Q1: Over the past few years, what’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in how organizations approach community engagement?

The biggest shift I’ve seen is the move from viewing communities as marketing assets to viewing them as an “operating system” distributed across the enterprise, but unfortunately, most organizations haven’t fully made that transition in practice. They’ve adopted the language of community-led growth while continuing to measure success with metrics designed for content marketing: impressions, post frequency, and monthly active users. What’s actually changed is member expectations. People have experienced what genuine peer-to-peer connection feels like in mutual aid networks, Discord servers built around shared obsessions, and spaces that formed without organizational oversight. They know the difference between a community that exists for them and one that exists for the organization hosting it.

The organizations winning at community engagement right now are the ones that have internalized that distinction and let it reshape how they make decisions, not just how they talk about what they’re doing. That distinction also shows up in how organizations report internally. Engagement metrics can’t tell an executive team what’s stable and what’s deteriorating, and increasingly, that’s the question leadership wants answered before they’ll fund more investment.

Q2: Many organizations invest heavily in their online communities but still struggle to keep members engaged. From your experience, what are the most common reasons behind this?

The most common reason is that organizations build for the community they imagine rather than the one that actually shows up. They invest in platforms, content calendars, and governance structures before they’ve let members tell them what they actually need. The result is a highly engineered environment that produces the appearance of engagement, including activity metrics, event attendance, and post counts, while the conditions for genuine connection suffer. Members can feel the difference between a space designed around their needs and one designed around an organization’s reporting requirements.

The second most common reason is conflating engagement with dependency: creating systems that require members to engage with the organization rather than systems that actively encourage members to connect directly with each other. Communities that build toward mutual aid, where members become resources for each other, are far less dependent on any one person, platform, or budget cycle to survive. That’s not just healthier; it’s also what makes them hard to kill when leadership changes or a platform gets acquired.

Q3: We often hear that engagement is more than posts, comments, and likes. How do you personally define meaningful community engagement?

Meaningful engagement is a transaction that leaves both parties different than they were before, not a reaction or a reply logged in isolation. The clearest signal I use is whether members are bringing their real problems to the community. Not the polished, safe version of their problems, the actual ones, with stakes attached. When that’s happening, you have meaningful engagement. When members are performing participation, like posting because the system rewards posting, attending events because attendance is tracked, you have engagement theater. The distinction matters because engagement theater is easy to generate and impossible to sustain.

That’s also the signal I look for when I’m asked to assess whether a community’s governance is actually working, versus just producing reports that look fine. Real engagement is harder to foster but compounds over time: members who’ve gained genuine value from a community become its most effective recruiters, advocates, and, eventually, its informal leaders.

Q4: Today’s community members have countless ways to connect, from forums and webinars to Slack, Discord, and social platforms. How should community leaders think about choosing the right engagement channels?

Channel choice should follow member behavior, not organizational preference or platform trends. The question I always start with is: Where are these people already having the conversations we want to be part of? The answer is rarely “nowhere”; it’s usually a channel the organization doesn’t control and therefore hasn’t considered a community asset.

From there, the strategic question becomes whether to meet members where they are, create a dedicated space with a compelling reason to show up, or some combination of both. What I’d caution against is the instinct to consolidate everything into a single platform for the sake of manageability. That instinct serves the organization, not the members. Different conversation types have different natural homes: synchronous connection, asynchronous depth, quick peer questions, and long-form knowledge-sharing all have different channel requirements.

The goal is coherence across channels, not consolidation into one. Think of them as rooms in a house, each with a distinct purpose but with real relationships to each other. That thinking also guards against the opposite mistake: abandoning your owned community platform entirely in favor of earned outposts on channels you don’t control. You get only the metrics those platforms choose to give you, their rules of engagement can change overnight, and when they do, you have no fallback. A deliberate ecosystem where each channel earns its place is very different from being present everywhere, where the risks for governance and burnout are all too real.

Q5: How has your own approach to community engagement evolved over the years, and what experiences have shaped that evolution?

The biggest evolution has been learning to ship sooner and learn faster. Early in my practice, I was susceptible to the same trap I now help clients avoid: wanting to get the design right before exposing it to real members. What I’ve learned, repeatedly and sometimes painfully, is that the gaps you discover through real use are navigable. The gaps you discover after a year of development are not. To be honest, this is a lesson I’ve learned but am still learning the hard way with some clients.

I’ve also become much more attentive to power dynamics within communities; who gets to define what “good engagement” looks like, whose participation is centered, whose is treated as supplementary. The communities that have shaped my thinking most are the ones that weren’t built by organizations at all: grassroots networks, mutual aid groups, professional communities that formed before anyone thought to formalize them. They tend to have a clarity about purpose and a tolerance for productive messiness that organization-built communities rarely achieve on their own.

Q6: AI is changing how communities are managed and experienced. Where do you see AI creating the most value for community engagement, and where should human interaction remain at the center?

AI creates genuine value in community engagement at the operational layer: surfacing relevant content and connections, reducing the friction of finding expertise within a large community, flagging at-risk members before they disengage, and handling the repetitive moderation and routing work that burns out community managers. It’s also where governance shows up in practice, not just theory: moderation and routing decisions made by AI still need a human accountable for the outcome, even when the AI is doing the work. These are appreciable gains, and organizations that ignore them are hurting themselves.

Where I’m more cautious is at the relational layer. The thing that makes a community valuable, the sense that real people with real stakes are paying attention, is precisely what AI cannot replicate, and what members notice when it’s absent. An AI-generated welcome message and a human one are not even remotely equivalent, even if they’re indistinguishable in content. The context in which a person took the time to write it matters greatly.

My working principle is: use AI to reduce the operational burden on human community builders so they have more capacity for the interactions that actually require a human. Don’t use it to simulate those interactions.

Q7: If you could rewrite one rule in today’s community engagement playbook, what would it be and why?

I’d rewrite the rule that says engagement strategy should start with the platform. It almost universally does: organizations select a technology, implement it, and then try to generate engagement within whatever constraints that platform imposes. The sequence should be reversed. Start with the people: who are they, what do they actually need from each other, what would make their professional or personal lives meaningfully better? Then ask what conditions would allow that to happen.

Platform selection comes last, as a consequence of those answers, not a precondition for them. The reason this rule persists is that platform decisions are comprehensible to procurement and IT, while people decisions are far messier and harder to put in a proposal. Ironically, platform-first decisions are usually where the risk gets baked in. The vendor lock-in and governance gaps that surface eighteen months later trace straight back to a platform chosen before anyone asked what people actually needed.

Q8: What’s one misconception about community engagement that you wish more organizations would move beyond?

The misconception I encounter most often is that scale is success. Organizations treat community growth, measured by member count, monthly active users, or content volume, as the primary indicator that something is working. But scale without depth is just reach, and reach without genuine value exchange is not a community; it’s a large audience of disengaged people who will learn to tune out your communications.

Some of the most effective communities I’ve worked with are relatively small and extraordinarily high-trust spaces where members bring their real challenges, share resources without gatekeeping, and hold each other accountable. Those communities generate disproportionate business value because the engagement is real. I’d rather help an organization build a community of 500 people who genuinely rely on each other than a community of 500,000 who show up for the content calendar.

Q9: If you were helping a company redesign its community engagement strategy today, what would be your top priorities?

My priority is always a listening phase: not a survey, not a focus group, but actual immersion in how members currently talk to each other, what they complain about, what questions they ask repeatedly, where they go when the official community doesn’t serve them. That intelligence shapes everything else. That listening phase does double duty. It’s usually where I find governance gaps showing:

• Who is actually accountable when a member complains
• Whether anyone owns the platform relationship
• What happens when the one person running the community leaves

My second priority is identifying the smallest viable version of the thing that would generate real value, and shipping it before it’s fully formed. Early imperfection is a feature, not a bug: it gives members something to react to, and their reactions tell you more than any amount of pre-launch planning.

Third, I focus on power distribution: building structures that push decision-making, resources, and recognition toward members rather than concentrating them in the organization. Communities that empower members to lead, curate, and shape the space are far more durable than ones where the organization controls all the meaningful levers.

Q10: Looking ahead, what do you think will define successful community engagement over the next three to five years?

The communities that will define successful engagement over the next three to five years are the ones that get serious about member outcomes rather than engagement metrics. As AI makes it easier to generate the appearance of activity at scale, the signal value of traditional engagement metrics will continue to decline. What will matter is whether participation in a community demonstrably changes something for its members: their careers, their capabilities, their access to people and resources they couldn’t reach otherwise. I also expect the most resilient communities to be the ones that have distributed ownership most broadly, where members have genuine stakes in the community’s direction, not just access to its content. I’d also bet ‘engagement’ stops being something leadership funds on its own.

What gets budget is confidence: whether an executive team can say what’s stable, what’s deteriorating, and what risk is hidden in their community investment. Engagement will still matter, but as an input to that confidence, not the goal itself. The organizations still running engagement theater will be the ones that can’t answer those questions when asked.

That said, three to five years is a close window, and the danger of looking only at near futures is that we stop being imaginative enough. What will your community look like in ten years? Once we are (hopefully) past the difficult childhood of AI adoption and have a clearer sense of its ethical and human implications, what will community engagement actually look like? Will text-based interaction remain central to online communities, or will we have graduated to other modes: video, 3D avatars, virtual worlds? Recognizing where we want to be ten or more years out helps us identify and amplify the signals that can lead us toward that preferred future, rather than just optimizing for whatever is in front of us right now.