I've been working with organisations implementing community functionality for three years and one message that I always emphasise is how important it is to show visitors that there is stuff happening on your site. With Pluck we call this stuff Collections but the principle is valid for any community.

Collections show visitors to your site that there is a community there that is engaged and active. Collections can take many forms - some examples are recent forum posts, highest rated products, top users and latest photos - and the precise form they take isn't that important. What is crucial is that content spots or widgets that spotlight Collections are used liberally throughout the site, and not just on pages that feature community functionality.

Without Collections, visitors to your site often won't realise that there are community features there and will think nobody else is interacting. This in turn can have a noticeable impact on engagement. The graph below shows what I mean.

This is from one of our customers. They staggered their implementation of Pluck community features, with Comments on articles coming first. They do a great job of email marketing, which explains the regular peaks in engagement, but they didn't have any Collections until this summer. At that time they introduced some simple Collections in just a few places on their site.

In the wake of their deployment of Collections they've enjoyed an increase in average comment volumes of 60%. Collections are clearly having a big impact on community engagement and they're now planning to use them much more widely.

The lesson from their experience is clear: if you don't show your visitors that stuff is happening in your community they won't engage as much. After all, who wants to be the first one at the party?