No Fail Community Engagement? YES (Based on Millions of Data Points)

With daily polls and questions, you can set them up and let them run, and your members will do all of the work. Woo! So in today's episode, we are going to cover daily polls and questions. Before anybody freaks out about the idea of doing something every day, Let me explain the rationale and the strategy behind daily polls and questions and how at Mighty Networks we have made this super easy to be able to set up and let it roll. So daily polls and questions are the 3rd piece in a community design plan. Monthly themes for novelty, a weekly calendar for consistency and building a habit amongst your members, and then daily polls and questions are for sparking relationships and connections between the members of your community. And again, just to recap, community is the goal. We are trying to build relationships between your members, and then that can be monetized through online courses, through memberships, through challenges and events. So the reason daily polls and questions work so extraordinarily well is because they allow your members to share their experiences, their stories, their ideas, their opinions about topics related to your big purpose, related to the reason you're bringing members together, people who are in transitions to have their best year ever. That is what we are doing. So with daily polls and questions, I'm just going to get this out of the way up front. You can set them up and let them run and your members will do all of the work. There is a really effective way to do polls and questions, and there's a really terrible way to do polls and questions. I'll start with the terrible way. So a lot of times people show up and they're like, oh my gosh, Gina, my community is not working. I don't have any engagement. I'm asking questions all the time. I'm posting all the time, and I just can't get anybody To engage. 9 times out of 10, I look at the questions and it's this. And tell me in the privacy of your own home, car, wherever you're listening to this podcast, 9 times out of 10, here's what's happening. The person has woken up in the morning and they're like, oh shoot, I have not posted in my community in forever. Read an article, take the link to the article, post it in the community and say, hey guys, what do you think? And nobody answers. And then the creator, the host tends to spiral. They're like, oh my gosh, everybody's too busy for a community. Nobody wants this. I don't know why I'm doing this and I should just give up. That's not true. What's happening is that you've set up a question that is not fast for your members to answer, like really hard. So think about it. So first of all, you're basically saying your members have to go read an article somewhere else. So right off the bat, They're leaving the community. Then they have to form an opinion about that article. They also probably don't know, is it a fast question to answer? Should they answer it in a really long and involved way? So they put it off, they'll do it later if they do it at all, and then they never come back to it. So what I'm about to show you is a much better way to do fast, really valuable questions. So number one, you want questions that your members can answer in less than 10 seconds. Not because they're not gonna come back and give something really thoughtful later on, but because you want them to engage really quickly right off the bat. So at Mighty, we went and we looked at what are all the questions across our platform. These are like millions of data points. We looked at what is the formula for the questions that are being answered that have high engagement, and it turns out they follow a very specific specific formula. There is a very fast unlocking phrase, and then the way that we have set up polls and questions within a Mighty Network, for example, and this might be true for other platforms, I don't know, is that you ask the question, members come in and they give their sort of quick response, whether that's a quick answer to a question, click in one of the polls, multiple choice, hot or cold, which is how do you feel about, or a percentage poll. Those are the 3 kinds of polls we have at Mighty. And then they get notified as more and more people come in to answer the question or poll. So then the conversation starts. So members are actually meeting each other around a question that was really simple to answer in the first place. So let me give you some examples of unlocking phrases and you'll start to see what I mean. By, oh yeah, I can totally answer that, or that's actually really fun for me to contribute my stories, my experiences, my ideas. Again, not advice. What's one? So that's an example of an unlocking phrase. What's the first? What's your number one? What's the most? What's your favorite? Would you rather? How do you feel about X, Y, or Z? What's an unusual? What do you prefer? Or do you prefer X to Y? These are the kinds of questions that will bring your members back, will generate a lot of engagement, a lot of contributions, because everybody's like, oh my God, that's actually like a really fun question. And then they'll start meeting each other. You can set these questions up and schedule them in advance. And also on Mighty, because we love daily polls and questions, and we see just how popular and effective they are at driving not just members to contribute, but really extraordinary engagement. So we built an infinite question engine that's available on a little bit of our fancier plans to be able to generate these kinds of really effective questions based on the topic of your community, based on your big purpose. So it pulls from your big purpose. It knows these unlocking phrases that work really, really well, and it will give you a never-ending source of new questions that you can choose from, set up in advance, and you never have to think about it again. I have seen people really get nervous about the idea of daily polling questions. It feels like a lot of work, like to a person, it's like early on they'd be like, oh my gosh, do I need 365 questions? You can take days off for holidays. In the days that you have weekly calendar items, maybe you don't have your daily polls and questions. However, with the infinite question engine, you can set up your polls, your questions in advance, schedule them out, watch your members interact on it, and not have to think about it again. Hi, Gina. I'm a little skeptical of daily engagement because my goal in creating my own community wasn't for this to become a time suck for people or something additional they had to constantly check. Can I do every few days of engagement? You can absolutely have your monthly themes and weekly calendar. Here's the thing about daily polls and questions. They are extremely easy to set up. It also creates that habit amongst your members such that they're meeting really cool people. So typically the reason people are too busy for your community is because it's not providing enough value. When you can introduce people to each other, that is the whole reason behind people magic and creating those valuable relationships such that not only is your community that like super fun thing that somebody's doing when they're waiting in their car instead of like, I don't know, scrolling Instagram or watching TikTok videos. Now your members are able to quickly answer questions. So these questions are designed for very quick responses. They are designed for your member to have this moment of a win, like, oh my God, I love that question. What is my first emoji that I use? Or what is the first app I use every morning that I wake up? So I would reframe this notion of your community or your, even your courses being work for your members. And I would flip it on its head and think about it as how am I providing value to my members in these bite-sized pieces and daily polls and questions that, again, you can set up in advance. We have hosts that are taking, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes every month to set up their polls and questions in advance. It's not a lot of work. You can decide for sure after doing them for a while, like, what do your members want? Where do your members engage? That's why the analytics are so important and why we have Mighty Insights. There for you to see what are your members doing, what do they want to be doing, where are they getting value, where are they engaging, and give them even more reasons and more context when they're starting to DM each other, build relationships with each other in the comment section. So if you want to make it a little bit less frequent than daily, that's fine. I would at least encourage you to start with daily polls and questions and see if your members Have the same reaction and the same results we're seeing across literally hundreds of thousands of Mighty Networks, where these polls and questions are delivering pretty awesome engagement. And that's today's episode of People Magic. I'm Gina Bianchini, and I will see you next time. Woo! Thanks for listening to People Magic. Want more of a deep dive on today's topic? Well, Check out People Magic Profit, my 9-part free masterclass on how to launch your own wildly profitable paid membership and community. Do you have your own burning questions you'd like me to discuss on this podcast? Well, I want to hear them. So leave your questions in the review section and keep tuning in.