Great question, I think a lot of projects are trying to find a way to get community members engaged.

In our case (Curious Addys Trading Cub), we built discord QA bot (this product actually came from that bot) where community members can ask questions and community members who want to teach and help others can subscribe (get notifications) and answer questions, and after we launched that, people who weren't really active before started being really active by asking/answering questions (we got like 5 core contributors from this feature). We learned from that experience that giving community members do something which are going to help other community members work quite well.

Other ideas would be encouraging the community members to "own" and organize something. For example, in our case, one of the active community members (now mod) started forming women group and organize monthly events discussing NFT, careers in NFTs etc. which attracted many female members in our community and the engagement for that group is usually pretty high. I also saw this in other project (The 333 Club by Zeneca_33) that some members organize marketing learning circle, casual chat group etc. and they voluntarily organize events in the discord which brings high engagement in the discord.

I think what kind of initiatives you can do really depends on what kind of communities you lead, but if you really create a space for members to comfortably start any initiative and encourage them, recognize them, and sometimes reward them, there will be a lot more engagement in the community and community-driven engagement is always the best as founders time is always going to be limited.

I think turning it to DAO definitely is helpful, as they are going to come back to vote etc., WoW Pixies does a good job to keep community engaged by letting members decide what to invest in so you could take a look at how they do/what their engagement looks like.

Good luck!!