reporting resources Archives

Why ‘Knowing Your Numbers’ is so Important in Community Management

December 4, 2024 By Emma Nicholas

Those of you who know me, know how passionate I am about this topic, and those of you who don’t are about to find out!

My background is sales – I’ve had the opportunity to work for Cadbury, PepsiCo, and LEGO during my career, and the importance of ‘knowing my numbers’ was drummed into me throughout those 18 years.

It can be easy to find reasons not to ‘know your numbers’ in the world of community management, because… which numbers?

In sales, targets are generally numerical – easy to define and easy to measure. In community, not so much.

In my opinion, this makes it even more important to define and measure success in your community, and guess what? You are the expert, so you can define and shape both the numbers you measure and the narrative that goes with them – putting you wholly in charge of your community metrics.

Imagine being able to report to your peers and stakeholders “We did x in the community and the impact was a y% increase in activity”. ‘Knowing your numbers’ can help you achieve just that.

Six Tips for Defining Community Metrics

Here are the steps I recommend taking to define the community metrics that are most important to your community:

Don’t start with your reports! It is easy to get sucked into the community metrics associated with the standard reports that your community platform provides. This can lead you down rabbit holes of reports against criteria that don’t really matter to you.
Instead…
Understand your community’s reason for being – we call this the Shared Purpose : Shared Value. Why does your organization have a community – what will the organization give to it and get from it? Why will your community members come to your community? What will they give to it and get from it? Where the commonalities of these questions intersect, you will find your community’s Shared Purpose : Shared Value. (It’s a little more complicated than that, but you can read more here)
Understand the key behaviors you are looking for in your community – aim for 3 or 4 – these should all contribute to achieving the Shared Purpose : Shared Value.
Some examples of key behaviors are:
1. Ask and answer
2. Share
3. Discover
4. Connect
Work out how to tie these criteria to your organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This is crucial – in this way, you equip yourself and your stakeholders with the numbers to demonstrate the performance of your community program against the criteria you know to be important.
When you are happy with these criteria, establish how you can satisfactorily measure performance against these behaviors and work out which reports you can pull regularly (weekly, monthly, quarterly) to track performance. For example, you could measure “Share” by looking at the number of new posts. Often the metrics will not be perfect, but as long as you are confident in why you are tracking that metric, and what it tells you about your community, the trend over time is more important than the measurement itself.

GET STARTED!! I cannot stress this enough. The sooner you start, the sooner you will establish a baseline and track trends. You don’t need fancy tools or dashboards – use what you are comfortable with (I use Excel workbooks) and start measuring. Set up a workbook where you can track data, and build your workbook for the future – leave space to add more data over time. If you can pull data for past periods, do so, but don’t feel you have to do it all at once – build up slowly if needed, and start with what you consider to be the most valuable community metrics.

Once you have set up your workbook, ensure you update it regularly – add a recurring calendar slot to keep you accountable, and schedule as many reports as you can (if your platform has that functionality). You will refine your report over time so don’t aim for perfection.

As you get to ‘know your numbers’ you will develop another level of confidence in the impact of your community management work.

I hope you find this helpful. If you want to dig deeper into this topic with a passionate group of community builders, join The Network. Our clients see a return on their membership with just one template, conversation, or solution to a challenge.

We also offer bespoke community advisory solutions. If you would like to talk more about which solution would be the right one for your community program, please get in touch.

Four Ways to Improve Community Reporting

May 23, 2023 By Jim Storer

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:

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

Welcome to the new normal.

Growing Organizational Interest in Community Metrics

May 22, 2023 By Jim Storer

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.

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

January 24, 2023 By Guest User

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 Metrics	Activity 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

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.

Impactful Metrics & Reporting in Community

July 27, 2022 By Jim Storer

Great metrics and dashboards reveal the value of engagement.

Choosing the metrics that tell your community’s unique story of engagement is crucial. What engagement activity is worth measuring? It depends on the strategic, operational, and tactical goals of your community.

Community engagement metrics help to tie engagement to outcomes, and in turn, to business value. Engagement data should be tailored to its audience, ensuring that community metrics are meaningful. For instance, a product manager and a market director may both be interested in the emergent product testimonials in a community, but they are interested in this data for different reasons – and are likely to use it in different ways.

While the product manager may want to understand how the product is used in order to improve the product, the marketing director may be interested in what aspects of the product members are most excited about so they can share it with others. Deciding what data to share, how to present it, and how often, is critical to telling the story of your community in a meaningful way. More importantly, reporting data effectively is what leads to increased support and investment. We break metrics and reporting into three categories: strategic, operational, and tactical.

Strategic Metrics & Reporting in Community

Strategic metrics and reporting is focused on impact and value. How does the community further the strategic objectives of the organization? Why is it a better investment than a more traditional approach to addressing those issues? Senior executives are responsible for budgets, which reflect how the priorities of an organization are expressed and changed.

This is why measuring community ROI becomes important – because it demonstrates effective impact. If organizational change is a strategic goal, showing how communities address organizational change more effectively, for the same investment than another approach, is critical. When reporting on the significant value community brings to company culture, executives who look beyond the revenue benefits will find that the complex problems community solves creates value not only for the bottom line but also for the brand, the employees, and the stakeholders. Community investments are an investment in long-term fiscal health, innovation, and a positive customer experience.

Strategic Metrics & Reporting in Community — An example of a strategic metric is Return on Investment (ROI) – Use our ROI Calculator to calculate your community ROI.

Operational Metrics & Reporting In Community

Operational metrics are focused on how behaviors and workflows are changing. Behavior change is what collectively generates strategic value. Knowing which behaviors are changing, how fast, and in what areas of the community is critical to understanding how to encourage the spread of positive behaviors and discourage the negative ones.

Operational metrics help decision-makers monitor how well plans are working so they can learn and adjust as needed. If behaviors over a quarter don’t change, then it may prompt a change to how the community is being managed – or when looking at benchmarks over time, it may just signal a traditionally slow period in the life of the community.

Done well, operational metrics help:

See the gaps and opportunities
Probe deeper into whether a management approach is working
Celebrate good performance and reflect on what is working well

Tactical Metrics & Reporting in Community

Tactical metrics are the day-to-day activity measures that help community managers understand the direct impact of their actions. How many new comments happen after a question of the week is posted? What percent of the community comes back after newsletters go out? Are those metrics better or worse than prior periods, which can tell the community team if the quality of their efforts is improving?

Done well, tactical metrics help

Understand what content and programming works
Identify times and periods that have different engagement levels
See how changes in management influence engagement

Three recommendations for more effective engagement

Measure: Engagement data is vital to understanding who, how, and when members engage. Identifying key behaviors when designing metrics will help the organization understand how engagement impacts work. Translating this impact into value makes it meaningful to the business.

Analyze: Combine data and member research to understand why members engage – and how it impacts their success. Use this analysis to create user stories that resonate for both users and internal stakeholders so everyone can see the impact

Act: Use your understanding of member activity and behaviors to build successful patterns into community programs, functionality, and management approaches. Experiment to see what works.

Building Community Teams with Lisa Tallman

May 26, 2022 By Jim Storer

Lessons from the NEW Community Manager Handbook - Episode One - Lisa Tallman on Building Community Teams

Lessons from The NEW Community Manager Handbook is a limited-run podcast series, featuring the 21 community leaders showcased in the Handbook in conversation with Anne Mbugua.

Episode One features Lisa Tallman, VP, Data and Information Management at Easterseals, on building community teams. She and Anne discuss building a business case to support community resourcing, finding community talent inside your organization, having the right mindset for hiring for your specific needs, and more.

If you haven’t downloaded your free copy of The NEW Community Manager Handbook you can get it here.

Listen to Building Community Teams with Lisa Tallman:

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About Lisa Tallman

As an organizational leader, I initiate and execute strategies that make work easier; advance employee expertise and confidence; and boost organizational advantage and performance. I engender trust, share expertise and engage stakeholders in solving complex challenges and designing new ways of operating that serve them and the organization.

I embrace the power of technologies and platforms to help employees, customers and partners. That said, people are any organization’s most important resource and are the most important contributor to successes, big and small. I enjoy helping individuals and teams embrace their potential, create and use all available tools to design pathways for their own success and that of the organization every day.

Areas of expertise include: strategy development; change leadership; analysis, assessment and evaluation; project management; strategic planning; resource allocation; roadmaps; diverse audience communications; operational performance integrity; cost management and budgeting; executive advising; process redesign; work streamlining; vendor selection, negotiations and management; dashboards and reporting; training and professional development; presentations; public speaking; and professional organizational engagement and expertise sharing.

Please feel free to reach out to me through LinkedIn, or by emailing me at lisatallman@gmail.com.

About The NEW Community Manager Handbook

The NEW Community Manager Handbook features 21 profiles of community leaders sharing advice and ideas on everything from accessibility, hiring, strategy, gamification, engagement, technology, and more. Each profile is paired with research from the State of Community Management reports and includes tactical advice for implementing what you’ve learned.

Download the New Community Manager Handbook

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Using Community Dashboards to Tell a Story

April 26, 2022 By Jim Storer

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.

Community Conversations – Episode #77: Jeremy Meiss

January 5, 2022 By Jim Storer

Episode #77 features Jeremy Meiss, Director, DevRel & Community at circleci.

Jeremy shares a look at how circleci connects with their audience through developer relations programs.

Using Orbit to connect their community channels, Jeremy and his team provide a single pane of glass into the developer journey, and can easily track and measure the impact of individual members.

This episode of Community Conversations is sponsored by Orbit. Learn more about Orbit here.

LISTEN NOW:

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Calculating Community ROI: Measuring the Networked Value of Engagement

September 19, 2018 By Jim Storer

Few teams know their community ROI

Our State of Community Management research revealed that despite the high returns we calculated, only 41% of those surveyed say that they are able to calculate value in any way themselves, and only 23% have taken the next step to calculating ROI for their community program. Only 23%!

What’s the big deal about calculating ROI, anyway?

By calculating ROI you demonstrate to stakeholders that they are making a good choice about investing in the community program – and that it is worth more investment. The other, critical, thing it can do is to show how community value has grown historically and how that value is projected to grow in the future, giving them further assurance that they are making a smart financial choice.

Evaluating the investment return (ROI) of the community directly connects to increased executive interest, support and investment – which in turn has a massive impact on resource allocation for communities programs. So, why don’t more community programs calculate their ROI?

Our research suggests that there is a lack of business skills on community teams and this gap is a disservice to both the business and the community team. Overwhelmed by supporting value creation, community teams do not have the resources or the time required to measure and report their own success.

Calculating Community ROI: Measuring the Networked Value of Engagement

Our research brief, Calculating Community ROI: Measuring the Networked Value of Engagement, explores a simple formula for capturing the ROI of a behavior at the heart of all successful communities: an answer.

No matter what your community use case, questions and answers are its lifeblood. By capturing the value of this single behavior, you capture the lion’s share of the return communities generate. Drilling in on answers highlights the way that communities surface innovations, strengthen networks, highlight best practices, and drive behavior change.

This brief includes The Community Roundtable’s Community ROI calculation as well and approaches to find or estimate the inputs required to calculate it.

The result is a straightforward, understandable formula that focuses the heat of the executive spotlight on the results that matter the most to business outcomes.

Access the research brief.