| A | B | C | D | E | F | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Metric | What it is | Why it matters | How to measure it | How to improve it | |
2 | How it works ✍️ | Active members | Members who are actively engaged with your community | Active members who engage in meaningful interactions create more helpful and lively communities. | Determine your definition of "active." Measure how many community members fit this definition during a set time period. | Encourage participation during onboarding and regularly inspire engagement, such as by starting discussions or sharing interesting content. |
3 | 1. Have an idea for a metric you'd like to add to the glossary? Scroll to the bottom and add it to the "Community-sourced" section. | Activity by source | Where activity is occuring across community channels | Activity by source tells you where your community members congregate so you can inform your strategy. | Use a tool that allows you to centralize your view into activity across channels and report on activity by source. | Use this information to learn where it makes the most sense to engage with community members and customize your approach accordingly. |
4 | 2. We want to make sure you get credit. Please add your name and let us know if we can recognize you when we update the glossary. | Champions | Product and brand advocates who positively influence and enhance your community in multiple ways | Champions provide valuable feedback, help other members, and spread the word about you and your community outside of owned channels. | Determine your definition of "champion." Measure how many community members fit this defintion during a set time period. | Give community members a reason to act as champions. Create a champions program to recognize and reward top community members. |
5 | 3. We'll review your addition, reach out with any questions or concerns, and update the glossary on a rolling basis. | Churn rate | The number of members who have left your community or become inactive | When active community members become inactive, it can have a negative impact on the community at large. | Divide the number of members who have left or become inactive within a given time period by the total number of members during that same time period. | Reach out to inactive members to understand why they left and analyze your community metrics to see if there are certain issues contributing to churn. |
6 | 4. Thank you 🫶 | Community-qualified leads | Leads who are qualified by their activities in your community | Sales opportunities often show up in communities before ever being recorded in a customer relationship management technology. | Determine your definition of "community-qualified lead" (work with your go-to-market colleagues here) and use a tool to automatically add this information to your CRM. | Use this information to understand which attributes make for the most valuable and successful community-qualified leads. |
7 | Deal time to close | How quickly a member of your community becomes a paying customer | Community engagement can significantly speed up the sales cycle. | Calculate the average number of days it takes for a deal to close across all deal types. Subtract the average number of days it takes community-qualified deals to close (you may want to break this up into deals that were generally community-engaged and deals that were spotted in your community before your CRM). Divide this number by the average number of days it takes a deal to close across all deals and multiple it by 100. | Cultivate helpful community activity that answers questions, highlights product use cases, and increases buyer confidence. | |
8 | Membership | The number of members you have in your community—either as a whole or by specific subset | Membership is essential to community growth and there are likely certain types of members you want to attract. | Use a tool that allows you to centralize your view into membership across channels and aggregate it. | Build your community for the types of members you want to attract and continually engage in acttivites that cater to those members' wants and needs. | |
9 | Organization membership | The organizations your community members work at or are associated with | Certain types of organizations will naturally align with your ideal customer profile. | Use a tool that provides visibility into relevant demographic and firmographic details related to community members. | Nurture "pioneers" who are the first members of an organization to join your community to inspire them to invite their colleagues. | |
10 | Retention rate | The number of members who stay active in your community | Retention rate is a great indicator that people are finding value in your community. | Calculate the number of active community members you have at the end of a certain time period, subtract all the new members you gained during that same time period, and divide it by the number of members you had at the beginning of the time period. | Reach out to both active and inactive members to understand why they continue to stay active in your community or have become inactive. | |
11 | Responsiveness | How frequently community members receive responses | Responding to questions and concerns is key to creating a helpful community for your members. | Use a tool that shows you how often community members receive responses and from whom. | Use automated alerts to stay up to date on activity that requires a response and encourage fellow community members to reply when possible. | |
12 | Sentiment | The feelings associated with specific community activities | Sentiment provides insight into what drives positive and negative emotions in your community and alerts you to issues that may require your attention. | Use a tool that automatically assigns sentiment to conversational data. | Cultivate a friendly, inclusive community environment and pay special attention to negative sentiment to spot opportunities to help community members. | |
13 | Time to response | How quickly community members receive a response | Responding to questions and concerns quickly is important to creating a helpful community for your members. | Use a tool that shows you how quickly community members receive responses and from whom. | Use automated alerts to stay up to date on activity that requires a response and encourage fellow community members to reply when possible. | |
14 | Community-sourced metrics | 📊 | ❓ | 💡 | ⏱️ | 💪 |
15 | Your name | Metric | What it is | Why it matters | How to measure it | How to improve it |
16 | Austin Johnson | Community Responses | The number of posts by someone else that a community member has responded to | it shows a willingness to engage, answer and drive discussion | Track all messages by that person with UNIQUE thread.ts in slack | still thinking about this one, but trying to play with the idea that we tell folks this stat contributes to their "user score" for our app |
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