IMPACT – 8.5/10

When you design for participation instead of conversion, three things shift.

1. Your metrics stop lying to you. Traditional funnels treat anything that is not a sale as failure. If someone only ever wants to read your newsletter and occasionally share a post, they appear to be a weak lead. In reality, they might be a highly valuable light participant: someone who amplifies your work to networks you cannot yet reach on your own.
2. Your community stops feeling like a pipeline and starts feeling like a place. People no longer feel pressured. When they can choose how they participate, they feel respected, capable, and in control of their own involvement.
3. Your team can be honest about capacity. Deep engagement is expensive. It involves staff time, emotional labour, and often custom support. When all roads in your funnel lead to “book a call” or “join the program,” your calendar fills with misaligned conversations.

With The Participation Pathway System, community engagement becomes a design question: How can we make it feel easy to be lightly involved, satisfying to be meaningfully involved, and safe to go deep when people are ready?

PLAY – 9/10

Step 1: Choose one audience and one offer.
Pick a single group you want to engage (for example: alumni, local partners, or newsletter readers) and one central offer you want to lead them toward over time. This might be a membership, a flagship program, or a recurring campaign.

Step 2: List your existing touchpoints.
Write down every way this audience has encountered you across the last 90 days. Think newsletters, events, social posts, DMs, webinars, office hours, surveys, sales calls, referral asks.

Step 3: Sort each touchpoint into Light, Meaningful, or Deep.

• Light participation: low time and energy. Reading, liking, forwarding, answering a one-click poll, downloading a resource.
• Meaningful participation: some exchange. Filling out a short form, attending a live session, replying with a story, joining a group call.
• Deep participation: high commitment. Joining a program, donating, buying a product/service, co-designing something with you, being a case study, serving on an advisory group.

Step 4: Spot gaps and overload.
Step back and look. Do you have plenty of Light options, but nothing that invites people into something more? Or only Deep asks, with no gentle “first step” into the relationship? Notice where the pathway feels lopsided.

Step 5: Add one “invitation point.”
An invitation point is a clear, low-friction next step that helps someone move from Light to Meaningful or from Meaningful to Deep.

Examples:

• At the end of a newsletter: “If this landed for you, check out these resources…”
• At the end of a webinar: “If you want help applying this, here is how we can work together…”

SUSTAINABILITY – 8.5/10

Done consistently, this small habit protects your team from overextending while keeping your community engagement aligned with your values.

Block time each month for a “Participation Check-in” and ask:

1. Where did people say yes?
2. Where did they disengage?
3. Did anyone try to engage in a way we had not planned for?

This shows you what’s working. If Deep invitations fall flat, add a step between Meaningful and Deep. If Light touchpoints perform well, create an easy Meaningful next step.

And when someone suggests a new campaign or channel, use the pathway as your filter: Where does it sit in the Participation Pathway, and what invitation point does it add or improve?

If you can’t place it, you are probably just creating more work and noise.

Takeaway

Community engagement gets easier when you stop trying to push people through a funnel and start building paths they actually want to walk.

Because people don’t want to be sold to, we want to feel less alone in the problems we care about.

Did you find this system helpful? Hit reply and let us know!

Until next recess,
Sarah & Jamie

P.S. If you’re enjoying this free newsletter, please share it with others; every single referral helps. Thank you!

P.P.S. Got a system you’d love us to share? Drop it in our inbox and we’ll feature it in a future issue — with credit of course!