What is Community Engagement? Definition, Types & Real Examples

What Is Community Engagement?

Community engagement, like many terms in the humanities, is hard to define because there are numerous interpretations. However, the principal one focuses on increasing the participation, interaction, collaboration, and voices of members to achieve effective results.

Community engagement refers to the process of working collaboratively with groups of people who are connected by geographic proximity, shared interests, or similar situations to address issues affecting their well-being. In simpler terms, it is the act of building relationships and partnerships between organisations and members to achieve common goals. This type of engagement can be transformational. Beyond including the people we serve and creating space for dialogue, effective engagement ultimately builds relationships of trust in which communities are empowered to take action and use existing systems to identify and address their most pressing issues. Community engagement is crucially important for any community to remain healthy and achieve goals, as the World Health Organization presents its own definition of the term. Thus, there is no industry or sphere of life in which community engagement is not important.

Developing community engagement means empowering participants to discover, plan, and make things happen together to strengthen collective capacity. For effective community engagement, constant commitment, public participation, and involvement are essential, because without them, it is impossible to build relationships. No relationships—no community.

Community engagement in the digital space is, of course, crucial because it is the glue that sustains members’ interest in what is going on. No online group can function if its members are absent or uninvolved in the organisation’s main activities or content.

And of course, community engagement can be developed in both directions. If you have an offline community, you definitely need to support it online. People have countless reasons and opportunities to be distracted, and if the community lacks an online space, it risks being forgotten by its members. 

Why Community Engagement Matters

When we talk about digital community engagement, we are not just talking about a sense of solidarity but about a crucial element that keeps a community alive. And when it comes to an audience linked to an industry or business, engagement becomes one of the central elements driving business or industry metrics forward.

Let’s take an example: a group of sports fans supporting a particular football club. First of all, these fans go to the stadium to cheer for the team and enjoy their time together. Why do we need to engage these fans online? Firstly, they need access to information about matches, news, and other updates connected with the team. Secondly, they need to stay connected, not just as neighbours, but through their shared passion for the club. A community space dedicated to the club serves as this third place.

The football club likely also has an app where tickets, merchandise, and other products are sold. If this app is integrated with the community, trust and interest in the app will also grow.

A community can be formed not as a continuation of an offline entity, but entirely around digital venues, such as online stores or video games. If it is so, it is not only necessary to sustain and grow the existing community but also to ensure that it continues to thrive even as its members spread out. Here, engagement becomes crucial for the internal metrics.

If the community is active, users and members have more reasons to return regularly, which directly influences retention. Thus, engagement becomes a core principle for the online entity itself. To make it work effectively, the community must remain lively: members should participate regularly, and the environment should be safe—meaning someone needs to manage moderation.

Types of Community Engagement

There are several traditional types: informative, consulting, empowering, and collaborative. 

Informative and consultative engagement are both shaped mainly through one-way communication, where community members act as passive receivers of information. It resembles a press conference or a customer support interaction: the community, as a group of people, receives information or assistance. Once they have received the information, they may continue to ask questions and request further support, so there is interaction, but it is not entirely equal.

Two other traditional engagement strategies, however, involve essential two-way interaction. A collaborative engagement means that members of the community share the same role and work together to enhance its individual parts, or its overall goals. An empowering engagement involves one part of the community motivating or encouraging another part to take action and participate more actively. This can be achieved directly or through additional tools such as competitions, membership levels, content creation, or other engaging mechanisms.

Let’s now move on to explore the specific types and real examples of community engagement.

Informative engagement

This is a more or less one-way form of interaction within a community. This form of engagement is relevant for communities formed across organisations, institutions, media, or even governments. This form of engagement includes newsletters and pushes. Like when you get the schedule of events from your public library, any newsletters from the embassy, or from The New Yorker with the news on the changes in the editorial team. Thus, most often it is about plans, events, or updates that might impact community members. 

What can be included: newsletters, informative sms and pouches, informative social media accounts and channels on messengers, a one-way forum on the websites with comment sections, news sections on the app. 

Consultative engagement

Consultative engagement is not fully one-way, but the roles here are strictly defined. It means that regular members of the community can ask for some information or demand some help from the organisation, institution, or community leaders, decision makers, and get this information through specific channels. In both offline and online, or united communities, it can be as public meetings, polls, surveys, or support channels, feedback letters, or even specific chatbot assistance. Obviously, now many organisations and communities use AI agents to perform part of the necessary elements, but the more humans engage in the process, the better it works.

Collaborative engagement

This strategy is crucial if you want to keep your community alive. Collaborative engagement includes and stimulates activity from all members and participants, and means that all opinions are important and heard. Even a simple forum or comment section below the article can be counted as a part of a collaborative strategy: people share their feedback, discuss content and participate in conversion. Actually, the conversation is the most straightforward example of cooperative engagement. In a way, many of the informative strategic tools aim to create collaboration as a final result: for example, when the company sends a newsletter with the schedule of events for a month, they want to attract people to participate and then create a discussion around it. Collaborative strategy is the democratic and most human, even if it contains hierarchy. For example, users of the video game can obtain a common mission with different roles. 

Empowering engagement

Some of the experts are sure that this is the most participatory of engagement strategies, because using this, you delegate decision-making to members. If members create content, as happens on Letterboxd, and if the company provides active beta tests and gathers feedback, as many tech companies do. Using this strategy, the community is empowered and obtains leadership, which leads to a high level of loyalty to the company, brand, or organisation, and even personal responsibility for their success.

Community Engagement Process & Theory

The community engagement process can be viewed as a five-step cycle. It begins with setting clear goals, then we go to identifying the audience to understand their needs, motivations, and preferred forms of communication. The launch should focus on implementing activities and developing involvement. Finally, the process includes measuring results, analysing feedback, and making iterative improvements to strengthen future engagement. 

To run this process, you can use one of the most popular theoretical models, listed below, or combine different strategies to create the most effective unique model, which will be the most relevant for your specific community.

ABCD, or Asset-based Community Development, is a model of engagement building which concentrates on the strengths of the community, which leads to its sustainability. Mentioned Letterboxd is the perfect example of this model implementation: members engage through their hobby and expertise, gathering film collections and reviewing films. So, they consult each other, create powerful user-generated content, and keep the main platform active, and constantly sizzling.

Sherry Arnstein, a social planner and public policy expert who worked in the field of Urban planning, community development, and citizen engagement, described and defined the Ladder of Citizen Participation, or Arnstein Ladder. This widely used foundational model in public communication illustrates different degrees of citizen power in decision-making. The model ranges from nonparticipation (where citizens have no real influence) to full citizen control. It highlights how some forms of participation, such as consultation or information sharing, may appear inclusive but in fact leave decision-making power with official institutions.

In digital communities, a similar pattern can occur: users may be informed or consulted, but without the ability to shape content or influence decisions. This framework is especially relevant when engagement strategies remain at consultative or informative levels rather than evolving toward active collaboration and shared governance.

The IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation is a broadly used framework developed by the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) to guide how organisations engage with the public in decision-making processes. It helps clarify the level of public influence in any engagement effort from being informed about decisions to having shared or full control over them.

From Theory to Practice: In-App Community Engagement 

Digital community engagement can be built through different tools we already mentioned: from online forums and WhatsApp channels to Twitch and Instagram. Social media often sounds the most obvious way to gather members together, but for many industries and companies, it is not the most relevant way. But for the start, let’s additionally specify what the difference is between social networks and online community-building tools.

Scope of social media represents of a connection circle. Traditional social networks initially were created to allow people to connect with other people with the same interests, and also to stay connected with family and friends, and then this approach has evolved and developed. Now, there is definitely no need to explain what social media is.

Online communities are a broader term. Online communities present groups of people with the same interests of any kind who tend to communicate and discuss significant themes. Of course, these online communities can form on social media, but they appeared before social networks, and can develop beyond Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Online communities often aren’t hosted on traditional social media but are gathering groups of people with common interests. You can perceive them as clubs: members participate in an activity to be a part of conversations around the topic. If they are not placed on a specific community platform like Discord or Reddit, such communities are usually gathered on standalone apps.

For brands and businesses, it is essential to use social media to grow awareness about their brand and attract new users, viewers, and subscribers. But then, they need to increase their internal metrics and keep users from going to social media, where their users can easily go to their competitors, but internally, inside the app or website. This allows brands and companies to provide a safe space for users, get user insights, gather first-party or zero-party data, and, of course, grow internal metrics and again—loyalty.

Retention is one of the main metrics for any app or website, and internal community tools help to grow it significantly and keep it at a high level. It's the internal social media effect: remember how you check your favourite social media daily. In the same way, your users will check your internal chats or forums to see what’s new there among their soulmates.

At Watchers, we allow our clients not just to gather first-party data but also to provide semantic analysis of user insights better to understand your community and their needs and desires. Such internal tools can almost fully replace the social media experience internally: for example, if you have a video game platform, and your users tend to gather on Twitch or YouTube to play together with the influencer, with Watchers, it is possible to host such streams internally right on your platform, gathering even more users inside the game.

Internal solutions provide much more secure space than social media or messengers: due to moderation, complete control is also based internally. No personal data will be used by your competitors or any other people or organisation: you control and manage all data that your community members want to share.

Last but not least, monetisation: when you use social media to grow your community, you spend money. When you gather them internally, you increase revenue due to the growth of subscriptions, deals, or any other transactions you obtain.

Embedded Community Solutions

Embedded solutions can include multiple tools and widgets. Let’s see the main.

• Community chat, comment section, online forum

It is the main environment, the playground, where your users gather and talk. It is the first layer of any online community. You can manage it like a social platform inside your platform, as a social part of your app. It can be made in different ways: as a comment section to articles and news, as an online forum or lobby on the home page of your website where users discuss as many topics as possible, or chats with different topics, to different events, games, or titles.

• Live streaming

As Twitch and YouTube metrics show, live streaming is the champion when we talk about community engagement. It is possible to reuse their experience inside any platform, even a small one. With internal tools for community building, live streaming can be hosted inside any website or app, and it is also possible to embed the existing live streaming from an external platform easily. It won’t be unique, but it allows your users to stay on your app and not go somewhere else.

• Engaging widgets

Sometimes digital users leave platforms they like just because they want to be entertained. Thus, they go to social media, browser games, or something similar. If you add various widgets to the platform, it will allow you to keep users permanently engaged. Polls, quizzes, giveaways, and other small digital bibs and bobs, together with reactions, stickers, emoticons, threads, and replies, will help your users feel nice at your platform without missing traditional social media or three-in-a-row games. 

Examples & Real-World Use Cases

At Watchers, we not only provide integrated tools to allow your audience to communicate right on your platform, but also help work with the community, build it, keep it alive, and work with the users most effectively. It can work for different industries and different types of communities.

• The sports digitised community in 10 days

Watchers has a case with building the community around the Olympics 2022: we started with the simple integration of the chat for viewers who watched different games during the tournament. Viewers watching the game could scan a QR code and join the chat to discuss what is going on with other viewers. We gathered around 100 thousand viewers in one chat who watched the games on the TV channel at the same time. These viewers had different time zones, represented different social classes, but due to the same interest and complete anonymity of the chat environment we provided, they returned to this chat again and again, even if there weren’t any games they wanted to watch. The desire to stay with the community was more powerful. In the end, we built a strong digitised community (most of them used just TV to interact with our client, but in just 10 days, the situation changed).

Read more about the case

• Community around the TV series—viewers were waiting for a new episode together

Another domain is for sure Film and Series. In 2024, our client premiered a new show, which became extremely popular since the second episode, but the tricky point was that it was available on two platforms at the same time. Yet, only our client provided the social layers for community building and communication among users. So, Watchers chats were a community of TV show fans that formed and became a killer feature compared to the competitor. Users watched the new episodes to get an opportunity to discuss it as soon as possible, and between episodes they watched the previous ones together, discussed them, formed fan clubs for the characters, and recommended each other various films and shows. It grows both retention and user base for our client.

Read more about the case

• Trading community with the local experts

With Watchers tools, another client built a system of experts in their stock-trading app. Experts and influencers have the right to stream, and other users can join the stream and ask questions on the topic. Participants of the community obtain the knowledge that they can get trustworthy information about stock trading from the relevant experts on the Watchers’client app. They don’t need to use an external platform or Google something/ Also, they can share opinions and participate in the discussion, which combines different engaging strategies that became possible due to an easy integration with Watchers.

Read more about the case

Overview of Community Engagement Strategies

What should your strategy include? What elements (not tools, but strategic approach) help you to keep your community engaged? Let's make a short list.

• Feedback

Listen to the community, work with their feedback and don't forget that your internal community is the best way to understand your audience. Use it.

• User profiles

User profile and customisable tools are the only way to perform yourself inside the digital community. Allow your users to customise their profile as richly as possible with avatars and names. If they can also customise additional things, like to influence the moderation of the space they are engaging in, it will work much better.

• Gamification

Users like to be celebrated, so celebrate them! Allow them to earn some badges, stickers, or other prizes, reward them for the activity and for their help to the community. The more they feel appreciated, the more they want to come back.

• Additional events

Host stream, invite local influencers, give the users useful insights and exciting conversations. The more additional value you add to your main platform, the more loyal your users will be.

• Track metrics and analyse behaviour

Track all users' actions, MAU, WAU, DAU in chat, the number of user interactions, 30-day retention; analyse all users' messages and behaviour to understand your audience and to provide them better service, content, or any other thing you provide. 

FAQs About Community Engagement

What are the 3 C’s?

Communication, collaboration, and commitment. Communication is about constant dialogue, transparent conversation, and the members’ understanding that they have a voice. Collaboration means that members share common goals and feelings of shared ownership. Commitment describes a willingness to be involved in community development and sustainability.

What are the main types of community engagement?

Usually, informing, consulting, collaborative (or involving), and empowering are divided.

H3: What is the primary goal of community engagement?

The goal is the creation of collaborative relationships to address shared goals and create sustainable environmental outcomes, resulting in positive outcomes for the community.

What is a synonym for community engagement?

Community engagement can also be described through participation, collaboration, or, in a way, public involvement or audience interaction, but the initial term has its own specificity as engagement is broader than the others mentioned.

How to increase?

You have to build strong and trustworthy relationships through transparent, inclusive, and consistent communication. You need to use various channels, analyse users' feedback and insights, and constantly grow the value of the community for its members. 

Enhance Community Engagement with Watchers

Try our solution if you'd like to integrate in-app community-building tools to grow engagement. We provide community chats, in-app live streaming, plenty of engagement widgets for any platform and any brand which is ready to interact with users and listen to the audience. Integrate Watchers into your platform and turn passive members into active participants. We'll be happy to help you find the best community engagement strategy for your audience.

Sources

• Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate, Empower | Intosai Journal
• Community Engagement 101: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide | VisibleNetwork
• Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation | The Citizens Handbook
• The Evolution of Social Media: How Did It Begin, and Where Could It Go Next? | Maryville University
• What is Community Engagement and why is it an important approach? | UNICEF
• Strategic Community Engagement: A Unseen Power For Business Leaders | Forbes