Posted on Oct 9 • Originally published at crowd.dev In software engineering, trunk-based development (TBD) is a strategy to manage git workflows that suggests merging commits in a single main branch, instead of the git flow that suggests working on multiple branches.This story is about applying this strategy to Community management to increase engagement.Six months ago, I joined Ronak Ganatra, Jakub Czakon, and Ophir Prusak as an admin to co-run the Developer Marketing Community — a place where tech founders and marketers hang out to share insights and best practices. People from dev-first companies like Algolia, PostHog, Supabase, Vercel, and Warp are all in.The objective? To grow an engaging community.At this time, the community had:Only 1 out of 5 people were active members. Worse, only 1 out of 50 people posted messages.So, how to increase engagement and ignite conversations?We had two radically opposite hypotheses:As founders and marketers in dev-first companies, we talk about many topics: developer relations, content marketing, product launches, SEO strategies, swag, and so on.We initially created one channel per topic to reduce noise, focus discussions, and inspire.We created nine different channels:In such a structure, some community members started to ask us: "Where to post? Is this channel the right place?"Some channels were obvious: #intros, #jobs. Now, picture this:#content, #devrel, and #first-time-marketers sound like relevant channels. Or #general because it has more community members and would increase reach? Or is it just #shameless-plugs?We realized that to answer "where should I post," more options led to harder decisions. In psychology, people call it the Hick's Law. Hick's Law predicts that the time and the effort it takes to make a decision, increases with the number of options. The more choices, the more time people take to make their decisions.— source: growth.designThe more options, the more time one takes to decide. Worse, we realized that when in doubt, community members just didn't post anything at all — and that's exactly what we wanted to avoid.As a result, most conversations happened in #general, and 50% of channels were inactive.If more channels don't inspire community members to engage more, what could inspire them? How about fewer options?We completely redesigned the structure of the community. We archived the most inactive channels and renamed for clarity.We had six different channels:We defined topics for each channel as below:In this experiment, #ask-anything and #share-anything are the most interesting channels from my perspective:If we go back to the previous example:The answer is straightforward: #share-anything.Results? Six months later, the community has: By reducing the number of channels, we doubled the percentage of members who post while growing the community by +70% in six months.If you need help building an engaging community, think trunk-based management.Inspired by software engineering, this strategy suggests focusing conversations in a few main channels, instead of having multiple channels.Reducing the number of options makes it simpler for your community members to start conversations. Enjoy the fun!Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well Confirm For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse Oluwafemi Lawal - Feb 18 Hannah Aubry - Feb 17 Code of Relevancy - Feb 10 Nicole Zonnenberg - Feb 9 Once suspended, crowddotdev will not be able to comment or publish posts until their suspension is removed. Once unsuspended, crowddotdev will be able to comment and publish posts again. Once unpublished, all posts by crowddotdev will become hidden and only accessible to themselves. If crowddotdev is not suspended, they can still re-publish their posts from their dashboard. Note: Once unpublished, this post will become invisible to the public and only accessible to flo merian. They can still re-publish the post if they are not suspended. Thanks for keeping DEV Community safe. Here is what you can do to flag crowddotdev: crowddotdev consistently posts content that violates DEV Community's code of conduct because it is harassing, offensive or spammy. Unflagging crowddotdev will restore default visibility to their posts. DEV Community — A constructive and inclusive social network for software developers. With you every step of your journey. Built on Forem — the open source software that powers DEV and other inclusive communities.Made with love and Ruby on Rails. DEV Community © 2016 - 2023. We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.