sense of belongingness.

The desire to belong is universal, and sports exemplify it perfectly.

One Reddit thread discusses, “How do people love a sports team? People even cry when their team loses.” The answers aren’t quite academic, but they’re as real as they can get:

“It’s mostly a sense of pride… It’s fun to talk shit about other people’s teams. It’s fun to follow the moves your team makes. It’s fun to represent your team and talk about them with other people. It’s fun to yell at strangers random things if they root for the same team as you.”

The interesting thing is that there’s nothing unique to how people form sports communities, invest in a shared experience, and become superfans. We’re seeing the same dynamics with many brands out there:
•    LEGO invites fans to suggest new sets and vote on which ones the company should produce next
•    Figma engages designers to contribute with templates and plugins, giving them a sense of pride and ownership
•    Duolingo fosters community competitions and gamified learning streaks that create a culture of daily mass engagement
•    Notion maintains a global community of organisers and template creators who act as brand ambassadors

online communities - figma — Figma unites designers in online communities

The patterns are the same across the board. Curiosity and passion bring people together. But to make them stay together in the long run, you need an intentional community engagement strategy.

Community Engagement Strategy Framework (Step-by-Step Action Plan)

Your strategy draft may span anywhere from 10 to 25 pages or more. The bigger your company, the more likely you’ll end up with a combination of the following:

Step 1 - Define Objectives and Success Metrics

Grab a pen and jot down your:
•    Short-term objectives: Anything that would help solve the most pressing, immediate community issues (Eg, increase daily check-ins).
•    Long-term goals: The ones that require a long-term dialogue and more complex activities (Eg, create a group of brand ambassadors)
•    A brief, one-paragraph explanation: Establish why all these matter

Want active supporters who stick around, contribute to your reputation, and respond to your offers? Your objectives will revolve around engagement, retention, conversions, and reputation.

The theory of SMART goals will guide you to formulate Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound goals.

As for the metrics and KPIs that evaluate how you’re achieving business success through community engagement, consider:

• Community engagement rate
• DAU/MAU and UGC/DAU ratios
• Retention rate
• Net Promoter Score

💡By the end of this post, we’ll talk more about these metrics and their formulas.

Step 2 - Identify and Understand Your Community

Communities are like onions. They have layers.
Take football enthusiasts, for instance. The fans of Liverpool FC aren’t just “football fans” but a mix of:
•    Locals who live for matchdays at Anfield
•    Global fans who watch every game on TV and join the club’s app
•    Casual supporters who’ll only tune in for the big fixtures
•    Official supporters’ clubs worldwide, the ones that run their own meet-ups and organise watch parties
•    Partners and sponsors who are looking to increase their visibility within the community
•    Everyone in the internal staff (from coaches and doctors to stewards)

online community — Liverpool has such a club song with a reason: their fans are always united

Volunteers who shoulder any match event.
In marketing and community management, we call these layers stakeholders. They include ALL the parties involved with the community: members, managers, moderators, leaders, and external partners.

To successfully engage these categories through your strategic plan, you’ve got to know them well. It’s an ongoing discovery process, where you:
1.    List down:
a.    All the categories involved with, impacted by, or directly interested in your community
b.    Every category’s interest and how much they can influence your projects
c.    Every category’s needs and expectations regarding your project
2.    Decide which of these stakeholders you should prioritise when developing your engagement efforts
3.    Review and update your analysis to understand how circumstances change and how to adapt

For Liverpool, this means you can’t offer the same touchpoints to a season-ticket holder in the Kop and a 15-year-old fan in Jakarta. Instead, you might have to:
•    Prioritise the fans who go to matches and the official supporters’ clubs, facilitating live matchday chats and in-app events
•    Create a separate track for partners and sponsors, since their interest is in brand activation and line-up debates
•    Consider the global app users as a separate category and offer them more on-demand content and second-screen experiences

This analysis is critical for shaping your engagement and messaging strategy. Done well, it helps you speak their language, push the right emotional buttons, and get the level of implication you expect.

PRO TIP:
To get a more accurate and relevant image of your community’s layers, don’t just name them. Look into their demographics (who are these people?), motivations (why are they here?), and engagement level (what’s their behaviour?).

Step 3 - Choose the Right Engagement Channels

A channel is right or wrong depending on how effectively it activates your community and supports your engagement plans. That means choosing the best channels should be done from your community’s point of view, not your brand’s.

Below, we’ll walk you through the main options with special mentions of how each one would fit a crypto-trading community.

You’ll see their pros and cons, based on the main particularities of such communities – members are primarily global and semi-anonymous, placing a high value on their privacy.

online community - duolingo example — Duolingo builds communities internally and externally

Online Platforms

General examples include websites, learning hubs, membership platforms, and any other online platform where the brand owns the environment.
Crypto exchanges often build members-only dashboards such as Coinbase Learn or Binance Academy.

✔️Ownership lets you set the tone, structure activities as needed, and implement whatever features you want – especially the ones that facilitate a safe, moderated space that prevents misinformation.
❗️You must attract people organically and pay for feature development and ongoing maintenance.

Offline Events

Workshops, meetups, conferences, and other in-person gatherings are common for this channel. In the cryptocurrency world, conferences like Token2049, ETH Global, or Devcon are among the most popular.

✔️The bonds that form face-to-face between advanced traders, founders, and analysts are stronger.
❗️More difficult to organise and scale. Also, more expensive. Again, since we’re discussing crypto, some regions have level restrictions, and not all members will want to attend in person and reveal their identity.

💡By the end of this guide, we’ll cover online vs. offline engagement in more depth.

Social Media

Facebook Groups, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and other public digital spaces where brands can participate. You’ll see almost every crypto community out there publishes updates and explainer videos on X and YouTube.

✔️Great for reach and discovery, people come here daily and even spend hours scrolling. One market update video can easily attract tens of thousands of viewers in hours.
❗️The algorithm decides who’ll see your content, and while this channel is great for top-of-funnel reach, it is not ideal for deep engagement.

Corporate Communities

Slack channels, Teams groups, the good old-fashioned intranet, and other work-focused spaces or productivity hubs. For crypto, in particular, startups often use Discord to run internal decision-making.

✔️Can act as a culture engine. Since users here are typically employees, this environment can foster a stronger sense of belonging among them.
❗️This would be more useful for the core teams involved in crypto project development, and less for the broad user base.

DID YOU KNOW?
Professionals who can speak up and feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel motivated and empowered to do their best job.

Forums

Discourse forums, Reddit boards, Q&A hubs, and any thread-based discussion space. The r/CryptoCurrency subreddit has 10 million followers.

✔️More intentional. Users browse for topics and contribute where interested, creating a valuable archive of UGC. For crypto, this can include discussions around market trends, governance proposals, etc.
❗️Slower than other channels. Requires a higher level of moderation and effort to avoid becoming an echo chamber.

In-app Communities

Comment sections, live chats, discussion threads, activity feeds, and in-app live streams are standard here.
Trading platforms like eToro integrate social feeds, livestream analysis, and even copy-trading chats into their app.

✔️When people are already in the app, it’s so much easier to engage, and the interaction is more contextual and relevant than anywhere else.

❗️You’ve got to work extra to nail the UX design and ensure technical maintenance.
For crypto, this is the strongest channel of all because it’s safe, relevant, and facilitates immediate interaction.

RESOURCE

If you have an app or digital platform, you can integrate a solution like Watchers.io to activate your community from the inside.

You’ll get to keep people engaged, increase loyalty, and foster collaboration, and they’ll feel connected and have a stronger sense of belonging.

Basically, Watchers.io integrates social building into your product or service. Football clubs, streaming services, gaming apps, and educational hubs use it.
Also, check out the case study of how a trading app integrated this solution to create in-app audio and video streams led by experts.

Step 4 - Develop Activities and Content Calendar

These are the bricks of your strategy, the engagement catalysts you’ve been planning for. You can use the following:

Surveys

Structured questionnaires can provide valuable insights into your community. Assuming you put their feedback into practice, they also make the respondents feel heard and important.
Liverpool has the “LFC Your Voice” platform where fans are invited to “answer surveys, influence decisions, and win prizes.”

Q&A

These can include a meeting between an SME and your members, where they ask questions live. But they can also be asynchronous, as in any knowledge base with questions from community members—threads in forums, FAQs at the end of posts, dedicated Slack or Discord channels, etc.
Notion hosted a “Maker Space” event at SXSW 2025, where they organised live office hours and had their certified consultants sit 1:1 with attendees.

Live streams

While not an actual activity, live streaming is a delivery method you can use with almost any activity or form of content. Behind-the-scenes, announcements, product demos, and many more can be streamed live, and you don’t really need much structure. Their conversational tone and immediacy make participants feel closer to the brand.

LEGO’s live-stream events on Twitch and YouTube, where designers and fan contributes to build new set prototypes in real-time, are pretty popular.

Webinars

A webinar is a type of content you can you can use to share your expertise, onboard new members, or walk community members through a particular process. By definition (and the platform where they occur), webinars are structured, have a professional feel, and also support interactions in the chat rooms.

Duolingo is exceptionally committed to supporting its users through live events and webinars.

Collaborative projects

Any shared document, online library, or playlist for members to work on will do the trick. As long as people build something together, no matter how small, they’ll gain a deeper sense of connection and belonging.

It’s why Fortnite players collaboratively build mini-games in Fortnite Create, Spotify users let their friends see their activity, or why designers choose to publish their UI kits and templates through the Figma Community Files.

DID YOU KNOW?
Collaborative projects help soothe the connection crisis. As described in a Forbes article, 43% of employees accuse employers of not allowing them to connect with colleagues. And 50% say they genuinely want to have better social connections at work.

Challenges

Daily habits, fitness goals, recycling goals, and creative prompts are all great opportunities to spice things up within the community. People love challenges and sharing their progress, so they’ll quickly spread the word.
Hot Girl Walk is one of the most notorious challenges ever. It began as a simple daily four-mile walk and attracted millions of women, proving that challenges can have a profound impact even on a global scale.

Step 5 - Assign Roles, Moderation, and Support

The most common roles you need to account for when laying out your engagement strategy include:
•    Community managers: The people in the office who come up with the strategy, coordinate activities, and facilitate the event by overseeing how things go.
o    Think about the Duolingo community managers who plan for those learning clubs, monthly challenges, and streak events that keep millions of users engaged.
•    Moderators: The individuals in the field who ensure that conversations remain positive and activities run smoothly.
o    An example is the human moderators who engage with the +600K followers in the r/LiverpoolFC subreddit.
o    Or AutoMod, the AI-powered moderation solution that Discord made available for developers to automatically detect and filter spam, harmful language, or problematic behaviour before it reaches its chats.
•    Brand ambassadors: The cheerleaders who spread the word and infect everyone with their enthusiasm. Often, they’re not part of your staff, but they are very committed to engaging the community and attracting new members.
o    Twitch streamers like Faker (who’s got 3.9M followers on the platform) are excellent proof of how influential ambassadors can be.

Think of these three main roles as the brain, the muscle, and the energy of every engagement project.

PRO TIP:
At this step, you have an excellent opportunity to promote inclusivity and diversity. Carve out space for a variety of voices, perspectives, and backgrounds among the community’s hosts, speakers, and ambassadors. And leverage moderation to create a safe space, with no room for harassment or exclusion.

Step 6 - Measure, Report, and Iterate

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Here’s what your engagement strategy must account for at this step:

Analytics

Analyse the metrics you’ve picked at Step 1 to see how healthy your community is and whether you’re on track with your goals.

Feedback
Enhance your analytics by exploring member behaviour in greater detail. Ask for feedback through surveys, comments, DMs, live community discussions, etc.

Regular Reports
Compile analytics and feedback into a summary of what you did within the project/activity, what worked well, and what didn’t. Next-step recommendations are also important here.

A/B testing
A structured experiment at its core, A/B testing involves releasing two versions of the same element to two different user groups. The goal is to determine which one performs better, especially before launching a major community feature or programme.

Things you can A/B test as part of your community engagement strategy are:
•    How you welcome new members (different onboarding flows)
•    Short Q&As vs full webinars (the best event formats)
•    Push notification vs. emails (the best form of content delivery)
•    Whether a function, like the chat, should pop up or stay in the menu (where to place features)
•    Lunchtime vs. evenings, workdays vs. weekends engagement (the best timing)

By experimenting with all these details, you can validate specific ideas with a small group of members before rolling them out to everyone. This gives you the chance to optimise participation rates, reduce engagement drops, and generally create an experience that more of your member personas are likely to respond positively to.

Iterations
You always want to keep up with your members’ evolving preferences and expectations. And correct the missteps you’ve identified. Iterations are crucial for maintaining engagement.

Key Components of Effective Community Engagement Strategy

Community engagement success depends on many factors. But if you prioritise the following key components, you’ll set yourself up for the win:

1. Clear Purpose
When you clearly communicate your purpose, people who resonate with it will come along (and stay for longer).
Also, when you need to make a decision, it suffices to ask yourself, “Does this support our mission?” and “Does this align with our values?”. And you’ll know what to do.

DID YOU KNOW?
A global study discovered consumers are four-to-six times more likely to support a purpose-driven company.

2. Inclusivity and Diversity
Events and projects fizzle out if people aren’t having a good time. That’s why it’s so important to make them inclusive–so everyone feels safe, welcomed, accepted, and (gasp) like they belong. Consequently, engaging is much more natural.

3. Transparency
Nobody can trust a community where higher-ups make decisions behind closed doors or fail to communicate openly about goals, community rules, and challenges. Therefore, you must foster transparency at all levels and throughout your community’s entire structure, from top to bottom.

4. Two-Way Feedback
Communities thrive from dialogue. Don’t expect people to passively absorb information and then be anything other than passive. Encourage them to share opinions and contribute. Once they get their groove, they’ll gain a sense of ownership and become more loyal.

5. Impact Measurement
A strategy is a step–by-step plan, and measuring impact is watching your steps. Still going in the right direction? Did your actions get the results you wanted? When you measure impact, you get a feedback loop to guide future actions.

6. Sustainability and Continuity
If your community is on fire one day and “meh” for the next five, you can’t expect people to keep showing up. Give them regular touchpoints and accustom them to a predictable engagement rhythm. Soon enough, checking up on you will become a daily habit rather than something they remember from time to time.

Offline vs Online Community Engagement

Even in our digital-first world, offline encounters still matter. However, online, it’s much easier to initiate engagement (and equally easy to lose it, given the intense competition for attention).

What gives?

online vs offline community engagement comparison

Both offline and online community events have their pros and cons. It would be a mistake to settle just for one, as modern strategies typically combine them.

Community Engagement Examples by Industry

Everywhere you look, you’ll find plenty of community events. Here are just a few examples to demonstrate the diversity of options and the applicability of these strategies:

Corporate Example: Internal Employee Community

The more hires you have, the harder it is to keep them connected and avoid silos. That’s why corporations often create internal employee communities where people in different roles can communicate, hear from leadership, and exchange resources.

Target, for instance, has over 3,000 engineers who use Slack for internal communications.
And Dell turned to a private advocacy platform for its employees to share content and foster an internal, engaged community.

Retail Example: Loyalty Programs and Customer Reviews

D2C players constantly strive to turn occasional buyers into loyal customers. They offer small gifts in exchange for reviews and promote loyalty programs, where individuals accumulate points and unlock discounts through repeat purchases.

Aside from increasing sales, they increase the shopper's sense of belonging and their loyalty towards the brand. Sephora’s Beauty Insider is one of the most popular loyalty programs out there.

IT Sector Example: Developers Discussing Product Features

From Discord servers to Git repositories and general forums, there are numerous places where IT professionals can gather, discuss, exchange ideas, and even collaborate on developing specific solutions.
On GitHub, a giant online collaboration platform for developers worldwide, you’ll find plenty of communities created around specific coding tools. One of the biggest and most engaged open-source developer communities here is created by Microsoft (which owns GitHub), around Visual Studio Code.

Local Government Example: Resident Feedback Platforms

Governments are in the service of people, so they must keep a two-way communication line with them.
(Here’s an example of how the City of Cambridge has taken steps towards resident consultations by writing a detailed Resident Engagement Review.)

Often, to ease consultations, institutions launch feedback platforms. So, here’s another example, this time from a public sector-adjacent institution, Stonewater. This housing association in the UK has developed a Customer Hub allowing residents to provide online feedback and contribute to project discussions.

Social Media Example: Fans Activation Through UGC and Challenges

Brands have followers on social and invest a lot of resources in keeping them engaged. UGC is more valuable because it feels more trustworthy to hear from another client than from the brand itself. And followers love getting involved, being seen, and developing a sense of ownership from their shared content.

One of the most successful UCG campaigns ever was engineered by the ALS association. Their Ice Bucket Challenge attracted 17 million participants worldwide and generated over $115 million, which the association could use to research ALS genetics.

Stock Trading Example: Experts in Trading Share Expertise with In-App Live Streaming

Often, brands from a more complicated domain, when the expertise is crucial, don’t understand how to help their community and use additional external platforms for this.

Watchers helped T-Bank to improve their work with the community by integrating in-app live streaming. In the last two years, users have been able to participate in meetups with financial experts and influencers, discuss strategies and the stock market while surfing through the host app. Of course, T-Bank has its social media and could use podcast or video platforms for such an activity. Still, they chose to build a strong community engagement strategy, and now their users return to their app regularly because they know that they can get expert, crucially needed info and participate in a valuable conversation. They also keep all the finished streams in-app to allow their users to come back nd revise everything whenever it is convenient. As a result, the brand has constant growth in retention and ER, and a constantly increasing number of deals.

Templates and Tools for Community Engagement

Community engagement is a complex process that requires a consistent and systematic approach. The good news is that tools and templates can make it more manageable. Here’s how to employ some of these for the different pieces that comprise your engagement strategy puzzle:

tools for community engagement strategy building

Community Engagement Best Practices

Communities evolve and strategies must adapt, but the recommended best practices stay the same. To leverage member interactions, stick to the following:

1. Start with clear goals. Everything you include in the engagement plan should serve your goals.
2. Build trust and transparency. Have your leaders, managers, and ambassadors always model transparent and open communication.
3. Recognise and reward participation. Don’t just create opportunities. Make sure you applaud and support anyone who participates.
4. Encourage peer-to-peer interaction. Member interactions facilitate self-sustained engagement, keeping the community more active in the long run.
5. Measure and improve continuously. Always pay attention to metrics and adjust your strategy for improvements.

Metrics to Track Your Community Engagement Success

With so many things happening within a community, you might be tempted to track everything and become overwhelmed by insights.
However, it suffices to focus on the following core metrics, and you should easily be able to tell how healthy and active your community is and whether it’s moving in the right direction.

Build Community Engagement Strategy with Watchers

If you'd like to build a community engagement strategy and turn your passive customers into active community members, you can book a call with our product team. We will help you achieve this by building the best engagement strategy for your app or website.

FAQs About Community Engagement

What is a community engagement strategy?
A detailed, step-by-step plan to connect with an offline or online community, encourage members to participate, and work on long-term goals like loyalty and retention.

How to develop a community engagement strategy?
1. Define your objectives and success metrics
2. Identify and analyse community member personas
3. Choose the proper engagement channels
4. Develop a calendar and the actual activities
5. Assign roles for moderation and support
6. Launch the engagement activities and communicate
7. Measure and report on results and iterate

What is the primary goal of community engagement?
The primary goal is to develop two-way relationships that motivate community members to participate actively and collaborate. When you do this right, loyalty, retention, adoption, better product ideas, stronger fan bases, and so on are just byproducts.

References & Further Reading

The Best Marketing Strategy No One is Focusing on | Pat Flynn
2025 State of Social Research | Deloitte Digital
The Role of Online Brand Community Engagement on the Consumer-Brand Relationship | MDPI
Belongingness | Wikipedia
SMART Objectives: A Strategic Approach to Achieving Business Success | ResearchGate
10 Timely Statistics About The Connection Between Employee Engagement And Wellness | Forbes
CryptoCurrency subreddit | Reddit
Have Your Voice Heard at LFC | Liverpoolfc
Notion at SXSW 2025 | Notion
LEGO Live Streams | YouTube
Events & Webinars by DuolingoHelp | Duolingo
Create in Fortnite | Fortnite
Friend Activity | Spotify
Figma Community | Figma
The Connection Crisis | Forbes
What is Hot Girl Walk? | HotGirlWalk
Liverpool FC subreddit | r/LiverpoolFC
AutoMod | Discord
Faker | Twitch
Global Study | Forbes Leadership
5 innovative companies breaking free from the inbox with Slack | Slack
Employee advocacy examples | Khoros
Beauty Insider Frequently Asked Questions | Sephora
Microsoft / vscode | Github
Resident Engagement Review | Cambridge
Customer hubb | Stonewater
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge | ALS

Adelina-Nicoleta Vasile