Engagement Before Expansion: A Smarter ERG Growth Strategy
Most ERGs think they need more members to increase engagement—but that’s backward. You don’t get engagement by adding members; you get members by driving engagement. If your ERG is growing performatively but not functionally, it’s time to focus on structure, processes, and meaningful programming fir
Hey, so I heard this quote from a business coach of mine last week. It was about sales, but honestly, I think it’s wildly relevant to ERGs:
👉🏿 You don’t get engagement by adding members—you get members by driving engagement.
Let that sink in for a second.
A lot of ERGs think growth = engagement—as in, “If we just get more people in our Slack channel, if we just increase our mailing list, engagement will naturally follow.” But that’s not how it works. You don’t fix low engagement by adding more people to a broken system. You fix low engagement by actually engaging the people you already have. And that engagement is what brings in more members organically.
I was presenting at DiversiTech today, and I said something I hadn’t even thought about before, but it really stuck with me:
A lot of ERGs have grown performatively—they got more members, maybe even did a fancy brand refresh with a new logo—but their operations never evolved.
They’re bigger in appearance, but they’re not stronger in function.
So if you want to grow your ERG, don’t start with recruitment—start with maturity. Grow the back-end operations of your ERG first. Structure. Processes. Programming that actually matters. When your ERG functions well, engagement increases. And when engagement increases, growth happens naturally.