The Commitment Curve

One of the foundational concepts in community building is the Commitment Curve. I explore how to incrementally ramp members up the curve, building commitment along the way.

One of the foundational concepts in community building is the Commitment Curve:

The concept is simple: community members’ level of commitment grows in line with the intensity of their actions. To increase member’s commitment, provide clear paths for members to ramp up their actions, and offer a number of simple actions to get people started.

🌱 Initiation

The initiation phase starts when a prospective member learns about the community, and decides to get involved. To initiate members successfully, have compelling stories and artefacts for them to engage with - origin stories, articulations of your shared mission and values, or conversations where core members unpack the community’s purpose and ambition. Make these artefacts accessible and up to date.

👀 Passive

After initiation, most members become passive participants. They will spend time lurking: gauging the community’s norms, and observing how others interact. The experiences people have in this phase will determine whether they decide to actively engage, remain lurkers, or drop off. It’s worth intentionally designing your community to allow passive participants to enjoy their experience. For Slack / Discord communities, this could include #recommendations and #no-dumb-questions channels, which enable passive learning from other people’s conversations, or ‘ICYMI’ master posts that summarise the most interesting conversations every week.

🏊🏻‍♀️ Activation

The activation phase is the hardest to nail! Don’t be demoralised if the majority of your members never activate - that’s normal in most communities - particularly those open to all. There’s a few things you can do to encourage activation, such as having an #introductions forum with standard questions, and encouraging everyone to post an intro within a week of joining. When someone starts to dip their toe in, make sure they’re met with a positive reaction - i.e. other members engaging with them. The core team should lead the charge, or assemble an informal ‘welcome squad’ of power users to help make new members feel seen and included.

🧚🏻 Power

Witnessing the transition of a member from active participant to power user is a beautiful thing! In this phase, you’ll see members start to do aspects of your job - organising events, leading conversations, and suggesting projects and initiatives. In this phase, the community builder’s job is to create opportunities for members to lead, and provide plenty of recognition and validation. You can also incorporate extrinsic rewards for power users (DAO tools are a promising mechanism), but be careful that extrinsic motivators don’t replace intrinsic motivators.

In sum - increase commitment to your community and buy-in from your members by creating a phased and legible on-ramp to higher-commitment actions. We are what we do; not the other way round.

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