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Why are your members disappearing—even when you’re doing everything “right”?

Rob breaks down the real reasons communities lose members, even when packed with great content. Drawing from what successful games do to keep players hooked, you’ll learn the 3 invisible traps that quietly destroy retention—and what to do instead.

No gimmicks. No burnout. Just practical, game-inspired strategies to re-engage your members and boost community revenue.

Grab the free Retention Hacks Guide above to start implementing today!

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in community building and education. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob Alvarez (00:00)
Why are so many community builders doing everything right and still watching their members drop off?

I’m Rob and I used to think I just needed to post more. So I spread myself thin across every social media platform I could find and get my hands on, pumping out content while juggling everything else until I burned out. That was before I started studying what successful games actually do to keep people coming back. Now, I help creators and organizations design

game-inspired communities where members stay engaged without posting every single day.

In this video, I’ll show you three reasons why most communities fail and how to fix it without piling on more content or relying on gimmicks. We’ll go through the three invisible traps that kill retention and what to do instead if you want people to keep showing up and paying.

So let’s get started. Point number one, this first experience that feels kind of generic. When someone joins, do they know they’re in the right place? Are they actually greeted by the stale post for months or even years ago? Imagine you’re actually joining a party. You go to a party and no one welcomes you. You get in, everybody’s on their thing. If they’re doing anything, there’s just some

posters around the wall.

This is what most community onboarding actually feels like. Imagine again, that feeling you’re getting to a party where you’ve been invited. You have a friend who invited you to their birthday, but instead of that person, their family, or some friends of yours that you have in common greeting you welcome, excited to be here. Look, here are the drinks, here’s the pool, here’s some food, whatever it is that they’re doing. Just nothing happens. You go in and there’s some posters.

around. That’s it. Do not turn your community into this. The first five minutes somebody joins the party. You have to reduce the friction. It’s not about, get to the party. What do I do now? You want to minimize. You want to reduce that friction to an absolute minimum. An absolute minimum. The same thing is what you need to do with your community.

First five minutes reduce that friction. They show you direction, what it is that you do, what it is that they’re supposed to do in that community. And very, very importantly, they give people a reason to take that first step. Yes, content is important. Content is king. But you also need to think about why people are there and why not only they join, but they want to stay there and continue doing those actions. Does that make sense? Fantastic. Let’s say

they start strong. You have that first experience very well generated. People get to the party, they’re greeted, they know what to do next. Everybody’s, dancing or having a good time, whatever that looks like in the party that you’ve designed. How do you keep that going?

And that’s where I get to another point. I started up the saying, when you feel that there’s low engagement, what’s the typical response? Typical response is more posts, more posts, more content, more courses, more, more, more, more, more. But more, more, more is not really sustainable. At some point you can spread yourself thin. you’re this amount of, imagine a bread, right? You’re this amount of butter.

you spread until there’s nothing left to spread. No matter how good you are at spreading, eventually it runs out. If you go into another bread and you start spreading again, you’re only so much butter So don’t spread yourself thin. Because amongst other things, that is not strategic. That’s not gonna get you better results. Maybe in the short term, you create a little bit more content and it gets better. But that, you know, that curve of how much that is gonna get you, the effort is always gonna be going up.

the results are not always going to be following in that much of a strong suit. So I’ve been there. Like, trust me, this is not something I’m making up. It’s, you know, this, no, I’ve been there. I’ve been hosting events, scheduling posts, trying everything. literally, my, one of the things I’ve done in life, I started when social media was very young. And I think at that point, Instagram was just about to be around or had just started. So it was basically Twitter, Facebook, and this Instagram thing coming out. was,

I had a small company managing social media. So we were all about, posting and doing stuff, We did more, we did more, we did more. And that’s what we, people hired us to do, to create that content, to keep that social media stuff going. Then I realized content is not the strategy. More content is not a strategy. A system for the strategy is. And that’s, that’s a huge realization. That’s when I, as I was describing at the start,

everything changed at that point for me. People don’t return for more. They return for that momentum that you’re building with them. That means having things that go from rituals, loops, and community rhythms that they actually plug into. The community is moving forward and they want to plug into that so they can move forward alongside that community. Then that’s why it’s a community. It’s about

everybody building all of this together. So stop when you see yourself spreading yourself thin like that piece of butter on your bread. Stop. Say, wait, wait a second. I’m just creating more and more and more. This is not sustainable. Eventually I won’t be able to create more. How can I turn this into a system that other people can actually plug into? That’s how the community can keep going. So you don’t spread yourself. You or your team, even if you have a team.

You can grow and grow and grow eventually, you it’s not going to be sustainable because how much more content, more people you’re hiring is not going to be reflected in how much you’re getting paid for that. You need a system to keep people engaged. And yeah, of course they keep going. However, is there a way for them to know where they stand? That is the third point. If people don’t know what success looks like in the community, they’ll quietly drift away.

Games are masters, absolute masters at this. And by the way, by the way, before I dive deeper into this one, if you want my three gamification hacks to increase your community’s revenue, that is a freebie that you can access. Look into the description and access that for free right now. So as I was saying, games are masters at doing this. They do things like XP. They do levels, unlock stuff. There are

all sorts of ways in which games show you progress. Even the quote unquote simplest ones. You can say that Monopoly, one of the ways in which you see progress is how much money you’re accumulating or how many properties you’re accumulating. You see how far away you are in the game. If you see some people standing, sitting in a game and you see them having huge amounts of money and bunch of properties, you know the game is advanced. If you see nobody has purchased anything, you know they haven’t started. You have an immediate sense of progress. And I’m not saying Monopoly is the best example by any means.

But even a game like that one gives you a quick and direct sense of progress. Communities can do this. You don’t need the money from Monopoly. You don’t need points and badges and leaderboards. Maybe you have them, maybe they can be useful, but you don’t need that. You can borrow this for your community by giving people things like milestones, status markers, even something as simple as complete these three steps to get your mystery gift.

They know that they do this, they do this, they do this, and they’re gonna get here. Give them these steps, give them these systems as we were saying before, so they understand where it is that they’re standing, what they still need to do to continue down that loop that’ll get them the results that they’re expecting when they joined your community. This is not a gimmick. Progress is not just, know, here’s a badge, you got a badge, it’s not a gimmick. It’s a feedback loop. It’s what people are needing, what they’re asking for.

so that they can know where they are and they can look forward to the next thing they can do and continue down the path that you have set for them because you know it works and gets them the results that you’re promising when they joined your community. And if you want to boost your attention and revenue in your community using game-inspired strategies, as I said before, these strategies that actually work, I put together a free guide with three proven hacks. All you have to do is go down to the description and get those three.

I’ll send you the three hacks to boost your community’s revenue right away. It’s the same framework I’m using to teach paying clients. This is something I charge people for. This is something that my clients, pay clients get. But you can grab it today. No strings attached. So let’s make a quick recap of what we’ve been discussing. Most communities fail because they aren’t designed to retain. They’re not designed for that. They’re designed to deliver the content that say what people have to say.

and have that stuff there. Usually communities are not designed for that. The first experience, because of this focus, feels flat. Yes, the content is there. I’m not saying your content is not great. I’m sure it is. What you’re delivering gets those results. But the first experience can feel flat. And that’s when you start losing people. There’s a bunch of people who are gonna drop off just at that point. The next thing that happens is that eventually, even when people go after that, some of them, that flat first experience,

There’s no systems. So you’re spreading yourself thin, trying to do more and more and more instead of having a system that actually allows you to retain people much better in a strategic way, like games. And then people don’t feel like they’re actually progressing, like they’re moving forward. Even if they are, sometimes it’s about having those reflection points of, actually take a look at where you were a week ago, a month ago, or when you started and where you are now. What are the things where you’ve progressed? And just looking at that, like, oh,

actually have done all these things, I wanna keep growing. And these are the next milestones you’ll get to. your community, which is already a game, whether you like it or not, if no one can win at that level one, they won’t keep playing,

So again, grab the free grant guide in the description if you’re interested in some more hacks that I have created and that I use with my paying clients. And let’s help your members win so we can help you win as well.

Rob Alvarez (09:36)
And at least for now, and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over.

End of transcription