Engagement Ladder
The Engagement Ladder chart answers the question, "When members engage, what are they doing?" You can use this chart to analyze member behavior and community engagement for a given period.
When you switch to full-screen mode, you can change the total number of active users on the y-axis to the percentage of active users.
Engagement types
Jive engagement ladder uses the following engagement types:
- Outcome Designation: Activities where community members designate content or responses with outcomes, signaling the content state, such as successful, final, or official. Outcomes signal engagement that leads directly to business results.
- Collaboration: Activities where members create or modify content to improve the value of the community.
- Curation/Moderation: Activities where members help organize community content by tagging and categorizing content or conversations easier to find.
- Participation: Activities where members interact with content in the community by liking, rating, voting, commenting, approving content, tagging, following, searching, sharing, or bookmarking content. Typically this is a higher form of engagement than consumption, requiring the member to take an extra step to signal comprehension or sentiment.
- Expert/Asset Location: Activities where members search for either answers (content) or experts (people) to get their task accomplished.
- Consumption: Activities where members view or download content in the community. At this lowest level, member interaction is passive (viewing content) with no signals on their reaction, sentiment, comprehension, or added value in the form of comments or questions.
Using Engagement Ladder
Jive tracks more than 30 activities that members perform in their community. Analyzing 30+ activities might be cumbersome, so we categorize activities into similar engagement types to easily analyze and visualize the behavior patterns.
The following questions provide a few examples of how we categorize behaviors:
- Are members consuming content?
- This question groups viewing and downloading activities together.
- Are they participating or interacting?
- This question groups commenting, liking, and poll taking activities together.
- Are they looking for content or people?
- This question helps group people searches, content searches, and tag searches together.
You can use the Jive Engagement Ladder to analyze the following:
- When members engage, what behaviors do they demonstrate?
- Is overall engagement growing or declining?
- Which behaviors are dominant in your community? Do you see unexpected surprises?
- Which behaviors are growing or declining as a percent of total engagement? And is that change expected?
- Am I happy with the trends I see and do they meet community goals?
- How should my answers to the above influence my change program to move member behaviors (and engagement) in the expected direction?