Ask an owner who their most engaged members are and you usually get three names. Ask them to name the next fifteen and it goes quiet. That gap is where most of the opportunity in a community sits.
The three names are real. They are also the three people you already talk to, already thank, and already do not need a tool to find. The value is in positions four through twenty-five.
Can I just use the Skool leaderboard to find my most engaged members?
The Skool leaderboard is a starting point rather than an answer, because it has three specific blind spots as an owner-facing diagnostic. Skool communities have a public leaderboard, and it does more for engagement than most analytics ever will, because members can see it. The weaknesses:
- It ranks against other members, not against themselves. A top contributor can halve their activity and still sit at number three. The ranking hides the decline.
- It rewards volume. Someone who leaves twelve one-word comments outranks someone who writes two thoughtful replies that start real conversations.
- It cannot see anything outside your community. Your most community-committed member on the entire platform might sit at position 180 on your board.
Use it. Just do not stop there.
What does most engaged actually mean?
Most engaged means three different groups, not one: stars who are consistently high over time, rising members who are currently accelerating, and untapped members who are prolific elsewhere on Skool and silent with you. Conflating them is why the question feels harder than it should.
1. Stars — consistently high, over time
The people who show up week after week. They answer other members' questions, they are the reason a thread has replies, and their absence would be felt immediately.
What they need from you: recognition and access. Not another ask. A public shoutout, an early look at something, a genuine thank you. These members are already giving you more than they get, and the fastest way to lose one is to only ever contact them when you want something.
2. Rising — currently accelerating
Someone who was quiet last month and is commenting this week. This is the most under-served group in almost every community, because they are invisible to a ranking. They are not near the top yet. They are on their way, and whether they get there is genuinely influenced by what happens in the next fortnight.
What they need: a reply, fast, and one specific invitation. "You clearly know this — would you post about it?" turns a rising member into a star more reliably than any campaign.
3. Untapped — engaged, but not with you
Members who are prolific across other Skool communities and silent in yours. They have the habit. They have proven, publicly, that they will show up for a community. Yours just is not the one.
Skoolgrades defines this concretely rather than by feel: at least 25 posts elsewhere on Skool, active in 2 or more communities, seen in the last 14 days, joined 30 or more days ago, and silent with you for 30 or more days. Every member matching all five is a real, findable opportunity.
What they need: a specific invitation into a conversation they would actually care about — which requires knowing what they care about, and that means knowing which other communities they are in.
What should I count as engagement when ranking members?
Count posts and comments heavily, poll votes moderately, and likes not at all. Before you rank anyone, decide what counts.
| Signal | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Posts | High | Starting a thread is real investment |
| Comments | High | Where actual participation lives |
| Poll votes | Medium | Low effort but deliberate |
| Likes | None | Nearly free, close to noise |
Skoolgrades counts comments plus poll votes as engagement and does not collect like-level data at all. Per-post liker capture was dropped on purpose — it added volume without ever changing a decision.
This is why Skoolgrades ranks on participation — comments, comment replies and poll votes — rather than page loads, and why its engagement figure reads lower than a visit-based one (the full reasoning). For the job in this article — finding the specific humans carrying your room — the harsher number is the only one that helps.
Then compare each member to their own history, not to the roster. That single change turns a static ranking into something that tells you when a member is heading somewhere.
How do I actually find these members?
You find these members either by tallying commenters across two four-week periods by hand, or by having a tool read the community and label each member's lifecycle state for you.
By hand
Perfectly doable below a couple of hundred members.
- Open your last four weeks of posts and list everyone who commented, with a tally.
- Do the same for the four weeks before that.
- Compare. Names that went up are rising. Names that went down are fading. Names high in both are stars.
- For anyone interesting, open their Skool profile and look at which other communities they belong to — that tells you what they care about.
- Write the short list somewhere durable.
The cost is time and consistency, and the ceiling is real. Step 4 in particular becomes impossible around a hundred profiles, and the whole thing goes stale the week you skip it.
Automatically
Skoolgrades reads your community through a Chrome extension installed by you, running on your own logged-in Skool session in your own browser. As of July 2026 there is no public Skool API — Skool ships changes often, so check its own documentation — and there is no partnership and no datacenter scraping. It is you looking at your own community, done systematically. Skoolgrades is not affiliated with or endorsed by Skool.
From eleven collected streams it builds per-member activity heatmaps and runs the Cohort Blender, which places every member into a lifecycle state: star, rising, steady, fading, drifted, ghosted, untapped, or going dark. Those, plus 25 other cohorts, are materialized and rebuilt weekly.
The output is not a ranking. It is a set of named groups where the name already implies the move. That is the practical difference — "position 7" requires interpretation, "rising" does not.
Cross-community footprint also produces member themes: the recurring interests visible in what a member engages with around Skool. Combined, you get a line like "rising member, consistently engages with offer design and pricing elsewhere," which is enough to write a message that sounds like a person wrote it.
What should I do with each group of engaged members?
Each group of engaged members needs a different move: recognition for stars, a fast reply for rising members, a specific personal message for untapped members, and a direct check-in for fading stars.
- Stars — recognize them publicly. A shoutout post naming contributors costs nothing and is the highest-return post most owners never write.
- Rising — reply fast and invite them to post. Window matters more than wording.
- Untapped — one specific, personal message about the thing they already care about. Not a welcome template.
- Fading stars — the group most owners miss entirely, because a leaderboard hides them. Someone whose own rhythm has halved gets a direct message now, while they still remember why they joined.
Where the move is a message, Skoolgrades does the whole path: build the list, draft it either verbatim for everyone or personalized per member using what it knows about each one, review and approve every single draft, then send from the extension panel one member at a time. You click send for each. Nothing is automated, and that is a deliberate design decision — blast sending is how owners get flagged and how members learn to ignore their inbox.
What are the limits of this member data?
Member engagement data has three real limits: cross-community counts undercount deliberately, large communities are sampled rather than counted in full, and only public information is read.
Cross-community counts undercount on purpose. "Twelve members active elsewhere" is a floor, not a total. The real figure is higher. Conservative and certain beats generous and wrong.
Large communities are sampled. Above roughly 3,000 active members, collection uses a fixed frame of around 900 members rather than a full census, so those numbers are estimates. Fine for ranking and deciding, not for reporting exact percentages.
Only public information is read. Public Skool profiles, public communities, and the community you already administer. Members' private messages are never read. Chat collection is list-only — thread list and unread state, so you know who is waiting on a reply, not message content.
So who are my most engaged Skool members?
Your most engaged Skool members are three groups, not one: stars, rising members, and untapped members who are busy elsewhere on Skool. The leaderboard finds the first, misses the second entirely, and structurally cannot see the third. If you only do one new thing this week, find the members who are rising and reply to them within the hour — that is the cheapest engagement work available to any community owner.
More on the underlying signals in what member behaviors matter and how to track member activity.