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The Community Roundtable

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

Four Ways to Improve Community Reporting

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Ready to level up your community reporting program? Whether you’re a solo practitioner or you lead a team of community professionals we have four ways you can immediately improve your community reporting program, opening the door to increased resourcing, support, and growth,

1. Make time for metrics.

We know you’re busy. Collecting, analyzing, and reporting metrics is a specialized skill many community managers don’t have time for but you either have to make the time, or outsource this work as community reporting is critical to the health and growth of you community program. . Maturing community programs should look for this skill beyond the core team to leverage existing expertise vs. trying to bring it in house. Community reporting ownership is increasingly moving to a specialized role on the community team, or in larger organizations, into a reporting organization that works across the company. While not every community has the budget for this, specialized reporting roles can lead to increased resources.

2. Understand the metrics’ audience and report accordingly.

What’s important to a business operations manager differs completely from that of an executive. Design reports with the end user in mind. Add a “why this is important” section to provide important contextual information. As communities mature, organizations want to see the value for the business (at a minimum), and the return on investment (ROI) – but the detail with which you provide this information can and should vary depending on your intended audience.

3. Flush out long-time inactive accounts.

Much like a database, communities should be cleaned up periodically. Remove people who haven’t returned to the community in a set time period (varies by community). Maintaining inactives can negatively impact your other metrics.

Community expert Dianne Kibbey, Global Head/VP of Community and Social Media at Newark Electronics shared this perspective:

Companies in general measure inactive members in very different ways, but it’s important to understand that an inactive member and a lurker are not the same. A lurker could be someone who’s indirectly active in the community, maybe they don’t engage in conversation, but they’re definitely aware of what’s going on at some point.

As an external community, we’re there to serve a purpose: getting an answer, downloading a piece of content. A member may find what they’re looking for, and they may then become inactive. We regularly clean up inactive [users] or try and re-engage them in another activity. It was a really interesting thing to see this year that everyone’s looking at these inactives and figuring out what to do about them, but it’s not necessarily a negative.

4. Get with the times.

Stop citing the 90-9-1 rule for community engagement. Instead, use the 55-25-20 Rule as a new benchmark. The 90-9-1 Rule, coined in 2006, explains behaviors exhibited in large online collaboration communities (like Wikipedia). It doesn’t apply to today’s niche topic or business use case focused communities. Instead, there’s a new engagement rule — backed by years of research — that better fits today’s online communities. Based on over a decade of research, a well- managed online community sees the following in a given month:

community reporting
  • 20% of members are actively creating content
  • 25% are validating and consuming content
  • 55% are inactive

Welcome to the new normal.

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.

Best-in-class communities measure behavior over activity – SOCM Fact #12

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By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

What is the best way to capture the value of your community?

Communities serve a number of strategic uses, so it can be hard to come up with the metrics that best demonstrate how the community delivers on that strategy. But one thing is certain – the basic activity metrics – logins, visits, and such – won’t capture that value. While almost every community tracks basic activity, best-in-class communities are far more likely to measure behaviors and outcomes than the average community.

Why? It’s no accident. People, groups and organizations typically focus on things that they know are being measured, from the kid who asks, “Will this be on the test?” to the executive who pays closest attention to the numbers that go in the report to his CEO. When you select metrics that get at the behaviors you want in the community, you focus on those behaviors. It’s human nature.

So what should you do? Here are 5 tips.

1. Start with what you want to see, not with what you have.

One bit of bad news if you hoped this was easy. The easy stuff that your community platform delivers you in pretty charts probably doesn’t get it done. Visits, posts and logins make for easy graphics, but they don’t necessarily tell you if people are getting value.

Behavioral metrics also take longer to move. Activity can ramp up quickly – and there is nothing wrong with looking at activity metrics to make sure people are coming to the community and doing things, especially when you are just getting started. But as your community matures, it’s less about them showing up and more about the ways they are giving and getting value.

“Visits, posts and logins make for easy graphics, but they don’t necessarily tell you if people are getting value.”

2. Push the value conversation.

It’s really hard to measure fog. If you can’t express the value of the community to the organization and its members in a clear, concise way, you’ll have a hard time getting members to engage (because they don’t know why they should). But equally important, you won’t know when you are truly delivering value. Stories and anecdotes get you there for a while, especially at the start. But at some point, you’ll need hard numbers – so nail the value piece down.

3. Make metrics a part of the strategic conversation from day one.

Once you have your value defined, identify and begin tracking the metrics. It’s OK if your numbers aren’t huge right off the bat.  Your metrics are the way you will be able to track your progress, and will help you troubleshoot, generate new ideas and recognize gaps.

Plus, you don’t want to be caught flatfooted when someone above wants to know whether this community investment is paying off.

SOCM2016_Fact_#12_Reporting

4. Share your data with an eye toward your audience.

When preparing your data – remember who it’s going to. Your immediate boss may want the intimate details of which customer forums are generating the fastest community response times to support questions. Your CEO probably doesn’t.

5. Storytelling still matters.

While getting the right metrics is critically important, qualitative data, case studies and clear examples bring a human face to the numbers on a page. Don’t get so caught up in the numbers that you stop gathering the pieces that you can attach to show the human business impact of a 58% increase in number of questions answered in your platform.

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

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!

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