Tracking the performance of your community is essential both to help you learn what’s working and what isn’t and adjust accordingly, and to give you the data to tell the story around your community’s impact on business growth and gain continued investment. So, it’s a must-do, but sadly it isn’t always straightforward. It can often be hard to directly attribute the community to business growth and success, but hard things are worth doing! In this article, we will outline an approach to measurement that takes into account both the overall health of the community, the business value your community is driving, how to gather the data and the importance of data correlation.
In order to achieve any other business goals, you first need to ensure you have a ‘healthy’ community. But what does that mean? We are referring to a community that people are regularly engaging with and participating in. This regular engagement is a good proxy for user value - as the assumption can fairly be made that if someone is receiving sufficient value from an experience (that value might be connection, knowledge, support or anything else!) they’ll keep coming back. And without baseline engagement, it will be very hard to deliver any other meaningful outcomes. So how might you measure community health?
We recommend looking at three different categories of metrics:
.1 - before anything else can happen, your community must be visible to members and potential members - they need to find you and activate their ‘membership’. Awareness metrics you might want to track (depending on the nature of your community e.g. whether it exists on social media, or an online community platform) could include:
- Site views
- Followers
- Logins
- Registrations
.2 - Once you have established awareness, you need to be considering engagement i.e. what people are doing once they get to your community and the extent to which they are actively participating. Typical engagement metrics include:
- Monthly Active Users (MAU)
- Number of unique posts
- Number of likes/comments
- Average attendee numbers (a common event engagement metric)
.3What do your members feel about the community? How likely are they to return or recommend it to a friend?
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) - a universal measure of likelihood to recommend to a friend
- User Experience Score - a self-reported measure of how good/enjoyable/informative/valuable something is
- Sentiment analysis of free-text feedback
- Other experience measures specific to your community’s objectives e.g. the extent to which members feel they are getting valuable support to better use your product, or the extent to which they are learning new skills, or the extent to which they feel connected to like minded individuals
In addition to these broad health metrics, you may likely want to identify specific metrics for each area of your community experience and programming e.g. content views, event experience scores etc.
A common mistake community builders make is only tracking community health. As we’ve established, it’s really important to measure, but it is a baseline measure that doesn’t tell you anything about the business value your community is driving. You need to understand and be able to confidently articulate the ‘so what’ of your community beyond awareness, engagement and experience.
What is being made possible for your business as a result of your community?
Are you attracting more customers?
Retaining them better?
Reducing your support costs?
Gaining insight that’s making your product more effective?
In order to tell this story effectively, you need to consider the objectives you outlined when you set up your community - what business goals did you set out to achieve?
And then consider the data available to measure the extent to which you are achieving those things (or what data you might need to start gathering).
This is where it can get a bit tricky. Whilst community health metrics give you insights as individual data points, more often that not, being able to measure business value requires a data correlation exercise. Most commonly, it involves taking the business value data points you’re interested in (customer lifetime value, retention, satisfaction etc) and comparing that data for customers who do engage with your community, against those who don’t. Let’s take an example:
One of the objectives of your community is to increase customer lifetime value (LTV). The only way you can effectively measure impact against this goal is by correlating two data points: (1) Community engagement, (2) Customer lifetime value. By correlating this data, you can see whether customers who engage with your community have a higher LTV than those who don’t. You may likely want to go even more indepth than that and look at what type of engagement correlates with higher LTV, or what type of customer this has a more significant impact on, in order to inform the evolution of your community strategy and programming e.g. does attending events have more of an influence over increasing LTV or participating in forum discussions?
A word of warning: it is often almost impossible to isolate your community as the only driver of a particular outcome. In most businesses, any number of strategies might be implemented at any one time to drive a business goal such as increasing LTV, so it would be very difficult to say that what you were doing within the community was the definite single driver of the change. As the old saying goes, correlation does not mean causation. In these instances, we recommend continuing to report on the data but with the caveats outlined that causation cannot be assumed. Transparency is key in communicating community impact and getting trust and buy-in from your business partners and stakeholders.
Now we’ve looked at the different measurements you might want to consider, we’ll now dive into the type of data and how to measure. Commonly speaking, data inputs come in two forms:
.1- look at the wealth of data you have available from your online community platform, social media channels, event registration tools, website, CRM platform etc. This is where the majority of your data will come from. As we have outlined, some of this data is valuable and insightful as single data points, and some of it requires correlation.
.2 - solicit direct feedback from members in the form of surveys, phone calls or in-person informal chats. This type of data is incredibly valuable both in measuring impact, but also in unearthing deeper qualitative insights that inform improvements. All good communities rely heavily on member feedback and insight to continually optimise and improve the experience and value they deliver, and the business value they receive in return.
Measuring community performance isn't easy, but it is absolutely essential in order to continue learning, improving, and securing ongoing investment in your community.