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KM 101

Measuring the Success of Online Communities

Dennis Pearce

December 2024

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“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

� -- William Bruce Cameron

Measurement is in support of decision making

Define the decision you want to make
Determine the value of additional information to help make those decisions
Determine the cost of collecting and analyzing that information (is it worth it?)
Act on that decision (if you don’t use the information you collect, you’re wasting time and money)�
You have far more data than you think
You need far less data than you think
Just because it can be measured doesn’t mean it should be measured

Why measure?

	Improvement/ Success Validation	Ongoing Community Health Assessment	Hypothesis Testing
Strategy	Create baseline data; set benchmarks/targets and then monitor progress toward them	Identify “vital signs” (global activity, number of blog posts, etc.) and track at regular intervals	Capture data for a fixed time pre- and post-event or action to measure the impact Compare two pages, team rooms, blogs, etc. – one with the proposed change and one without
Example	We want to increase engagement so set a goal of 20% of members posting to forums, microblogs, and comments.	Track global activity monthly	Place a blog widget on the home page and see if views increase

Ways to measure

Analytics	Anecdotes/ Success Stories	Employee Surveys	Process Improvements
Views Comments Top search terms	Big sales win thanks to collaboration Found information quickly for a customer	“How satisfied are you with your ability to find the information you need to do your job?” “How likely are you to share your work on our digital workplace?”	Do deals close faster? Does product quality improve? Are there fewer calls to HR or IT for help?

The Dimensions of Digital Workplace Activity

Who	What	When	Where	Why	How
Locations Teams Departments Top users	Blogs Microblogs Forums Wikis Folders	Timeframe Before/After Year over Year	Which spaces Which content	Information Collaboration Social	Lurking Participating Creating

Key metrics for every digital workplace

Dimension	Why?	Questions to Ask
Participation	Ensure that the workplace is being used in alignment with strategy	What percentage of employee base is using the DWP? How evenly distributed are they (location, business function, etc.)?
Top Content	Determine what attracts employees to the platform	Where is top content located? Who is authoring it?
Top Users	Identify potential advocates and champions	Who are the top users? Are they evenly distributed?
Top Searches	Improve findability of content	What are the top search terms? Are there top searches that are synonyms? How do top searches compare to most popular content?

What are we trying to improve?

	Culture/ Engagement	Communication	Collaboration	Knowledge Management
Goal (example)	Unify divisions to form “one organization” mindset	Increase visibility and readership of Internal Comms and Executive communications	Encourage team rooms and reduce email exchanges	Make it easier for employees to find essential information
Metrics	Overall activity; activity in social channels; comments, likes & ratings	Blog views and comments; page hits to Comms home page; time on page or video	Team room activity; wiki and microblog creations and activity; broadcasts	File uploads, downloads, views; search usage and success rate