Bring back one inactive member every day

As a community manager, it's essential to add this task to your 'to-do' list - bring back one inactive member every day. Rather than solely focusing on attracting new members, redirect your efforts into encouraging existing members to return and contribute.

There are various approaches you can take to achieve this, such as finding discussions that may interest them and reaching out to them to join. Identifying a discussion topic that aligns with their area of expertise and encourage them to share their knowledge on. Additionally, you could connect with members they previously formed relationships with and ask them to reconnect with the AWOL (Absent Without Leave) member.

You can even involve the entire community in this endeavor. Suppose a prominent member has disappeared, make it a collective objective to lure them back on your community. You can even foster some friendly competition among members, with the most successful member who brings back the most valuable members receiving special recognition.

Even if you can't retrieve every member, it's still worthwhile as you may obtain valuable feedback.

What do you do to have absent members return? Join our discussion and exchange tips with fellow webmasters.

 

[Reverie]

What do you do to have absent members return? Join our discussion and exchange tips with fellow webmasters.

I frequently would email/mass send the absent members. I would talk to people who may know them and just ask around. Sometimes things come up and they just can't be online - but it's good to know and they sometimes like it that they are being checked in on! After that, just have to hope for the best.

 

[Tracy]

As an aside.. does an admin have an interest in bringing back a major participator of their site that they may have "pissed" off and that user got so fed up with the BS on their site that they requested their account to be removed?
I recently went through this with TAZ, and ultimately requested they remove my account as I had a wheel barrow full of their BS and got tired of it and decided I simply no longer wanted my name associated with their site. Pretty sure most admins would rather not lose one of the top posters on their site due to the fact they prefer to try to "massage" script providers, especially when the actual user averages about 80 posts a month and the "other" about 10. Ultimately... for me, I , as a user, give benefit to an "admin" site.. they don't really benefit ME at all. Wanna play games.. guess what... I can toss a site to the side easily and go about my normal life. I have NO need of any "site admins" type sites as realistically, I get NO benefit from them since I simply run MY site for MY benefit... I'm not into it to "make money" or such, and the majority of my links to the site come from other resources (FaceBook, Twitter and Reddit). And after around 3 decades of dealing first with BBS's and then moving into the realm of the interwebz, my knowledge somewhat exceeds most involved in this field. You don't want to utilize that knowledge.. no loss to me.

 

[Arantor]

I recently went through this with TAZ, and ultimately requested they remove my account

Wait, what? I mean, TAZ went downhill but... not *that* downhill?

Oh well, more the merrier over here anyway.


Getting back on track, people leave for basically two reasons - something preventing them being on the site but they're otherwise happy to participate, or they're not happy to participate.

The former can be fixable by way of giving them space and time and the occasional 'hello, yes, we're still here, all good with you?' type message.

The latter... egad. Not sure what you'd need to do about that - not sure there's anything you *can* do about it.