The Ultimate Guide to Community Engagement and Retention in 2025
In this guide, you will learn some of the most advanced and time-tested strategies and activities to boost community engagement and retention.
The world of communities has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. It was bit easy to spark engagement.
People would compete for points and badges just to show off virtual trophies on their profiles.
But now, community gamification is over-saturated. It’s impossible to expect people to come back to your community just because of points and trophies.
So, what really makes members come back to the community?
There are a few core human drives behind long-term engagement -
Feeling safe and comfortable in the group
Receiving appreciation from others
Getting instant, tangible value
Feeling a genuine sense of belonging
If you observe closely, these are the invisible forces pulling people back to your platform. It’s community manager’s job to make sure that these needs are met.
You don’t build engagement activities just for the sake of activity.
Communities that carefully craft experiences around these drives win the community engagement.
It is therefore important to have a better understanding of these drives before we jump into crafting experiences and activities around these.
Feeling of Safety and Comfort
Community members need to feel safe, protected and comfortable. They won’t speak up if they feel judged or ignored.
We made this observation consistently across all the communities we built or participated in.
Take Reddit. It does not require you to use your real name. You can hide your identity behind a funny username; and protect yourself from being judged for your thoughts and opinions.
No wonder Reddit is the king of user engagement.
Appreciation and Recognition
Every human loves being appreciated and recognised. We would unknowingly go out of the way to receive appreciation from others.
Successful communities have built mechanisms and culture to appreciate their contributors and build the connect. An example is Laracasts Community - a community built around supporting developers building software with Laravel framework.
The members in the community do not hold back from appreciating when you provide a thoughtful answer to the questions.
Receiving Instant, Tangible Value
Our time is limited. If the community fails to deliver value fast, people will bounce. I discuss this concept in our article on Community-Led Growth Implementation.
Your community can plan all the activities and events to invite users but it all will fail if your community does not provide instant value.
Sure, you will get temporary boost in user activity; but it won’t work for long-term organic community engagement.
Recommended Reading - SaaS
Feeling a Genuine Sense of Belonging
Belonging is the glue that holds communities together.
It’s what makes your members say, “This is my community. These are my people”.
Shared values, inside jokes, rituals and relationships - all add up to this magic. It’s one of the reason we advice building your community around a niche. We discuss how a SaaS community can be built using the pain-points that customers face in specific niches.
11 Top Community Engagement Activities
Following are the top activities that we have implemented in variety of communities (B2B, D2C, Course Communities etc.).
1. Member of the Month | Budget: $25-$50
This is the easiest of all the activities, yet the most effective to boost engagement in your community.
Every month, pick a community member who has made significant contribution to the community. You could conduct a short video or email-interview with them or simply write an appreciation post.
You may choose to spend $25-$50 to send them a virtual gift or swag.
2. Weekly Challenges | Budget: $0 - $100
Organise weekly challenges for your community, relevant to your niche. These need to be super simple and low-effort activity from the participants.
For example, in one of the developer communities we built, we’d have a weekly “Share your setup” challenge. Members simply needed to click a photograph of their work desk and chair from a distance and share.
Let the community members choose a winner through voting.
3. Live AMA | Budget: $0 - $500
Invite an expert, an influencer or leader in your niche to conduct a live AMA (Ask me Anything) session with your community members.
This simple activity can get your people back to your community, participate and have great conversations. It also helps boosting the trust and excitement.
You may choose to have a budget for this - and reward your influencer or the member who shares the best question with a gift.
4. Referral Contests | $100 - $500
Reward your members to invite their friends or colleagues to your community. This works because it gives you growth as well as engagement in one shot.
We had successfully implemented referral contest at CrazyEngineers. The members would receive 5 points for inviting each member; and the member who invited most of the members would be declared as a winner.
Caution: Some members may use referral codes to create fake accounts. Make sure that your community platform is prepared to tackle this.
5. User-Generated Content Drive | $0 - $100
Ask members to create long-form content for your community. Encourage them to create tutorials, share ideas, provide product feedback or success stories.
In one of the two-wheeler discussion forum, we encouraged the members to share their travelogue. The result was phenomenal.
Of course, you may choose to reward your members with a gift or appreciation.
6. Polls and Quizzes | $0
At Jatra, we are bullish on Quizzes and Polls; specifically Quizzes. We tested them in one of our communities and the engagement skyrocketed. Here’s how to implement it:
Create some fun, easy to answer quiz questions
Make them a part of your daily community feed
Make sure that users must answer within certain time: 5 or 10 seconds
Members who mark the right answers get to be on the leaderboard for that question
Jatra has “Quiz” post-type that lets you create these questions.
7. Virtual Meetups | $0
Organise monthly virtual meetups for your community. It could be a simple Zoom Call or Google Meet Conference for your members.
Always pick a topic for the discussion. This way, every member will have something to contribute to the community.
Virtual meetups help build a stronger connect among the members.
8. Workshops and Tutorials | $0 - $100
If relevant to your community, organise workshops and live tutorials for your community. Make sure that your members can learn something that helps them advance in their career.
You may also choose to conduct fun workshops where your members can learn a new skill. For example, in one of the communities, we conducted multiple workshops like:
Better Resume Writing Workshop
Public Speaking Workshop
Tie a Tie workshop (Yeah! we brought in an expert to teach us how to tie a tie)
How to type fast workshop
Some of these workshops were conducted by our own community members.
9. Behind the Scenes (BTS) Content | $0
Your members need to feel special. The best way to do that is to give them access to some BTS content.
It doesn’t cost you anything; but your members will feel a sense of belonging. You may have monthly threads on what the company is working on, photos from the office etc.
10. Early Access to Features | $0
Your community members should always be the first group of people to get early access to the new features you are rolling out.
It helps in several ways:
find the bugs early on, before global release
get feedback [Read - Upvoty Alternative]
make changes, improve documentation etc.
This also helps you build excitement among the community about your product and its features.
11. Private Group with Exclusive Access to Select Members | $0
Build a private group exclusively for the most active members and contributors of your community. It makes them feel special and also motivates other members to gain access to the special group.
Make sure to have lot of unique content and resources for these special members of your community.
What you should NEVER do:
Never incentivise members to post on your community. We see that many community managers make this mistake in order to boost engagement. It builds a wrong, negative culture in your community.
This article will stay up to date with new activities. We encourage you to share some of the activities that you have tried that got members engaged.
