The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

Building a Cost Impact Model for Community Growth

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Esri is the global market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, location intelligence, and mapping.

The Esri Community Team uses data-driven models to power community-centric initiatives, and align community efforts with the company’s mission, vision, and values.

Despite having high engagement and satisfied members, the Esri Community team struggled to get organization-wide buy-in for expanded community use cases.

Learn how the Esri Community Team built a Cost Impact Model for their online community program and design an impact model of your own in this community case study.

Download the Esri Case Study

More Community Case Studies

Growing Organizational Interest in Community Metrics

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The Metrics & Measurement competency of The Community Maturity Model™ helps organizations understand the “why” of social approaches and the results they see when they do. Community teams are often responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting back to the organization, which evolves as the community grows. The same occurs as a community program matures: Beginning with activity metrics and anecdotal evidence of behavior change to more performance and behavior-based metrics.

When The Community Roundtable launched in 2009, community managers were responsible for almost everything associated with their community program. As time passed the role changed leading to the creation of the Community Skills Framework™, which highlights five skill families, each with ten skills.

Community Manager Skills


Keeping the Community Skills Framework™ in mind, seeing community metric ownership move from the community manager to a specialist — on the team or elsewhere in the organization — is exciting. On larger teams (or in more mature communities), this work is done by a part-time or dedicated person on the core team (27% in 2022 vs 19% in 2021). Smaller teams often fill this role by someone outside the core team with these specific skills (10% in 2022 vs 7% in 2021).

Gone are the days when communities shared little beyond the core team and executive sponsor.

As more outsiders help the community team report successes via community metrics, the number of “eyeballs” receiving community program reports increases. This trend supports earlier findings that community programs are on their way to becoming a key operational unit. 2022’s respondents reported increased external stakeholder interest in community metrics from senior executives and HR leaders. Boards of directors’ interest stayed consistent year over year.

For those respondents who provided no reporting, if it’s too early to start sharing activity or behavior metrics due to your community’s age, capture examples of new and/or valuable behavior with screenshots. Have an older community? Identify metrics supporting the business use case to start and grow from there. Sharing the community’s impacts on business leads to gained influence and the resources needed to grow your program.

Proving the Value of Community Metrics: Making Strides

As communities mature, organizations want to see the value for the business (at a minimum), and the return on investment (ROI). The last two years’ responses in these areas are promising. There’s been a modest increase in communities proving their value, with even more headed that way. Every community — even young ones — needs to document successes with proving ROI in mind.

ROI is crucial for community managers, as it’s a language business leaders understand. The Community ROI Calculator provides an easy- to-explain framework to show ROI based on a valuable community behavior: Asking and answering questions. With this approach, key constituents in the organization discuss and agree on the value of a community answer, and then it’s simple math from there.
This year’s respondents were less likely to be able to calculate ROI than those in 2021, but they’re actively working on the calculation. Based on collected anecdotal evidence, there’s no reason to believe value in calculating community ROI is decreasing. Instead, those who are in the “no” and “don’t know” categories should try the Community ROI Calculator.

community roi community metrics
Click to Calculate Your Community ROI

Your Community’s Impact: How To Measure It

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By: Morgan Wood, Head of Community at Hivebrite.

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

Building trust and growing your community requires communicating your impact, but measuring impact isn’t always straightforward. Your choice of success metrics should not only hold you accountable but also tell your community’s story. 

Here, we’ll explain how to identify your community’s success and demonstrate its impact quantitatively and qualitatively.

Measuring Quantitative Impact  

Quantifying your impact involves many considerations, including:

  • The health of your community
  • The quality of member sentiment
  • The engagement of your audience in events

Let’s take a closer look at how you can measure each one!


Understanding Your Community’s Overall Health

The first step to understanding the impact of your community is to take a holistic view of its overall health. You can do this by looking at various metrics such as activity, reach, and overall growth—to do this we recommend you use the following metrics:

Traffic MetricsActivity Metrics
# of unique visitors per time frame# of page views per timeframe# logins per timeframe# registrations per timeframe% conversion of members # of Monthly Active Users (MAU)# posts created per timeframe# of moderator actions performed per timeframe

Diving Deep Into Member Sentiment  

In order to dive deeper into engagement, it is necessary to have a good understanding of your community’s overall health. Often, this means looking at things like how often members log in, what kind of content they interact with, and how long they spend in the community. 

However, engagement has been watered down (especially with the community boom) so we want to dig deeper by looking at sentiment metrics. The better you understand your members’ feelings, opinions, and attitudes toward your community, the better you can shape their community experience.

Targeted Feeling Metrics
Belonging# New Members # New registrations 
Importance% feedback implemented from members % of engaged members vs. members registered
Security # unique comments from members# unique discussion posts from members
Happiness # of converted advocates or championsYour overall Community Health ScoreYour Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Event Metrics
# of registrations vs. # of attendees% Engagement of Attendees# Website Visits% Returning Attendees# Post event engagement (i.e: on-demand content views)

Discover how creating a sub-community around your flagship events can boost reach and impact.

Measuring Qualitative Impact  

Traditionally, organizations have focused on quantitative data, but not everything can be reduced to a number. There is just as much value in qualitative data as quantitative data. Qualitative impact allows you to elevate, champion, understand, and tell the stories of your members.

Gathering Member Stories

Ask for member stories! These are simple but powerful narratives that highlight how your community has made a positive difference in someone’s life. Stories like these are invaluable when it comes to showing the impact of your work.

Ottobock is a med-tech company continually specialized in prosthetics and orthotics. Its community, Movao, connects amputees using its products.

The team running the community has created a stories page where community members share inspiring stories about their life:

Conducting Surveys and Polls

Asking your community members directly is another great way to measure the impact of your community. You can do this through surveys, polls, one-on-one interviews, or focus groups. This method is especially useful if you want to get feedback on specific initiatives or programs.

Correlating Your Data

Correlating data is critical. Correlation can tell if two variables have a linear relationship, and the strength of that relationship.

If someone doesn’t attend any of your community’s events in the coming year, how likely are they to renew their membership? If you compare this to someone who attends an event, you might be able to predict how likely they are to resubscribe the next year. You can use this information to focus on initiatives that have the greatest impact when two variables are correlated. 

Invest time in understanding and measuring your community’s impact across your organization by working with other departments. If, for example, your community strives to improve products, you must work closely with the Product and Customer Success Teams to determine how many ideas are implemented, how they affect customer satisfaction, and how they influence new customers.

Final Thoughts

Measuring impact is often imagined to be far more complicated than in practice. The best place to start is with your members and what impact you want to make for them. Remember, the most important thing is to keep your community’s goals top of mind and apply a rigorous methodology when evaluating your chosen metrics.

About Hivebrite

Hivebrite is an all-in-one community management platform. It empowers organizations of all sizes and sectors to launch, manage, and grow fully branded private communities.

Using metrics to understand community growth and business impact

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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:

  1. Membership
  2. Engagement
  3. Responsiveness
  4. 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.

Using Community Dashboards to Tell a Story

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A thoughtful narrative combined with powerful metrics can help you tell your community story in a way that connects with stakeholders and executives, unlocking additional resources and providing you with needed advocates in your corner.

But, how do you decide what story to tell? Many community platforms now come with built-in analytics and reporting capabilities, but if you aren’t speaking the same language as your leadership team, even these easy to capture measurements might fall flat.

Georgina Donahue, Director of Community at Pragmatic Institute, used metrics-based storytelling to build community dashboards that clicked with their leadership team.

Read Georgina’s story

About Pragmatic Institute

Founded as Pragmatic Marketing in 1993, Pragmatic Institute has a strong track record of providing real-world insights, actionable best practices and proven tools to product managers and product marketing managers around the world.  

In late 2018, recognizing the power of data and the increasing need for a real understanding of data science and AI among business and product professionals, Pragmatic Marketing purchased The Data Incubator (TDI), a leading data science training organization. The two companies rebranded, and became Pragmatic Institute in 2019.

Then in 2020, Pragmatic Institute grew once again, this time acquiring the masterminds behind the leading design courses at Cooper Professional Education. Pragmatic’s goal is to create a bridge between product, design and data that will help the organizations they work with identify the right opportunities and create the most innovative solutions for their markets.

Together, Pragmatic’s design, data and product practices create a powerful professional education platform to enhance the knowledge and skills of key contributors and teams.

Read more Community Case Studies

Interested in more online community management case studies? Learn how top community programs at organizations like Aetna, Blue Prism, Heifer International, The World Bank Group, and more use community-led programs to increase engagement, boost customer loyalty, improve the employee experience, encourage innovation, and more.

Throwback Thursday – Community Metrics 101

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By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable

One of the most daunting aspects of community management for many community managers is how to tackle metrics and measurement. There are so many things to measure, track and report on. And then – what’s the best way to share this data. Weekly? Monthly? With your whole team? Executive reports? It can become overwhelming quickly.

Reporting_Socm2016

Our research has shown that communities need to be aspirational in their metrics instead of settling for what is easily available. Measuring behaviors and outcomes rather than just activity correlates with overall community maturity. That’s a challenge for a couple of reasons – those metrics can be harder to define and they can be harder to track in many platforms. Dive into this week’s #tbt post for a primer on community metrics 101: what metrics you should track, how to think about community value and more!

This week’s #throwbackthursday focuses on Community Metrics 101 – a look at the importance of metrics and measurement in any community.

  • What community metrics are most important to track? – One of the most daunting tasks for many community managers is dealing with community metrics. A member recently approached us with the following question: “I’m getting started with tracking metrics for my community and looking for guidance – where do I begin? What metrics are most important to track?”
  • If you run a community, don’t think like a website on metrics – As we continue to slice and dice the data from more than 200 communities for the State of Community Management 2015, we know that one of the most viewed pieces of the report will be the engagement profiles – the percentage of members who are lurking, contributing, creating and collaborating in the community. It’s a natural thing, especially for new communities, to want to look at engagement and growth metrics early as a way to show to people the success of the community.
  • The Basics of  Metrics and Measuring – If you get a group of community managers together and merely mention the word “metrics”, the first question that comes up is “What do I measure?”… and that is a fantastic question. With a huge variety of forum platforms, an even bigger pool of possible community objectives, and a never-ending list of user types – it might feel really impossible to come up with the perfect community dashboard.

  • For TheCR Network Eyes Only: Community Pitch Deck – Are you a member of TheCR Network? Check out this Roundtable Report: Unlocking the Executive Perspective on Success & Measurement: Business Goals, Community, & Metrics

Want even more #throwbackthursday action? Check out all our throwback posts!

Advisory_Banner_July2016_5

Friday Roundup: New faces, improving community metrics and heroes of heroes

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Photo from Thomas Wolf via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Photo from Thomas Wolf via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but Q1 of 2015 is basically over. It’s that time when community managers look at their strategic plan for the year, utter something that shouldn’t be typed in a blog post, and say to themselves, “Wow, I really need to dig in on those priorities!” But hey – no more snow, right? (Please?)

Here at TheCR, we are heading into the spring with some new and familiar faces back in then fold. Shannon Abram is returning, bringing her energy, positive attitude and strategic smarts back into our mix. We also welcome a new face onto our team. Georgina Cannie is joining us as our Community Management Fellow, working with Hillary Boucher to bolster TheCR Network and help us execute on a couple of major strategic priorities for the rest of the year.

Great conversation this week in TheCR Network with TheCR Champion Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter, the authors of “When Millennials Take Over,” about the book and the expectations of the new generation in the workplace. Savvy community professionals will recognize how well community approaches fit with this new generation. If you missed it, it won’t be the last you hear from them – they’ll be joining us for #ESNChat at 2pm on May 14, if you want a taste of their insight.

The end of the quarter is always a good time to raise the topic of metrics – this week, Shannon laid out three things you should be keeping in mind as you improve your community metrics and measurement strategy. We also put together the first of three posts planned on our Community Superheroes’ Superheroes. If you look on the back page of The Community Manager Handbook, you’ll see the list of the “superheroes” we worked with to develop the lessons in the Handbook, and who they had drawn from in their careers. In the posts, we’ll give you more on why our heroes have found these folks so valuable. If nothing else, our heroes’ heroes are another set of thought leaders and practitioners to follow to expand your community knowledge base.

Things We Are Reading This Week

Convincing Skeptical Employees to Adopt New Technology – “Bringing new technology and tools into your organization can increase productivity, boost sales, and help you make better, faster decisions. But getting every employee on board is often a challenge. What can you do to increase early and rapid adoption? How can you incentivize and reward employees who use it? And should you reprimand those who don’t?”

Gamification Is Thriving Inside the Enterprise – “Opinions may vary, but there is no denying that the use of gamification inside the enterprise is becoming an effective way to engage staff with their organisations. “If you want employees to share knowledge and collaborate, you need to have not only a platform but motivated people,” says Mario Herger, CEO and founder of Enterprise Gamification Consultancy LLC.”

Beware Red Herrings: Intranet vs. ESN is a Sham – “Internal communications departments have debated this question, as have ESN teams and intranet teams. Maybe they saw higher adoption and engagement on their ESN platform, or read success stories from their peers. Or maybe their tired intranet publishing platform is in desperate need of replacing. Oscar Berg nailed it when he wrote that choosing between an intranet and ESN is the wrong question to ask — it displays technology-centric thinking. Instead of thinking about platforms, the starting point needs to focus on organizational and user needs.”

What Millennials’ News Consumption Habits Mean for Associations – “A new report found that millennials are not willing to pay for news and that while they don’t actively seek news through social media, they often get their information through Facebook and YouTube anyway. How does these findings affect associations? Though they don’t use social media primarily as a source for seeking out news and information, a majority of millennials end up getting most of the news they absorb from their social networks, according to a report released last week by the Media Insight Project. MIP, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, also found that they’d be very unlikely to pay for news.”

New Social Media and Community Jobs

Community Manager – Beachbody, Santa Monica, CA

Community Manager – Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Cambridge, MA

Community Manager – Manulife/John Hancock, Toronto, ON/Boston, MA

Community Manager – The Onion, Chicago, IL

Enterprise Community Manager – First American Financial, Santa Ana, CA

Community Manager, Local Guides – Google, New York, NY

Community Manager – Williams-Sonoma, San Francisco, CA

Digital Community Engagement Manager –  Hillshire Brands, Chicago, IL

Marketing and Community Manager – Van Andel Education Institute, Grand Rapids, MI

Community Marketing Manager – Sumo Logic, Redwood City, CA

Community Manager, Niche – Twitter, San Francisco, CA

Community Support Manager, ShopSense by Shopstyle – Popsugar, San Francisco, CA

Online Community Associate – SolarCity, Las Vegas, NV

What community metrics are most important to track?

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

One of the most daunting tasks for many community managers is dealing with community metrics. A member recently approached us with the following question: “I’m getting started with tracking metrics for my community and looking for guidance – where do I begin? What metrics are most important to track?”

Like so many community issues there is no one-size fits all solution (probably not the response you wanted to hear!) We can tell you that through the State of Community Management 2014 report we found that 85% of best-in-class communities can measure the value of their community, so clearly measurement worthy goal. We’ve put together three best practices for getting a metrics and measurement program off the ground:

1. Ensure you have a clear and measurable strategy.

​Almost 80% of best-in-class communities have a measurable community strategy. Why? That – more than anything else – will give you clear guidance on what to track by articulating the business goals and behavior change you hope to see.

2. Identify a consistent reporting timeframe.

​About 60% of survey respondents prepare reports monthly. Reporting more often is likely a waste of time because behavior change takes time, but reporting monthly is often enough to get the feedback everyone needs to make adjustments to tactics.

3. Determine reporting audiences.

Think about who will be viewing your progress and goals. What story are you trying to tell them? Choose metrics that support the goals of your community and can be easily understood.

We also recommend both preparing monthly reports to track activity and sharing results with stakeholders and aligning your reporting with your community’s objectives to best engage your community stakeholders.

Do you consistently report on community metrics to your team? How did you decide what to report on, and how do you present this data in a meaningful way to your stakeholders?

Want more insights like these? Download the free State of Community Management 2014 report, and keep an eye out for the State of Community Management 2015, due out this spring!

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Want to access a global network of community professionals? Learn how membership in TheCR Network can provide 24/7 365 networking, training, professional development, and education.

The Value Of Social Business – Infographic

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As we continue the conversation on the value of community management I think it’s helpful to take a step back and think about social business as whole. This weeks infographic, originally published on MindJet is a great look at how companies think about social as a business tool.

Not surprisingly, the highest reported uses are for marketing and customer service. A whopping 77%  of respondents are not actively measuring the ROI of their social business programs – more support for the idea that measurement and metrics are huge topics in the social media and community world for 2014.

Social Business Infographic

 

Is tracking ROI high on your priority list for 2014? What metrics do you have in place to accurately assess the impact of your community or social initiatives?

 

 

Advisory:
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The Community Roundtable offers customized advisory workshops that are ideal for companies looking to start their journey, build out their community program or grow a community program that is not yet at its full potential. Sessions can be conducted in person or virtually and are designed to meet your needs.

Learn more.

Dave Olson on Pre-Social Media Communities

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The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.
Episode #9 features Dave Olson, Marketing Director for HootSuite, which helps people and companies track, monitor and manage their Twitter communities.

 

Podcast highlights include:
  • How the traditional title of “Marketing Director” translates to online marketing, customer service and social engagement
  • Turning metrics into meaning by realizing the personalities behind the community members
  • Tips on community: making members feel like they belong and are contributing, and that they are being heard and acknowledged
  • Stories about communities in the 1970s, enabled by “ditto machines” and other pre social media technology (the roots of Dave’s current personal projects are found at https://www.uncleweed.com/)
  • An example of a company (SubPop records) that started their community building in the pre-social media era (pre-Internet, even), and evolved it into the age of Twitter
  • Adding value, context and storytelling vs simply “attracting a crowd”

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

PHOTO CREDIT: kris krüg

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

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