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The Community Roundtable

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

Leveraging Data Analytics for Community Success

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Community Conversations is a long-running podcast series highlighting community success stories from a wide variety of online community management professionals.

Episode #97 of Community Conversations features Chris Catania, Head of Community at Esri.

Hosts Jim Storer and Shannon Abram chat with Chris about Leveraging data analytics for community success, community building and education for executives, and his work building a community ROI model and its impact on organizational value at Esri.

Chris shares ideas for building out your own cost benefit model, and explores the positive impact of measuring community ROI.

Community Conversations – Episode #82: Chris Catania on Community Leadership

Listen to Chris Catania on Leveraging Data Analytics for Community Success

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Storytelling with Metrics - A Quick Learn Course for Community Managers

About Chris Catania

Chris is an award-winning enterprise community building expert. For more than 20 years, he has helped leaders build community-driven organizations that leverage the power of community and collaboration to deepen trust, increase loyalty, build better products, drive engagement, save millions and grow top-line revenue. As a speaker, consultant and strategist, he has helped audiences transform disengaged customers into loyal and passionate brand advocates. He has led clients to create a digital workplace that connects and builds strong employee relationships and networks. Today he speaks and leads workshops to empower leaders to leverage community as a strategic asset in the workplace and a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

About Esri

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

Since 1969, they have supported customers with geographic science and geospatial analytics, what they call The Science of Where.

They take a geographic approach to problem-solving, brought to life by modern GIS technology. They are committed to using science and technology to build a sustainable world.

About Esri Community

Esri Community is an award-winning global online community of Esri users where you can find solutions, share ideas, and collaborate to solve problems with GIS.

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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.

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

Three Quick Community Wins for January

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Check these three easy community management to-dos off your list and set yourself up for community success in the coming year.

A new year can be both an amazing blank slate, and also, a terrifying blank slate. If you’re back at your desk and feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list, here are three easy ways to take stock of where your community is right now, and ideas for prioritizing for the coming months. Bonus: these research-backed tools help you make the case for needed resources for your community program.

1. Check your community’s temperature.

Through a short, 20 minute survey you can:

  • Identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities – By assessing your community program in the context of your strategy and approach, you can determine where you have gaps that matter (some gaps may be intentional or OK for your context) or opportunities to improve.
  • Prioritize initiatives with the biggest impact – Your assessment will identify activities and initiatives that will contribute to your community’s goals and growth. These may be tactical activities, like programming or larger initiatives like governance and strategic alignment.

Start your community score.

2. Calculate your Community ROI

January is a great time to benchmark the ROI generated by your community. Not only does it communicate the value you are currently creating, it also helps you set goals for where you’d like to be in the future.

The formula is designed to be simple to use, and simple to explain to stakeholders – but like any ROI model, it is best used as a piece of strategy development and discussion, not just as an output.

Calculate your community ROI.

3. Create or Update your Editorial Calendar

One of the most common questions we get from members is,  “How do I increase the value and the volume of member engagement?” This challenge persists across all community types, sizes, and use cases. One way we’ve found to increase audience engagement, in terms of both quality and quantity, is to implement an editorial calendar for your community programming.

If you are already using an editorial calendar to plan your community programming now is a great time to review what worked from last year, and tweak your plans to increase engagement. If you aren’t using an editorial calendar now is a great time to draft one for the new year. This short webinar highlights best practices for building an editorial calendar for an online community program.

Ready, set, go!

We hope these three ideas help you kick-start your community initiatives for the new year. Have a specific question about any of the above? You can always ask a question in our private facebook group or send us a message.

Esha Singh on Empowering Members

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Esha Singh, Product Manager at Workday.

Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professionals. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI, and more. 

Episode #73 features Esha Singh, Product Manager at Workday.

In this episode of the podcast, Esha shares how to empower members to keep coming back, the differences between a transactional community vs experience focused community, and how determination is a underrated superpower!

Listen now:

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Listen to more episodes of Conversations with Community Managers.

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.

Calculating Community Return on Investment (ROI)

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In this brief, we explore a universal formula for capturing the Return on Investment (ROI) of an engagement behavior at the heart of all successful communities.

The Value of 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 value communities generate. Drilling in on answers highlights the way that communities surface innovations, strengthen networks, highlight best practices, and drive behavior change.

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.

This brief includes an overview of the power of a tangible community ROI calculation, as well as:

  • Ways ROI models often fail
  • A formula for calculating Community ROI
  • Approaches to identify and refine inputs and assumptions

Learn more here.

Using ROI to Gain Executive Support

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Element14 is an online community of over half a million engineers, makers, educators, and students where members can connect, learn, create, and inspire.

The element14 team sought to provide tangible ROI to help executives understand the financial value the community provides to drive revenue.

In this case study, Dianne Kibbey, Global Head of Community and Social Media shares how the element14 team used ROI to successfully gain executive support for their community, and secure additional financial resources for community-led programs.

Download the element14 case study.

Calculating Community ROI: Measuring the Networked Value of Engagement

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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 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. 

Why Community Teams Need to Get Smart About Using ROI

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 Only 6% of community programs who calculate ROI, use it to secure resources.

The SOCM 2018 data revealed that of the respondents who were calculating ROI and presenting it to various stakeholders, more than 50% were using it to defend their program or to increase confidence in it, instead of the more traditional uses like increased budgets, headcounts, change in roadmap priorities etc. To understand why this is a problem, consider…

Would ROI be used to make a function like HR defend its existence? Or would it be used to decide what additional investments to make/ask for in the department?

Almost any program/department that involves the terms loyalty, retention, engagement, motivation, learning etc. is by nature, a complex function. The decision to establish a community and give it resources to function is an investment driven by business research and experience that says community programs have a variety of positive outcomes for the organization and its stakeholders. ROI cannot capture a complex value easily.

From a functional perspective, having to defend a program means that the community manager may have to focus on activities that show short-term returns. Further using the ROI to defend programs can trigger comparisons where there are none. For example, using TheCR calculator on ROI the average number was 2374%. At first glance, the number seems unbelievable. It is…because the content value being generated by communities is so much higher than the investment being made in the community programs. This does not mean however that it can be compared to another initiative with an ROI of 300% since the specifics of the two programs may not be comparable.

community roi

Click to Calculate Your Community ROI

ROI in its traditional form is a financial ratio to assess profitability and is calculated as total profits/total costs.

TheCR’s ROI formula for communities captures the extent and value of content creation activities and provides insight into the community activity and returns.

However, ROI in any form is just one part of an overall discussion on how the community is performing. There could be many other effectiveness indicators. As an example of how ROI is more appropriately used exists in the training field. A widely accepted training evaluation method is D. Kirkpatrick’s four levels of training evaluation (1959). The four levels are Reaction, Learning, Behavior, and Results. ROI is considered a part of Results and just one of the many indicators of results.

Using the other levels of evaluation in addition to ROI provide a much more accurate and comprehensive picture of the success of a training program. Similarly, in my opinion, the ROI should be just one of the indicators of the progress of a community program. Using it strategically to track progress, secure budgets, identify roadmap priorities are likely to yield better returns in the long term than using it to defend program existence or improve stakeholder confidence in programs.

For more details on how the ROI ratio is being used in community programs what impact it is having, and the importance of strategy, read our State of Community Management 2018 report.

 

Throwback Thursday: Managing a Community Budget

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community budgetLike it or not, managing a community budget is a must for many community managers – and might be something you’ve never tackled before. With 2017 looming (how are we halfway through November already?) we wanted to share some of our most popular posts on defining and managing a community budget.

And for those of you thinking, “Ha! A budget! I’ve got three paper clips and a cold cup of coffee!”, we’ve got something for you too – both how to survive when you’re underfunded AND how to calculate the ROI of your community to have the data you need to ask for more money.

Best Practices for Managing a Community Budget

Help! I don’t have budget to add new staff to my community team.

The Benefits of Community Benchmarking – How benchmarking your community can help secure increased resources.

Community ROI Calculator -Use this calculator to give you a glimpse into the ROI of your community, using the value of an answer as a key value.

The Smartest Way to Use Your Community Conference or Training Budget

3 Best Practices When Budgeting for Community and Social Programs

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Looking for more community management best practices? Check out our archive of throwback Thursday posts – the best of the best in community management. Including topics such as Building Your Community, Getting a Community Management Job and Community Metrics 101.