There is a reinforcing relationship among Active Members, Referrals, New Members from Word of Mouth, and Joining. Consequently, effective referrals can have a supercharger effect on membership over time. However, the effect of referrals might take months to kick-in. Furthermore, as community hosts, we can’t control word-of-mouth, though we may be able to influence it.
In this lesson, we’ll do the following:
- Introduce scenarios to see how different sets of parameters affect membership.
- Add the Referral Rate and Persuasion Fraction variables to the Active Members dashboard to allow us to play around with different assumptions regarding advertising and word-of-mouth.
Reflection Questions
- How might you measure New Members from Word of Mouth over time in the real world? How might you measure the Referral Rate?
- How long might it take before a member feels strongly enough about the value of their membership to start making persuasive referrals to prospective members?
- What might you do to encourage referrals?
- How might you help members make persuasive referrals?
- If you encourage members to make referrals by offering extrinsic rewards, will those referrals be persuasive?
- Under what conditions might members be intrinsically motivated to make referrals?
- How many referrals can an average member make before they run out of connections with other prospective members?
