Community Times: Measuring KPIs for your community

Apr 01, 2022

Hello there, Community Rockstar 👋

We hope you had a productive month and are staying healthy both physically and mentally. It’s important to take short breaks, give yourself some time, and burnouts are real.

In the community news, we hosted Noele Flowers in the 6th episode of “Chronicles of Community Builders” with a great host Manohar Kabeer, and also our monthly ritual, everyone’s favorite “When RETRO Meets METRO”.

On the other hand, a lot more new community builders have joined our community. Join us at Community Folks to get to know them and listen to their experiences.

We are here to keep you updated on all things community, the events that are being hosted, and the jobs that are open.

So, scroll down to see the complete picture.

Let’s goooooooooooo!

(p.s. if you have a question/query that you want fellow community builders’ perspective on? You can ask here or contact us at akash@communityfolks.com)

If you build a community for everyone, you build a community for no one.

4 KPIs THAT YOU SHOULD START TRACKING FOR YOUR COMMUNITY

Active members rate: Active members rate is used for tracking the count of unique members who engage in your community on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis.

New member acquisition: Tracking newly acquired members over a week/month helps you analyze the membership growth of your community. This KPI could also be attached to any of your public community initiatives and will tell you what % of those contributed to transforming your potential audience into community members.

Content volume: Tracking the total content volume generated helps you track the member interactions and content growth of your online community, Additionally, analyzing the % of member-generated content will help you measure community stickiness.

Count of product ideas /feedback submissions: Tracking this metric over a monthly/annual period tells you how involved members are in the growth of your brand product and how in turn a community contributes to product innovation.

5 EFFECTIVE TIPS TO CONSIDER WHILE SETTING KPIs

Align community goals with organizational goals: Set SMART( Smart, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) goals for your community that contribute to the overall organization goal for the tenure.

Do not run after community growth blindly: As a growing organization, the temptation to measure community growth is hard to resist, but you have to take the chill pill and see other aspects like how members are interacting and engaging.

Benchmark community behavior against your goals: Make a note of the behavioral changes you want to foster and review the rationale of your community. Ask yourself how your members are currently using your online community? Look out for the adoption of new behaviors to benchmark community behavior against your goals.

Prioritize community engagement: If your members aren’t engaging with your community, it could lead to a lack of value and disinterest. It is important to reassess your community members’ shared values and purpose to drive community engagement on priority.

Make use of storytelling to measure, and prove success: Design your performance indicators early to highlight how behaviors are changing, and couple the numbers with stories to help visually illustrate the possibilities and outcomes. This makes it fun and interesting.

Your company’s specific approach to online communities might entail a list of other micro-details but to take this list as a jumping-off point can go a long way in improving performance, conversions, and community health.

Must Check Out -

Community podcasts

In Before the Lock - This week’s podcast of In Before the Lock brings Erica and Brian, Where they answer the question “How to persuade others through the use of an age-old framework.”
Listen to it here: Inception
Masters of Community with David Spinks - In this episode, David Spinks, the VP of Community at Bevy and the Co-Founder of CMX, speaks with SJ Morris, Senior Manager, Developer Community at HubSpot. SJ shares what she's learned from working with these brands and the differences between the different kinds of developer communities that she's built. She also talks about how to get started in a community role, DEIB in building developer communities, and the balance of community capitalism.
Listen to it here: How To Build a Thriving Developer Community with SJ Morris

Community articles

We know it’s very hard to pick from so many amazing articles that get published every month but we have tried and here are the best articles of the month for you.

Community Content 101: The Community Leader’s Guide - A deep dive into creating engaging content for the community
Your First 1,000 Community Members - A Founder’s Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your First 1,000 Community Members
Growing Your Community - The Best Channels And Tactics

Throwback Time💯

Events last month-

We hosted the 6th episode of our series Chronicles of Community Builders with Noele Flowers on 11th March where we touched upon various topics in the industry with our host Manohar Kabeer.
You can watch the session recording here.
p.s. we have launched a new initiative where we give one of our community members a chance to be the host in the series. If you want to be one of them, contact us at: akash@communityfolks.com
We hosted When RETRO Meets METRO on the 25th of March. This was a special one as we dedicated it to the women in the community. We highlighted the stories of fellow women community builders. We also got to catch up with many new and old folks.

Till Next Time!

Have a suggestion for a piece of content we should include in our next edition? Email us and let us know!

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Community Folks