Not just more member engagement
Kerstin Tebbe, Founder, Collective Mind
We recently spent 8 weeks delivering a course on Participatory Approaches to Building an Engaged Membership with our colleagues from Conscious Consultants. With a set of participants from all around the world, we worked through member engagement frameworks, discussions about barriers and solutions to engagement, and how to design member engagement strategies. A few key ideas stand out for me about how to approach member engagement.
More meaningful, not just more, engagement
Is more member engagement truly our goal? There’s a tendency to assume that more engagement is better. If we could see and hear from people more, it would show us that the network is important to them and that they’re contributing. If we have more members show up to our meeting or respond to our survey, it means that people care about the network.
This idea of more engagement is inherently biased by our own purviews as network managers. Perhaps we focus on more engagement because it’s tangible — we can see and count it. We can tell as observers if attendance at an event is higher or lower, or if more or fewer people contribute to a task. In reality, we want more meaningful engagement — engagement that taps members’ needs, desires, struggles, and ambitions in a way that leaves them saying to themselves, “This is where I need to be”.
But more meaningful engagement is harder. If more engagement can be objectively defined and externally visible, more meaningful engagement is subjective and difficult to detect. What is meaningful will be specific to a given member. We can only understand more meaningful participation from the member’s perspective, and it is harder to measure. (We have to ask them directly and hope they’ll share their honest views and feedback!)
That truth leaves us grasping for responses to the question, what does member engagement mean to our members, not just to us as network managers? Why and how people engage are as varied as people are diverse; what is valuable to one person might not be to another. Diverse members inherently entail diverse ways of engaging, which can take lots of forms and levels of depth. As network managers, we must keep our finger on the pulse of our members to make sure we understand what they want and need. We must acknowledge that all activity doesn’t have to emanate from the center of the network, designed and directed by us as network managers. And we must always reflect on our plans and remain flexible to change course or simply let go of control when appropriate.
Why member engagement?
Member engagement is both a means and an end. It is an end in itself in that it nourishes the weaving of a network, building the connections, trust, and relationships that are foundations for everything we want to do together in the network space.
Member engagement is also a means. We don’t engage just for engagement’s sake. We engage to drive our network’s shared purpose. Member engagement is the means for setting goals, undertaking activities together, and working towards collectively desired outcomes. And member engagement is relevant to what we, at Collective Mind, think about as the two sides of shared purpose: both the member value proposition and the collective value to be created. Engagement is the means by which members fulfill their separate value propositions: it’s how they get a return on investment for the time, energy, and attention they use to show up in the network. Engagement is also the means for creating collective value: we create opportunities for members to work together to create value together within the space of the network that wouldn’t be created without the network.
Adequately prepare for engagement
Engagement doesn’t just happen. We have to set the right foundations and provide adequate support for members along a journey of engagement. We need to be clear with ourselves and with members about expectations on both sides. We must understand what the engagement is that we expect from members and situate it within what they see as engagement considering their current context, needs, and limitations.
We also need to ensure the basics: do members know what the opportunities are for engaging? Do they know how to access them? Do they realize that they have a mandate to engage and should feel empowered to do so? We need to make sure members are aware of how to engage and that they should. They need practical information, like the day and time of the next meeting, the Zoom link to join, and an overview of the agenda so they know what to be prepared to talk about. As network managers, it’s our job to provide this info alongside the structures, guidance, tools, and coordination support that members need to make the most of their engagement.
