The Community Commitment Curve

Engaging a community is a challenging endeavour and one tool that can be very helpful in conceptualizing community member engagement is the Community Commitment Curve.

The Community Commitment Curve is a practical framework for fostering engagement and leadership within your community. The concept was originally derived from Darrel Conner & Robert Pattison in 1982 to help map out how individuals adopt organizational change over time.

The underlying purpose of this tool is to help map out all of the different types of actions a member of your community can make.

Let’s take a look at an example…

Understanding the Commitment Curve

At its core, the Commitment Curve is about nurturing belonging. As members invest more, their sense of belonging deepens. By strategically guiding members through various levels of engagement, we can architect belonging and foster sustainable community growth.

At the bottom left you typically have people that are the start of their journey with your community. This might include people that have just found out about you or have been part of your audience for sometime.

As people invest more time into your community, they move up and to the right. It is important to recognize however that not everyone moves up the curve at the same speed.

Some people might advance to become a leader in your community rather quickly while others might hover as an audience member for months and maybe even years.

Whatever stage people are at on the curve, it is important to honor people where they are at.

There is no rushing people through this thing.

Instead, create the environment necessary to allow people to progress at their own pace and see what happens from there.