growth Archives

Using metrics to understand community growth and business impact

January 17, 2023 By Guest User

Note: This guest post is sponsored content from Common Room. Learn more here.

As community leaders dive into 2023, we want to offer them ideas for showcasing the impact their work has on the business. Aligning on the right metrics with stakeholders is a great place to begin. If you’re not sure where you and your stakeholders’ goals and community vision intersect, use this free 5-question self-guided alignment assessment.

Connecting community growth to business goals

Business-wise, the value of a thriving community comes from strategically applying community initiatives to business goals. At its core, community-led growth is about finding creative ways to use community channels to empower product users with deeper knowledge, support customer acquisition, increase retention, create opportunities for upsells, and more.

When executed well, community-led growth boosts nearly every department across the organization:

Support and success teams can meet users where they are to address bugs and issues in customer experiences.
Marketing teams can create messaging and content that’s specifically tailored to the community’s needs.
Sales departments can identify prospects with high intent and bring increased context and value to sales calls.
Product and engineering teams can get direct product feedback and learn what features users want next.

Success can be difficult to prove to stakeholders across an organization when it’s not measured—this is why metrics are so important to community-led growth efforts.

What metrics can tell us about community health and growth

Community growth is a long-term investment with compound interest. To make more strategic choices, what data do you need?

There are four main categories of metrics that community leaders should consider:

Membership
Engagement
Responsiveness
Business impact

Membership

Membership metrics provide insight into the makeup of your community and help you quantify your reach.

Useful metrics in this category are:

Member headcount is a staple of community growth metrics because more people means more perspectives, knowledge, and reach.
Understanding members’ role types is important, as teams may need to engage differently with prospects, current customers, and influencers.

Measuring membership metrics over time gives you insight into the overall growth of your community, and getting to know your members more deeply offers insights into topics they’re most interested in, commonly shared pain points, and how to provide the most value.

Engagement

Engagement metrics indicate whether or not members and prospects get value from participating.

Useful metrics in this category are:

The total number of posts across channels.
The ratio of observers to active participants can give insight into how welcome, interested, and empowered members feel.
The percentage of members who qualify as product champions can indicate how likely it is that your most satisfied customers will advocate for your product.
Understanding trending topics is key to knowing what’s hot (or not) in your community. Topics can spark content production ideas, factor into sales conversations, and inform product development.

Check your engagement metrics often. With this data, you’ll be better able to course-correct before spending resources on community initiatives that aren’t a good fit. If engagement is low, it’s an indicator of disconnect. Adrian Speyer discusses ways to re-engage a stagnant community in this live author Q&A.

Responsiveness

Responsiveness metrics help you understand how valued and supported your community members feel.

Useful metrics in this category are:

Your response rate, or what percentage of members’ posts receive replies.
Median response time, or how long it takes for someone to respond to a post, can greatly affect the flow of conversation.
The ratio of community responses to team member responses is important because dynamic interactions between members (and employees!) are what makes a community.

Responsiveness metrics provide interesting insight into how your community feels. If you’re looking to boost engagement, offering quick responses to posts can create a sense of organic conversation. If you notice your team is responding the most, look for ways to encourage members to chime in.

Business impact

If you can’t tie the impact of community to overarching business goals, you won’t be able to drive your business forward through community-led growth.

Useful metrics in this category are:

Customer acquisition gets a boost from a thriving community because it creates opportunities for prospects to engage with product advocates, and it helps them get questions/objections addressed quickly.
Retention improves when customers have access to more information, templates, and use cases, ensuring they have everything they need to get the most value from your product.
Account expansion is made possible when members share innovative ways to use your product, opening users’ eyes to greater value opportunities.
Community-attributed revenue is revenue from an organization whose members engaged in the community before they appeared in your CRM or marketing automation system. Being able to share this number is one of the best ways to demonstrate the impact of community on the business.

Proving community ROI can look different from one business to the next, and it’s critical to determine which goals you’re trying to achieve in order to make informed decisions about where you should focus your efforts and how to track your progress.

Intelligent community growth platforms

Layering data-based insights across your community channels is what we call intelligent community growth. Instead of manually pulling metrics, use an intelligent community growth platform like Common Room that aggregates data from across your community channels, social sites, and CRM to provide a holistic view of the members and activity in your community and enables reporting that gives you visibility into the metrics that matter for your community and organization, allowing you to draw a straight line from your community work to the impact it has on the business. We can’t wait to see how you engage and support your community in 2023.

The full version of this post was originally published on the Common Room blog on December 8. For more insights about community metrics and benchmarks, check out our free 360: Community-Led Growth Report.

The End of DIY Community Management and the Rise of the Community Executive

June 16, 2014 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

The discipline of community management is growing up. For us at The Community Roundtable it’s easy to see as the conversations have shifted from how we best execute on day-to-day community challenges to how do we transfer that knowledge and how do we integrate community processes into core business processes. But it’s also changing the role of the community manager – we see responsibilities of members of TheCR Network shifting to include more:

Internal consulting
Training/coaching
Building governance for other community managers
Program management

From my perspective this is a great thing – it means community management is extending to everyone in an organization and becoming they new approach to management. But it is also disruptive, because not all community managers understand this shift and many don’t (yet) have the skills to execute effectively on these new responsibilities. Add to this, for community managers who have been in the role for a while, they likely got started in a context where there were no formal resources or services available to them and they had to figure everything out on their own. They experience a tension between wanting to grow in the field and get more authority within their organization and still preferring to do everything themselves.

This struggle between wanting to do everything yourself and needing to scale is not uncommon – most people experience this in some form or another as they gain responsibility within their field. In order to become a director or VP, it is an absolute necessity to stop doing everything and start assembling a team of resources, both internal and external, to which you can delegate the doing. Once you do that, your responsibility is to help create a shared sense of purpose, the operations to support your point of view consistently and to mentor those who are on the front lines. Practically, that means you need:

Documented standards and playbooks
Training/Onboarding solutions that frame the challenge
A common way to assess and track performance, at various levels
Common tools and resources available to your whole team
External resources that have more cost-effective expertise or scale, to complement internal resources

In many ways, these new responsibilities fundamentally shift the day-to-day work of community management as it becomes more about assembling the right resources, managing budgets and hiring than planning community programs or moderating discussions. Not everyone wants to or needs to make the leap but it is helpful to understand the trade-off; if you want strategic authority and responsibility, you need to learn executive skills.

The other challenge for community managers who do make the transition to senior roles have is a hesitation to ask for and spend money – they are so used to operating in a context of scarcity that they assume they have to do everything themselves. We see this all the time with TheCR Network membership fees – when we talk to executives, membership for their community team is an easy and obvious yes but community managers themselves often assume they don’t have budget before they even ask.

Times have changed – community programs are now much more strategic, we have data and case studies that demonstrate community effectiveness and the role of community management is much more well understood. However, community managers still often fail to recognize that:

If you have built a reasonable and itemized roadmap that is tied to business outcomes, you are likely get at least some of what you ask for but do not limit your asking to your direct supervisor – you may need to go up a couple of levels.
You cannot scale without spending money and it’s not about the money per se, it’s about scaling your impact. If you do not build a roadmap, ask for budget and bring on resources that help you extend your reach, you will hamper your ability to grow your community program and its impact. If the community is effective, that harms the organization as a whole.

Growing up is a bumpy process and different people like different stages of maturity better than others. It’s worth really thinking about which part of the process and work you love – and seeking out opportunities that are weighted toward those responsibilities. The tide of community management is rising and bringing all of us along with it – enjoy the ride!

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Looking to take your career in community management to the next level? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals.

Untangling the Community ROI Issue

February 18, 2014 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

While the ROI conversation around social business and community initiatives seems to have died down a bit as more practitioners have figured out how to measure value and share their approach, it still remains a barrier in setting appropriate expectations and planning with executive stakeholders.

One of the core issues is that business planning and modeling has, more or less, been done through linear techniques. Said a different way, most business modeling represents transactional or mechanical process change – not organic process change.

The image below demonstrates the difference.

Organic process change depends on a change in behavior for the agents in question – in social networks those agents are humans. Introducing a new behavior into a ecosystem is very, very hard at first – very few people want to be the weird dancing man, or even the second weird dancing man. You need to spend a lot of time with a few people to get the first change in behavior – or find the the people that don’t mind being weird. Once the new behavior is exhibited, however, it is much easier to inspire subsequent behavior changes and as behaviors change, ROI starts to accrue at an accelerating pace.

The trick and the challenge is to go slow so you can go fast but that is in direct opposition to how most executives think about deployments or product launches. Instead, their experience is predominately with a linear ROI models, which creates pressure to for immediate value. Ironically, in community approaches when you go for scale first it is much harder to ever achieve the behavior change that creates sustainable value.

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The State of Community Management survey is our annual research initiative which focuses on community maturity assessment and will explore the questions:

How are communities performing?
What are the standards and strengths of online communities today?
What opportunities should community managers focus on to grow their programs?

This year’s research was developed in collaboration with TheCR Network’s Community Maturity Assessment Working Group, a set of experienced community managers and practitioners. Data will determine how communities are performing in the eight competencies in TheCR’s Community Maturity Model.

Interested in Community ROI?

Use our online Community ROI calculator to determine what the ROI of your online community program is. Start now.