Quick answer: The Community Commitment Curve is a framework for planning engagement. You list every ask you make of members, rank each by the effort and trust it requires, and order them along the member journey from discovering to joining, engaging, and leading. It keeps you from asking too much too soon and reveals gaps in engagement.
Last Updated October 2026
“How do I engage my community members?” is one of the most common questions community managers ask us. It’s usually the wrong question.
There is no single way to engage members, and quick tips produce random engagement. Your community exists for a shared purpose or identity, so every way you engage members should serve that purpose. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but a framework for building engagement and leadership around your community's specific purpose: the Community Commitment Curve.
Where does the Commitment Curve come from?
The Commitment Curve comes from change management, where it has been used for decades. Our founder, Carrie Melissa Jones, first heard the term in 2013 from Ayelet Baron, former Chief Strategy Officer for Cisco Canada, who spoke about its role in organizational change.
In 2014, Douglas Atkin explained at one of the first CMX Summits how his team had used the Commitment Curve at Airbnb to mobilize thousands of people to change public policy around home-sharing, and how he had used it at Meetup to fuel organizer engagement. Political organizer Marshall Ganz had originally developed it to train thousands of progressive organizers in the 2000s and 2010s.
Seeing its usefulness across community contexts, we adapted the model for brand community building. Since then, we’ve used it with hundreds of companies to plan engagement, and Carrie has taught it to hundreds of community builders from companies like ADP, Discovery Channel, Facebook, and Salesforce.
The Commitment Curve helps community builders, product managers, UX designers, and founders build meaningful, lasting communities that scale. Here’s how it looks at its simplest:
The Commitment Curve Template for Communities
How does the Commitment Curve work?
Psychological research shows that the more members invest in their community, the more they feel they belong to it. Many community builders hesitate to ask members for help because it feels like an imposition. In practice, well-timed asks are how belonging forms. Without them, a community becomes a one-to-many broadcast.
The key is timing. Imagine meeting someone at a conference who tells you their name and immediately asks you to be their best friend. You’d walk away. Now imagine they ask about your work, share a bit about theirs, and take your card. A day later, they email you a question, and you answer it. Then they invite you to coffee, and you go. Over coffee, you discover a shared love of Magic: The Gathering, and they invite you to a meetup. Three months of meetups later, you consider them a close friend.
That is how trust builds between two people, and it’s how engagement builds at scale. Many communities skip the early steps. New members get flooded with asks the moment they join, or they get no asks at all and drift away. Engagement that ignites too quickly burns out just as fast. Our job is to architect belonging, and the Commitment Curve is our key tool in understanding how to do so.
What are the stages of the Commitment Curve?
The Commitment Curve places every ask you make of members along a member journey with four stages. The goal is to move members from discovering your community to leading it, so the community can outlast any single leader.
Here’s how it might look to map out individual actions:
| Stage | What happens | Example asks (effort score, 1 to 10) |
|---|---|---|
| Discover | People learn the community exists, usually through marketing | Follow us on social (1) |
| Join | People become members and get oriented | Fill out your profile (2) |
| Engage | Members participate and build relationships | Read the community digest, RSVP to an event, reply to a thread, respond to a direct message (6) |
| Lead | Members take responsibility for others' experience | Lead a subgroup (10) |
Plotted visually, these asks form a curve that rises in effort and trust as members move from discovering to leading. Here’s a fill-in example of what it might look like to move members from discovering a community to attending a rally on the community’s behalf:
Community Commitment Curve showing member asks rising in effort from discover to join, engage, and lead
How do you create a Community Commitment Curve?
List every ask. Write down every ask you currently make of members, and any you want to make. Order doesn't matter yet. Include small asks like filling out a profile, reading the digest, or RSVPing to an event.
Score each ask from 1 to 10. Rate each by the effort and trust it takes for a member to say yes and follow through. Following on social might be a 1, replying to a direct message a 6, and leading a subgroup a 10. The numbers are subjective. What matters is that they reflect real effort and trust as closely as possible relative to one another; you want a ranking so you can map them out linearly as much as possible.
Sort by score and stage. With the ranking, arrange the asks from lowest to highest score and group them into the discover, join, engage, and lead stages.
Plot them on the curve. Map the asks visually so you and your team can see the whole journey at once.
Look for problems. Most existing communities find asks that are out of order, like inviting members to lead before they've taken smaller steps. Many also find gaps between stages where new asks are needed.
Why do you need two Commitment Curves?
Most community builders benefit from two curves: one for the people running the community and one for stakeholders across the organization.
The organizer curve is detailed. It holds every ask you can make, ordered from smallest to largest, leading to your end goal. Your team uses it to plan programs and content, create multiple entry points for members, and design engaging community experiences. It’s what we described above.
The stakeholder curve is simpler. It boils the journey down to the three asks that best show your community’s impact. If your goal is for members to lead their own subgroups, those three points might track members who join, members who engage regularly, and members who step into leadership. This curve gives leaders outside your team data they care about and shows progress toward meaningful leadership goals. You may shift it to communicate across teams.
The organizer curve anchors your day-to-day work. The stakeholder curve shows whether members are taking more impactful actions over time. These points aren’t the only things you should measure, but they give the rest of your organization a clear view of progress.
Here’s how simple a Stakeholder Commitment Curve might look:
An example stakeholder commitment curve
What does the Commitment Curve look like in practice?
One of our clients, a B2B SaaS marketing technology platform, had a community of thousands of power users. On paper, the community was thriving. The team ran hackathons, advocacy initiatives, webinars, a podcast, creator initiatives, a conference, and meetups, and nearly every program was oversubscribed.
The problem was that none of it connected. No one unified purpose or member journey brought things together, so it was utter chaos internally. Members found the programs confusing, the team found them hard to manage day to day, and users had no clear path to level up into co-creators. That path mattered: the company wanted members to contribute content to a shared library, helping new users and turning basic users into power users faster.
What the curve revealed: When we mapped every program and ask onto a Commitment Curve, the pattern was clear. The community was skipping the low-effort steps. It was inviting people to the party too early, before they understood the product well enough to participate. The journey needed to slow down.
What changed: We rolled out a new program designed to close the gap between newcomer and expert, and we reordered the journey so members took smaller steps before bigger ones.
The results:
More than 500 members joined the new program, creating a pool of more than 500 potential advocates
A clear leadership program launched in 10 pilot cities
User-generated content submissions increased
Product spend increased
The community influenced more than $5 million in pipeline
Events stayed oversubscribed, and the team now had a large group of members to invite into advocacy and content creation. Those members were already vetted because they had worked their way up through the journey. The asks came easier, and members said yes far more often.
What do you do with your Commitment Curve once it’s done?
Use it to plan content and programming that maps back to each stage, such as in-app notifications, emails, meetups, subgroups, weekly threads, and direct messages. This is how we design thoughtful content and member experiences inside communities.
The curve won't make members more involved on its own, and its purpose has nothing to do with getting people to “post more” for the sake of engagement numbers. Its value is in helping you see your work clearly, design a better community, and keep every program tied to your community's purpose. Revisit it whenever you add or retire a program.
For ideas on what to put on your curve, see our 7 themes to guide your community's engagement plans. For how the curve shapes a new member’s first weeks, read our guide to creating great onboarding for your online community.
Commitment Curve FAQ
Who created the Commitment Curve? The Commitment Curve comes from change management and political organizing. Marshall Ganz originated it; later, Ayelet Baron and Douglas Atkin brought it into community conversations, and Atkin used it at Airbnb and Meetup. Carrie Melissa Jones adapted it for brand community building and has taught it to hundreds of community builders.
What are the stages of the Community Commitment Curve? Discover, join, engage, and lead. Members move from learning about the community to taking responsibility for it.
What is the difference between the organizer curve and the stakeholder curve? The organizer curve maps every ask in detail to guide your team's day-to-day work. The stakeholder curve narrows the journey to three key asks to show leaders outside your team the community's impact.
How do you know if you're asking too much too soon? Map your current asks and their scores. If high-effort asks like leading, presenting, or creating content show up before members have taken several low-effort steps, your journey is moving too fast.
Use our free tools to build your first curve:
Want help mapping a curve for your community and turning it into a strategy?
Uplevel Your Community with The CMJ Group:
AI disclosure: We believe transparency about how we use AI is non-negotiable. This post is based on an earlier article by Carrie Melissa Jones and a CMJ client engagement. We updated this version using a proprietary CMJ Claude skill to meet the latest AEO research standards, and a team member reviewed and edited every sentence before publishing.
