31. How to Design for Community Engagement (Stop Asking the Wrong Question)
- Brianna Leever
- Jul 16
- 9 min read
TL;DR: "How do I get better engagement?" is the wrong question and it's keeping you too close to the problem to actually solve it. This post walks through the two hidden forces that predict whether members engage (unnecessary friction and strategic tension), a real case study where the same 100 members produced two years' worth of engagement in two weeks after a design change, and the three-question Community Engagement Recipe you can apply to your community this week.
"How do I get good engagement in my community?"
It's the question every community builder asks eventually. And it feels like the right question — because if members aren't commenting, posting, showing up to events, or connecting with each other, engagement seems like the obvious thing to fix.
But here's the problem: asking how to get better engagement when you're in the thick of managing your community day-to-day is a lot like standing with your nose pressed against a tree and asking how to get to the top. You can see every detail right in front of you. But you have no idea from that position how to actually get where you're going.
You need to zoom out before you can find the right path up. That's what this episode of Dear Bri is about — why most engagement advice is surface-level, what's actually driving member behavior, and the three-question framework I use to diagnose and fix engagement issues in any community, no matter its size or model.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 | Why "How do I get engagement?" is the wrong question
00:02:23 | The question you should ask instead
00:02:59 | Why community engagement is a design problem
00:03:42 | BJ Fogg's habit formation model applied to community design
00:07:13 | A real community engagement case study
00:11:57 | The Community Engagement Recipe [Framework]
00:15:52 | Full recap
Watch on YouTube
The Real Question to Ask About Community Engagement
Before we talk tactics, here's the question I want you to sit with first:
What do I actually want my members to do in my community?
Not "be engaged." Not "be active."
Specifically — what does your greatest member look like?
Is it someone posting a vulnerable win? Someone asking for feedback on their work? Two members connecting in the DMs and becoming collaborators? Someone showing up to every live call?
Because engagement isn't the goal. It's the result.
And when you skip past this question to tactics — more content, more discussion prompts, more notifications — you're solving for a symptom while the real problem stays invisible.
Engagement Is a Design Problem, Not a Motivation Problem
One of the biggest misconceptions in community building is the belief that engagement happens organically.
It doesn't.
People need structure. They need guidance. And most importantly, they need an environment that's been intentionally designed to support the behaviors you want to see.
When participation drops, the default response is almost always the same:
More content. More events. More discussion questions. More notifications.
But adding more activity doesn't automatically create more engagement. In fact, it often makes things worse — because the underlying design problem is still there, just buried under more noise.
Here's the belief shift that changes everything:
You don't get poor engagement because people don't have time or aren't motivated enough. You get poor engagement by design. And it's by design that you fix it.
The Two Hidden Forces Affecting Your Community Engagement
This is where habit formation research becomes incredibly useful for community builders.
BJ Fogg — behavioral scientist at Stanford and author of Tiny Habits — describes how any action a person takes requires the right balance of two things: motivation and ability.
If a task is easy enough, people will do it even when motivation is low — like scrolling Instagram. If a task is hard, they'll only do it when motivation is very high.
Anything that falls below what Fogg calls the "action line" — where ability is too low and motivation isn't high enough — simply won't happen.
Translated into community design, two forces predict whether your members will actually engage:
Unnecessary Friction
Unnecessary friction is anything that decreases a member's ability to take action — pulling them below the action line.
It shows up in ways community builders often don't notice:
A platform that's clunky or unintuitive for your specific members
Requiring members to log in every time they want to see or respond to something
A community culture of toxic positivity where nobody talks about what's actually hard — creating invisible friction for the person who wants to show up honestly
Content and conversation split across multiple platforms
The tricky part: members often can't articulate why they're disengaging. They simply stop participating. And from the community owner's perspective, it feels like engagement disappeared for no reason.
But there is a reason. You just have to know where to look.
Strategic Tension
Strategic tension is the opposite — it's the intentional structure that increases motivation and ability, pulling members above the action line into a place where action actually happens.
Strategic tension looks like:
Community rules that create psychological safety ("this is a feedback-free space," "it's okay to be a beginner here")
Shared language or mantras that guide behavior
Intentional enrollment windows that make members feel they're joining something special
Onboarding experiences that show members how to participate — not just what the community contains
Tension is what creates transformation. It's what makes your community feel unique and worth showing up for. Without it, even great content produces a flat community.
The key is learning to tell these two things apart: what's creating unnecessary friction that you need to remove, and what strategic tension do you need to introduce?
A Real Community Engagement Case Study: Carly + Fastpitch Power
Carly runs Fastpitch Power — a community for softball players and parents built around education and coaching feedback.
She came to me with an engagement problem that is deeply common: members were in the community, consuming content and getting value from Carly's feedback — but they weren't talking to each other. They'd show up, get what they needed, and disappear until the next piece of content dropped.
When we dug in, two problems were happening at once.
Problem 1: Unnecessary friction everywhere.
Her educational content lived on a custom-built WordPress site that was clunky and buggy. Members experienced technical friction every time they tried to access a lesson. And to actually connect with other members, they had to jump into Facebook — a platform most of her members were actively avoiding.
Right out of the gate, the path to engagement had multiple hurdles in it. People were dropping off before they even got started.
Problem 2: No strategic tension.
Because Fastpitch Power was education-centric, members came for the coaching videos and pitching feedback. There was no structure designed to get members talking to each other. Carly and her sister were the only experts anyone turned to. Members weren't being prompted to share their progress, encourage each other, or celebrate wins together.
The community was trained to consume — not connect. And there was no strategic tension in place to shift that pattern.
Here's what we did:
We migrated everything to Circle — one centralized home for community conversations, courses, and events. No more tab-hopping between a buggy WordPress site and a Facebook group nobody wanted to be in. That friction was eliminated overnight.
Then we completely redesigned the onboarding experience to introduce strategic tension from day one — prompts that encouraged members to introduce themselves, share where they were in their journey, and really understand why being part of this community created more value than consuming content alone.
The result: in the first couple of weeks after migrating to Circle, Carly saw more engagement than she had in the previous two years in the Facebook group — with roughly the same 100 members. Same people. Different design. That's what removing unnecessary friction and introducing strategic tension actually looks like in practice. It's not magic. It's design.
The Community Engagement Recipe: A Three-Question Framework
Once you understand that engagement is a design challenge — not a motivation or content problem — the next question is: how do you actually improve it?
Start by making a detailed list of every action you want members to take. Start simple: like a post, leave a comment, attend a live call. Then go deeper: share something they've never said out loud, admit a mistake, make a friend in the community.
And here's the key: if an action feels big, break it down.
"Make a friend in the community" is actually made up of dozens of smaller actions — reading another member's intro post, saying something vulnerable in a breakout room, seeing someone on more than one call, finding things in common. If you want a big action to happen, you have to design pathways for all the small actions that lead to it.
Once you have your list, run every action through the Community Engagement Recipe — three questions that follow the classic habit formation loop of prompt → action → reward:
Question 1: How Do I Prompt My Members to Take That Action?
A prompt is a cue — something that tells your member now is the time to do this thing. It could be a notification, a welcome email, a pinned post, a live call invite, or a ritual.
Without a prompt, even motivated members forget.
Prompts can be direct or indirect, and you can be prompting the initiator or the receiver — which means you have a lot of power to cue your members toward meaningful interactions.
Question 2: How Do I Support My Members to Make That Action Easier?
This is where you reduce friction. Is the action easy to find? Is the instruction clear? Is the platform intuitive? Is there a template or example to follow?
The deeper question: what does my member need to value or believe to be ready to take this action? The easier you make it, the more likely they are to actually do it.
Question 3: How Do I Reward My Members for Taking That Action?
Rewards don't have to be elaborate. Sometimes it's a direct message from you. Sometimes it's a community shoutout. Sometimes it's the intrinsic reward of connection — someone else commenting "oh my gosh, I've been there."
The mistake most community builders make: either hyperfixating on rewards (over-indexing on gamification) or not thinking about them at all. The sweet spot is considering the reward in context of the prompt and support — all three together.
So How Do You Improve Community Engagement?
Stop treating engagement as the goal.
Start looking at the behaviors underneath it:
What actions are you trying to encourage?
What's making those actions harder than they need to be?
What structures have you intentionally designed to support them?
When you start asking those questions, engagement stops feeling mysterious. It becomes something you can actively influence — not through luck, not through more content, but through design.
FAQ: Community Engagement Strategy
Why is my community not engaging?Low engagement is almost always a design problem, not a motivation problem. The two most common causes are unnecessary friction — anything making it harder than it needs to be for members to participate — and a lack of strategic tension, the intentional structures that give members a reason to show up and connect. Before adding more content or events, audit your community for both.
What is unnecessary friction in a community?Unnecessary friction is anything that decreases a member's ability to take action — a clunky platform, requiring logins every session, unclear navigation, content split across multiple tools, or a community culture that makes people feel unsafe being honest. Members often can't articulate why they disengage; they just quietly stop showing up.
What is strategic tension in community design?Strategic tension is intentional structure that increases member motivation and ability. It includes things like community rules that create psychological safety, shared language and rituals, enrollment windows that create a sense of exclusivity, and onboarding experiences that show members exactly how to participate. Strategic tension is what makes a community feel unique and worth showing up for.
What is the Community Engagement Recipe?The Community Engagement Recipe is a three-question framework based on habit formation research. For every action you want members to take, ask: How do I prompt it? How do I support it? How do I reward it? All three ingredients need to be present for a community behavior to happen consistently.
How does BJ Fogg's habit formation model apply to community building?BJ Fogg's model says any action requires the right balance of motivation and ability. In community design, this translates to two levers: removing unnecessary friction (increasing ability) and introducing strategic tension (increasing motivation). When both are working together, member engagement follows — not because people try harder, but because the environment is designed to support the behaviors you want to see.
What is the best way to increase engagement in an online community?Start by listing every specific action you want members to take — not "be engaged" but concrete behaviors like posting a win, attending a live call, or connecting with another member. Then run each action through the Community Engagement Recipe: how will you prompt it, support it, and reward it? Fix friction first (platform, navigation, culture), then build strategic tension through onboarding, rituals, and community design.
Bri Leever
Bri got her start building a community and growing it to a multi-million dollar revenue stream for a social enterprise in Portland, OR. Now, she supports folks used to running their business on content, coaching, and consulting to create their community offer. She's a Community Strategist by day and a Campervan host by night on the Big Island of Hawaii and you'll usually find her on, in, or under the water.
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