I came across an interesting listserve discussion where this was the topic. How do you define a member of your community as engaged or not engaged?
The particular question came from a community manager whose community had auto-subscribed all of their members – meaning they had a fair amount of lurkers or “observers”, but few commenters posting and replying. They can see that folks are clicking through from email links, but not doing anything else. So the question was,
“Of course we want to up our number of posts/discussions, but how do we measure engagement now? Do we count those people who are actively signing in and poking around, but not contributing? Should we track our emails about the community and somehow count the open rate as engagement – or is that really pushing it?”
Many community managers, including myself, consider people who have logged in in the last month to be active.
Others believe that lurkers are very valuable to a community, not just because they consume community information, but because they often share that knowledge to their other networks (who may or may not have access to the community).
So I’d love to know – how do you define an engaged member? And is that the same as an active member, for you?
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