Community engagement is essential when a government entity wants to get closer to the public. The best community engagement software work great to not only communicate your ideas, plans, aspirations, and expectations to the public but also to get to know their ideas, plans, and expectations. These community engagement platforms create a direct path for open communication and help identify and address issues that matter the most to your audience.
Establishing a community engagement platform for communication and engagement builds a pathway to develop trust and partnerships between government entities and community members. This type of interdependence results in the members taking accountability and ownership of decisions as well as creating an easier way to manage activities.
Here’s how you can increase engagement with the best community engagement software:
1. Encourage Communication
A place where people can talk to each other, share their ideas and help one another brings a community together like nothing else. The best community engagement platform helps in decision-making and allows you to make yourself heard. Always encourage people to discuss crucial issues and find out what matters to them. A community can grow when they share their stories and experiences with each other. When contributors feel they are heard, and their opinions are valued, they are more likely to participate in relative events. Using the best community engagement software, you can create a space where community members can talk to each other through messages, posts, and comments. Create a variety of groups for members so teams can coordinate effectively. The top community engagement platform can encourage community members to take part in initiatives and show that you care about their contributions.
2. Create Segments of Participants
Every community is made up of people with different engagement levels- some may be very active, and some may be hardly contributing. You can’t use the same methods for all members to drive engagement. For each group, you need different activities, rewards, and contests depending on the members’ rate of participation. To drive more engagement from non-engaged members, you can organize competitions, contests, quizzes, and fun activities, and offer prizes for activities. The best community engagement software can help you in organizing multiple events at one time, making it easy for you to launch them instantly and boost participation. These competitions can be automated and work perfectly without any human operation so you can sit back and watch as the engagement levels soar on their own. Not sure how to target each group and what activities to plan? NextBee’s team of professionals is here to help with that too!
Make use of our high-end analytics within our community engagement software to take a look at various demographics of participants, hours of peak engagement, and so much more!
3. Gamification
Gamification within the best community engagement software can drastically improve engagement. Gamification essentially means incorporating game-like features into a community engagement solution to encourage daily activities. It helps to increase the number of hours each member spends on your platform and elevates engagement levels. The rewards you offer are a key component of gamification. Rewarding community members for their participation is key to boosting participation in specific activities. For instance, if you would like to increase the number of posts each member makes, try incentivizing this activity and rewarding them with points that can be later exchanged for gifts, vouchers, or certificates. Leaderboards are a smart tool within the best community engagement solution. It is another key feature of gamification which showcases the highest scores of members. Leaderboards use friendly competition to encourage others to increase their activities and match their points to keep up with the point leaders. If you’re unsure how best to use gamification features in your community engagement software, get in touch with us. We can integrate it easily within your platform. We have also listed the top free leaderboard tools in 2023. Our team of experts will provide you with a detailed and personalized plan for your community.
4. Be Active
The best community engagement software works best when the interaction takes place from both ends. You must ensure that you as a moderator have a team that can respond to questions, queries raised by the members as well as take part in fun activities, polls and initiate conversations. If you are non-responsive, community engagement will die down no matter how active the members are. So, get involved in community events and encourage participation by showing you care about the initiatives you start. Ask members questions to get to know what they want, their interests, and their needs. When you become an active member of the platform, you expect to become a part of the community. Over time, people will begin to approach you with issues that matter to them and the changes they expect from you as a moderator. The trust and dependency built here are crucial to building long-term, lasting engagement. The top community engagement platforms allow you to trigger push notification messages whenever a community member posts a question or responds.
NextBee helps organizations build strong communities through tried and tested practices of over 10 years. Our team of experts helps organizations like yours reach their community goals, inculcate better organizational practices and improve community happiness.
If you want a personalized route to success, do give us a call. We’d be happy to share a platform demo of our best community engagement software with you.
