The Challenge with Community Tech

The myth of "active users"

I am involved in a number of membership-based associations, mostly revolving around my identity as an entrepreneur and EdTech enthusiast. Each association provides me with a niche professional network and learning opportunities. To amplify the organizational mission, there is always some form of “online community” that promises to bring members together. Unfortunately, each time I login, these online spaces often look like this:

At first glance, this looks pretty good. But a little more digging reveals the all-too-common dirty secret:

• “Active User” = Anyone who has created an account in the history of the online community (7+ years in this case)

• “Online User” = Someone who has logged in over the last 7 days.

So in reality, only 0.3% of those who created an account are “weekly active users”. When you consider the potential reach of this particular community (25,000+), the levels of member engagement start to look really bad.

So why would this community platform go to such great lengths to disguise the amount of member engagement on their tool? 

For one, they are almost certainly embarrassed by the low level of member engagement. This is something I understand deeply from my days running Mentor Collective. We were ultra-sensitive to participation rates among the students we worked to (virtually) reach on college campuses. We ultimately figured out how to consistently engage >40% of students, but it was only through years of mixed results that we honed our formula for online community engagement. Whenever we fell short, you can bet we were sweating!

10 years at Mentor Collective - essentially an online "community" company - taught me several valuable lessons.

Don't Compete with LinkedIn and Reddit

The online community I reference above is designed to create a space for members to network, consume content, and review online posts. This functionality is an awful lot like LinkedIn and Reddit, which some social commentators equate to addictive drugs. Like it or not, every community space is competing with free, multi-billion dollar consumer platforms. How can a small team of association professionals possibly compete? 

A few benchmarks to consider:

• 0.3% of my association's community platform users are active weekly

• 0.8% of HigherLogic users are active monthly according to their 2024 benchmarking report.

By comparison, Reddit reported 505 million total accounts and 268 million weekly active users at the end of 2023. That means over half of users (53%) login every single week. That’s 177x better than my association’s community platform.

I understand the appeal of a homegrown online community platform: you own it, you can charge for access, and you shape it to reflect your culture. But how often will your members login when they can read a free Subreddit or follow a LinkedIn influencer? The data suggests that maybe 1% of association members get meaningful value out of a community platform.

Community is diluted at scale

People want deep, authentic relationships – this is nearly impossible to create in chatrooms and online forums. Yes, these tools can be important in sustaining engagement among a subset of power users, but they are not the glue that holds a community together.

"The bigger you get, the more isolated people become. The only way to make an online community successful is to make it feel smaller to each member."

- CEO, Entrepreneurship Society (3,000+ members)

Most association leaders I interviewed reported a huge spike in member engagement at their in person annual events. These events lend themselves to highly curated small group interactions. This is where members get the most value – it is the chance encounters at the coffee table and the more intimate roundtable sessions that create lasting connections.

By contract, “community at scale” leads to more shallow relationships as members become increasingly anonymous. This notion is reinforced by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, whose research suggests that humans struggle to keep track of more than 150 relationships in their lives. If 150 is our maximum for social relationships, how are we meant to form deep connections across an online community of 1,000s? Does liking or replying to an online post constitute community without a deeper dimension of engagement? 

I would argue that most community tech is a glorified member directory where the proactive few (<1% of members) generate immense value and the reactive majority stays largely disengaged. The real glue of a community is the deep and sustained relationships among members. A fully featured community platform with forums, chatrooms, and AI chatbots provides little value if it only seeks to amplify shallow human connections.

Programs, not platforms

Hopefully the above two observations have established that a platform on its own - no matter how sleek or fully featured - does not create an effective online community. 

Programs, on the other hand, are how deep connections flourish. During my focus groups, many association leaders spoke proudly about their leadership institute where they deliver high-touch learning experiences to a select group of members. These mostly in person events range in cost from $500 - $10,000 and deliver some of the most transformative professional development experiences available on the market.  

"Our members are all clamoring to participate in our signature leadership program. We never have trouble filling seats."

- VP of Memberships, Professional Association (10,000+ members) 

The participants of these programs become the core of the community - they volunteer for board roles and become the bedrock of the association. This is because programmatic, cohort-based experiences are what draw people together and establish genuine trust. These shared experiences are infinitely more powerful than the shallow forms of engagement typical of a community platform (posting on a forum, reading a newsletter, watching a webinar, etc). 

Programmatic experiences also occur naturally at events – in fact, annual conferences are themselves a “program”. They have “programming” where members convene and learn together, but unlike a unidirectional webinar, members get to experience the powerful reciprocity of peer learning and shared experience. 

To me, shared experiences are the foundation of a strong community, and I've been lucky to participate in several transformative programmatic experiences myself:

• An exchange program in China at 16 years old

• A collegiate scholarship program

• My starting class of Associates at my first job out of college

• Joining a startup accelerator with 11 other founding CEOs

• Joining a virtual CEO group of EdTech founders who have raised at least $25M in funding

Each of these programs intentionally (or unintentionally) matched me with a cohort of like-minded peers and provided scaffolding for learning and growth. Now, decades later, I would commute across state lines to spend time with the deep relationships I formed in each of these communities. I am also significantly more likely to donate my money or time to the organizations behind them – sound familiar? 

How can programs scale?

The challenge, often, with programs is that they can be difficult to scale. One leadership institute can take multiple full-time staff members to pull off. Managing member applications, cohort curation, scheduling, reminders, content, facilitation, assessment, and feedback can be a headache -- but the results are worth the investment for the lucky few who are able to participate. 

As I think about the future of community tech, I think about scaling programs. Instead of building online spaces that will struggle to compete with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit, what might be possible if we worked to scale programmatic experiences for every member?

10 years ago, when I founded Mentor Collective, this may have been nearly impossible. But today, thanks to advances in both artificial intelligence and learning science, the time to scale high-impact, cohort-based learning experiences may be upon us. 

One of RallyBoard’s core theses is that it is now possible to scale cohort-based programs, and as a result, break through the barriers that have constrained community tech. We started by focusing on the most impactful aspects of association community: programs.

If you are interested in bringing your signature learning experiences to more (or all) members, we would love to hear from you.