Grassroots Engagement: The Effective Way to Inspire Trust and Build Momentum

Grassroots engagement is one of the main types of fostering engagement within communities. It starts from the bottom, with ordinary people taking ownership and promoting a cause, person, or brand. As others see that these initiators get involved with passion and conviction, they’re more likely to believe in the community and join it. Peer influence lends credibility, builds participation, and helps maintain momentum.

What Is Grassroots Engagement?

Grassroots engagement is a way to build momentum from the bottom up, where participation is driven by volunteers. The people on the ground, not a central authority, influence each other, attract new participants, and form a strong movement.

The term is commonly used in politics, activism, and social change, where citizens act beyond formal power structures to influence wide opinions and also decision-makers through petitions, local organising, or direct communication.

But the same principles apply to brands, sports organisations, and digital platforms where fans, users, or customers create content, organise activities, advocate publicly, or contribute ideas. All because they identify with the mission or community.

Across all fields, grassroots community engagement works when people feel personally invested and free to participate on their own terms, like we’ve seen it with:

• Volunteer-powered political campaigns (by Bernie Sanders)
• Decentralised grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter
• Fan cultures similar to Borussia Dortmund’s and their iconic Yellow Wall

Companies such as Patagonia that empower customers to go from passive consumers to advocates.

Why Grassroots Engagement Matters Today

83% of consumers would prefer brands to facilitate connections between people instead of just broadcasting messages.

Grassroots engagement builds trust in a world where consumers are tired of promo and ads and are more inclined to listen to their peers. Recent studies show 74% of Gen Zers trust friends and neighbours, when just 19% trust large technology companies.

Beyond trust, grassroots participation provides deeper engagement. Initial silent consumption leads to content creation and advocacy as trust grows. About 40% of consumers trust micro-community recommendations as much as personal ones, showcasing the impact of participatory environments.

Participation also strengthens retention. When people contribute, they develop a sense of ownership and belonging, making them more likely to return. Deloitte has recently demostrated that Gen Z and millennials are particularly sceptical of performative efforts (which increase attrition) and more motivated to stay involved long term when they feel included and see real social impact. 

Over time, participation compounds into brand strength. It’s an organic process in which more and more people start to willingly promote a brand in public. And it turns out that the more someone actively supports a cause, the more likely they are to donate to it (up to 85% of volunteers donate to the causes they support). But the entire above is all the more important for digital platforms. Users consume content on owned channels but move elsewhere to discuss it (about 21% on WhatsApp, 16% on Discord, and 21% on “other” social media channels, according to CMX). When that happens, platforms lose attention, first-party data, and monetisation opportunities.

The solution to prevent this behaviour is to offer users the experience they were seeking elsewhere directly on the platform. Designers create in-product spaces (embedded community chats are one example) where people can discuss their experience while they’re having it and long after it ends. Grassroots engagement occurs much more naturally in these spaces because users are in context. They’ve all seen the same content and can talk about it in the same space.

Given that internet users have such fragmented experiences and they’re hopping across up to 7 social networks daily, this design choice makes a measurable difference.

Grassroots Engagement Metrics: How to Measure Momentum

Since not all activity translates into momentum, you must monitor specific metrics (using community analytics) to ensure your grassroots engagement is on track. The metrics that measure who’s participating, how engagement spreads, and whether it translates into lasting impact are the ones that differentiate sustained engagement from noise.

Participation and Activity Metrics

The grassroots engagement metrics in this category indicate whether users are merely present or actively engaged.

Active Participants (Community DAU / WAU) — unique users who complete at least one meaningful action within a defined time window (DAU=per day, WAU=per week).

The meaningful actions include posting, commenting, replying, reacting, sharing, creating a group/event, inviting someone, submitting an idea, and uploading content.

Share of Engaged Users (Engaged Rate) — share of the total audience that participates, indicating whether participation is limited to a small group of typically involved members or is more diverse.

The formula is (Number of active participants ÷ Total eligible audience).

Participation Frequency — How often active participants contribute within a period.

There are two ways to measure it: 1) Look at the average contributions per active user or 2) Calculate the median contribution per active user (more reliable since it isn’t skewed by a small number of outliers/super-users).

The average contributions formula is (Total contributions ÷ Active participants).
For the median contribution, list how many contributions each active user made during the period, sort the list from lowest to highest, and take the middle value.

E.g., 12,000 active users generated 48,000 comments/messages over a week. The average contribution is 4 per active user/week, which may appear favourable. But the median value might tell a different story. For instance, if the median is 1 (at least half of the contributors only took one action during the period), you have lots of “drive-by” activity. To confirm you’re building an engagement habit, the median should be closer to 3-4.

UGC Volume (User-Generated Content) — total count of user-created items (posts, messages, comments, uploads) in a period. 
Count items created by non-staff accounts and track them by type with the formula (Current period - Previous period) ÷ Previous period x 100.

Growth and Network Metrics

These metrics measure whether momentum is spreading through people, not just through campaigns.
Invites/Referrals (Peer-Driven Acquisition)

New participants brought in by existing participants
To measure it, track referral codes, invite links, “invite sent” events, or “joined via invite” attribution. The Invite conversion rate = Joins via invite ÷ Invites sent.

If the invite conversion rises over time, it indicates that the community value proposition is strengthening.

Growth of Local Chats/Groups (Decentralisation) — members who create and sustain sub-communities (chapters, group chats, interest rooms).

It’s determined by counting the number of new sub-communities that appear each week AND survive the first 30 days with at least 10 community members.

Business Outcome Metrics

The following metrics connect community momentum to results.

Retention Uplift (Engaged vs Non-Engaged) — the difference in retention between participants and observers. 
It’s calculated as cohort retention by segment (“contributors” vs “non-contributors.”)

E.g., out of users who joined in the same period, 48% of contributors (people who posted, commented, or reacted) were still active after 30 days, compared to 18% of users who only consumed content. This 30-percentage-point retention uplift (48%-18%) shows that active participation significantly increases the likelihood of long-term use.

Platforms Watch Time/Usage Lift — difference in time spent and usage frequency between participants and non-participants. 
To measure it, calculate the average minutes/week and sessions/week for contributors vs. non-contributors.
If participants return more often and spend more time per visit, you’re getting strong signals to continue investing and test causality later, through experiments.

Conversion Rate and LTV (Sales/Subscriptions/Donations) — the impact of participation on conversion rates and lifetime value.

Conversion rate = (Number of users who converted ÷ Total users in segment) × 100

LTV = Average revenue per user × Average customer lifespan.

You should calculate both by segment (“contributors” vs “non-contributors”) to compare.

E.g., if 620 out of 10,000 contributors subscribe (6.2%) vs. 210 out of 10,000 non-contributors (2.1%), participation is strongly associated with higher conversion. Notably, if contributors stay subscribed longer or churn less, their

LTV will be higher even at the same price point.

Reduced CAC and Paid Dependency — the difference in acquisition cost and reliance on paid channels between community-driven growth and paid acquisition.

Paid acquisition cost per new user (CAC) = Total paid acquisition spend ÷ New users acquired via paid channels
Paid dependency = Share of new users coming from paid channels vs. referrals and organic sources
E.g., over two consecutive quarters, a platform spends £420,000 on paid acquisition each quarter.

Quarter 1:

New users acquired via paid channels: 10,000
Paid CAC = £420,000 ÷ 10,000 = £42
Referrals + organic account for 8% of total new users

Quarter 2:

New users acquired via paid channels: 12,350
Paid CAC = £420,000 ÷ 12,350 = £34
Referrals + organic account for 18% of total new users

In this example, we can see the platform kept its paid spend unchanged over the two quarters. Still, it managed to boost its share of non-paid acquisition (while lowering the cost of acquiring each new user). How? Through community-driven growth, it shows that grassroots momentum leads to measurable financial efficiency.

How to Build Grassroots Community Engagement

While you don’t need a huge audience or complex tools to begin, you do need:

• A clear intent
• A couple of first supporters

Some channels that foster natural participation (and, ideally, that you own)

A series of recurring moments that will keep energy alive and make your supporters keep coming back
Below is a step-by-step process for putting these elements into practice, with a focused in-app community guide.

1. Clarify Community Statement/Promise

To start a grassroots community, you need to set a clear foundation that consists of two principal elements: 
A cause people can rally around: This shared belief, idea, or problem brings people together, and while it doesn’t need to be political or grand, it must matter to the community.

A promise that makes participation worth it: Members should get real value (belonging, influence, learning, visibility, access, or impact) for showing up.

Having a clear cause and community promise will prevent engagement from becoming transactional or fading away as the initial curiosity disappears.
And if any of these complete sentences sounds too vague or even remotely similar to marketing copy? That’s your sign that the foundation is too weak.

As it comes to sports, Athletic Club offers a clear example: the brand’s identity is built on the principle of fielding players connected to the Basque region, the cause is cultural continuity and local pride.

If we look at brands, we can take LEGO as a solid example. The company’s cause is reflected by the commitment to put play first (play is the root of all learning and creativity) and the promise is to offer users influence and recognition (through initiatives like LEGO Ideas, where fans submit designs that can become real products).

2. Activate Your First Supporters

Grassroots community engagement doesn’t need a crowd to begin with. It needs a small group who truly support the cause and are excited to promote it even in the beginning, when there’s more conviction and less proof.

Strava took a bet on these early supporters when it first launched. Instead of speaking to everyone, the company decided to focus its marketing on road cyclists. These were the group they targeted and whose behaviors and preferences they used to shape the product. Segments and leaderboards were designed early on simply because the team noticed cyclists loved to track their performance, compare results, and even compete with friends.

When you’re looking to activate your first supporters, focus on these three core actions:
Identify a few individuals who really want to become visible participants in your community. 
Target those who are most vocal and have already organised themselves into informal groups, whether online or offline.

Make them feel valued and gain their trust by personally inviting them to support you.
Like Strava, Notion was very intentional about its strategy in the early days. The company didn’t want to focus exclusively on paid growth, so it identified power users. These users were encouraged to share the templates and workflows they had developed with others. And so, a powerful community was born.

3. Build In-App Spaces

Once you’ve activated the first supporters of your community cause and promise, it’s essential that you keep participation close to the core experience to maintain momentum. And you do that by designing contextual spaces, right where the experience occurs. 

These spaces make the interaction feel natural because they are tied to the moment that matters and can be accessed by users while they’re watching a match, following an event, or reacting in real time. 

Examples of in-app spaces you could build include:

• Event-based chats
• Content-anchored discussions
• Persistent fan rooms
• Live audio sessions
• In-app live streaming with real-time chat and reactions
• Action-linked social features like polls and copy actions

Over time, users will come to the app less for the content and more for the experience of being together.
Media Culture found that nearly one in five die-hard fans associate fandom with social fit. PwC reported that “more than two-thirds use social media during an event, 47% surf the web, and 24% play video games while watching sports.”

What is important here is that if the social layer isn’t built into the product, it will fragment the experience and hand over the most emotionally charged moments to platforms you don’t own.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

On all platforms, brands, and sports organisations where grassroots engagement fails, the cause is typically some structural mistake that slowly eroded trust and killed off momentum:

• Treating grassroots like a campaign (time-boxed hype)
• Over-controlling the conversation
• Building community outside the product
• Optimising for volume instead of participation
• Ignoring early contributors
• Asking for community engagement without giving value
• Being inconsistent with rituals

Let’s take a closer look at some of the biggest mistakes.

Fake Grassroots (Astroturfing) and Over-Control

Grassroots engagement only works when people believe participation is real, voluntary, and meaningful. The fastest way to destroy that belief is through astroturfing (fake grassroots activity) and over-control.

Astroturfing can range from planted comments and fake accounts to scripted “community” conversations, paid advocates presented as organic supporters, or pre-written talking points pushed as user opinion. Spoiler: none of these will end up well (a game marketing firm bragged about astroturfing Reddit, and faced serious backlash when the community found out).

Over-control occurs when companies insist on tight brand alignment and, under this pretext, they end up restricting acceptable topics. Or they’re moderating primarily to protect image rather than people. 
Sure, moderation is often well-intentioned. But it can easily slip into over-control, in which case it will tell your users that participation is only permitted within some narrow boundaries. 

In 2023, we witnessed the D&D OGL backlash. That’s an indisputable example of how over-control can quickly kill trust in a grassroots community (and do so faster than it could ever be rebuilt).

In short, a huge flaw of astroturfing and over-control is that they undermine the social contract; some research clearly shows that:

• People believe you less and inhibit reactions if they’ve got reasons to suspect that the engagement is manufactured.
• Users stop sharing if they see unfair moderation.

To avoid these traps, ask whether this conversation still happen if the organisation stepped back?
If the answer is no, the engagement is likely fabricated or overly constrained to sustain itself.

One-Off Stunts Without a Home Base

Contests, live streams, giveaways, special campaigns, and other big moments are effective at generating attention spikes. But when they end, the conversations and relationships have no base to continue. That’s why, with every new event, activation starts at zero, and the organisation struggles to regain attention. Because it lacks a home base to foster grassroots engagement and build on previous big moments.

This is especially costly for digital platforms and sports experiences. Sure, you get a lot of emotion with live moments, but the real payoff is, once again, in the long-term engagement, which can’t stem from events alone.
Grassroots engagement often builds on the big moments and creates a foundation for ongoing interaction. That consistent space where people can return between campaigns and just hang out with peers is critical to maintaining momentum.

Ignoring Moderation and Safety

Recent academic researches display that users exaggerate the toxicity they perceive online, because a very small minority of highly active users generate the most harmful content. On Reddit, for instance, where only about 3% of the content is highly toxic, users think it’s actually 43%. That’s how large the gap is between reality and user perception, and how much a small group of people can influence the experience for the entire community.

Thankfully, moderation exists to reduce harmful content even more, preventing people from being afraid to speak up. Without it, the thoughtful contributors will begin to disengage simply because they no longer feel safe within the community. And moderation is all the more important when it involves individuals who, for different reasons, cannot speak up for themselves.

Roblox was sued in 2025 by the Louisiana Attorney General with the accusation of failing to keep children safe from predatory behaviour on its platform. And that same year, Reddit administrators intervened in multiple large subreddits, locking or restructuring them after unchecked harassment made the communities unsafe, according to Business Insider.

You can avoid over-controlling when imposing moderation and safety rules by focusing on protecting participants, rather than just the brand’s image. Use clear community rules to set expectations early and signal that the space is safe for engagement.

Moderation is particularly important when the context is emotionally charged. Any social context (political, sports, or anything that leads to emotions) where reactions can quickly escalate needs a responsible gaze and typically includes a large volume of messages that can overwhelm the human moderators. Given the complexity of these situations, many platforms rely on hybrid moderation systems that combine clear rules, reporting tools, and AI-assisted filtering. All so they can intervene in real time without over-controlling the conversation.

Build Bottom-Up Communities with Watchers

Communities that excel at grassroots engagement design for ownership, and because they give people space and power to speak up, they turn them into the most convincing supporters. There’s truly no better way to convince people to participate than to make them feel they count and to let them shoulder the development of what they believe in.

These supporters won’t just turn into brand ambassadors, but find purpose in activating inside the community, day after day. That’s what real participation is all about, and the brands that embed it in the core experience have the most to win.

Start building communities with Watchers and let supporters connect, chat, organise, and trust each other right inside your platform.

FAQs About Grassroots Engagement

What is Grassroots Engagement?

Grassroots engagement is a bottom-up way to build momentum where people voluntarily participate, influence others, and shape the community or cause.

Is Grassroots Engagement Only About Politics?

Grassroots campaigns are common in politics, but the term applies to any environment where participation is stimulated peer-to-peer (instead of top-down).

How Do You Start with a Small Audience?

Identify a group of motivated supporters who share your cause, and personally invite them to a space (e.g., a first chat/room) where they can easily participate in conversations, set the tone, and attract others.

What Are the Key Grassroots Engagement Metrics?

The most important metrics fall under one of the following categories:

• Participation metrics: The daily and weekly active contributors, the share of engaged users, their participation frequency, and the UGC volume.
• Growth metrics: The number of peer invites and referrals, the rate of activation among the new community members, and the growth rate of local chats or sub-groups.
• Outcome metrics: The retention rate and repeat usage, the watch time or session length, the conversion or transaction rates, and the reduced reliance on paid acquisition.

References

• Obama’s grass roots in search of new turf | Los Angeles Times
• Bernie Sanders raises $6 million in first 24 hours of presidential campaign | ABC News
• Borussia Dortmund's Yellow Wall - a crown jewel of the Bundesliga's first 60 years | BUNDESLIGA
• How Can Brands Play In Modern Third Spaces? | Dentsu
• Youth Trust Peers, Local Government, and Institutions They See Taking Action | CIRCLE
• Kantar Marketing Trends 2026 | KANTAR
• Taking bold action for equitable outcomes | Deloitte
• Global Trends In Giving Report | Funraise
• The 2025 CMX Community Industry Trends Report | CMX
• Social Media Usage & Growth Statistics | Backlinko
• How to Build an In-App Community: Step-by-Step Guide | Watchers blog
• A Unique Club | Athletic Club
• Our commitments | LEGO
• What customers to target early | Strava’s Founder interview
• Notion’s Community-Led Growth Playbook with Camille Ricketts | Dock
• The Psychology of Fandom: What Drives Sports Fans? | Media Culture
• Engaging younger sports fans: How today’s trends can inform tomorrow’s investments | PwC
• Game marketing company takes down blog post bragging about how good it is at astroturfing Reddit after Reddit finds the post | PC Gamer
• Dungeons & Dragons open game licenses update delayed following fan backlash | CNBC
• Controlling astroturfing on the internet: A survey on detection techniques and research challenges | ResearchGate
• A loud minority makes the Internet look far more toxic than it is | ScienceDaily
• Louisiana sues Roblox alleging the popular gaming site fails to protect children | AP News