“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” Most of us know this perfectly and a complete lack of metrics is rarely an issue today. The main problems nowadays are which metrics to use and how to interpret them in situations where there are a lot of metrics and some of them show growth, but others show a decline, or when the metrics don’t show any change, but clearly there are enormous changes underway.
Topics covered in this chapter:
- What does metric mean?
- What is the value and costs of a metric?
- What metrics should a community manager measure?
- What does predictive and descriptive metrics mean?
- How to define a health metric for a community?
- What is the main problem of the metrics nowadays? How to fix it?
- How to identify the independent subsystems of a community project to being able to measure them correctly?
- How to avoid duplicating health metrics for people at different levels of an organization?
- How to deal with situation when different metrics say different story?
- What could be good candidates for community health metrics of a community project?
- How to define user churn in an online community?
- How to define monthly engaged users in an online community?
- How to create health metrics to measuring the impact of individual initiatives in an online community?
- What metrics can a community manager use to measure content initiatives in an online community?
- What metrics can a community manager use to measure community initiatives in an online community?
- What metrics can a community manager use to measure trust and safety initiatives in an online community?
- What is a good candidate for the top-level metric of a community project?
- What could be good candidates for content health metrics for a community project?
- How to understand the financial performance of an online community?
- How a community manager can measure the quality of a communication post?
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.