I think it would be great if community managers and community owners could make better data-driven decisions without spending a lot of money on infrastructure and hiring a team of data scientists. My first step in this direction is to improve the Community Management Industry Metrics Benchmarks. You can find the new version at: app.practical-cm.com/
What is the essence of the Online Community Management Metrics Benchmarks?
I have collected the most common metrics for hundreds of online communities, their descriptions and explanations of how you can calculate them if your community platform does not have them. The metrics benchmarks give you the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of your community programs. How? Easy! The first step is to choose the metric you are interested in and calculate its value for your community. Then you need to find the selected metric in the app and compare your value with the value of this metric in other online communities.
How are metrics benchmarks structured in the application?
My goal was to give you a 360 degree view of each metric. In most cases, I believe this requires three “projections”
Average Metric Value
This view displays the average metric value obtained from all available communities, as well as the lower and upper 90% interval values.
To understand the logic, imagine that we took a lot of communities and measured a chosen metric for each one of them. Then we sorted all the results values in ascending order and took three of them: (1) the average, (2) at 5% from the lowest value, and (3) at 5% below the highest value. This is what you can see in the top view in the app.
Metrics Distribution
The view displays a histogram of the metric values for all communities in our dataset.
Metrics Trend
The view displays how the metric value has been changing on average over the lifetime of the communities in the dataset.
In other words, we consistently calculate the selected metric for each community for a certain period (day, month, year) and then find the average value for all communities for a specific period of time of their existence (for example, the first month of life, the second month of life, etc.). Using the trend you can make an adjustment to the metric value based on the age of your community.
Filters are another way to adjustment the metric value
Different types of communities have different dynamics of growth. To help you evaluate your community initiatives more accurately, I have added filters. When you use filters, the metric value is calculated not on the entire dataset, but only on communities that meet the selected criteria. The two most important filters are the industry in which your community operates and the type of your community.
Online Community Metrics Benchmarks Are A Ruler For Measuring Your Performance
Online community metrics benchmarks are a ruler that allows you to measure your success in a particular community endeavor. All you need to do is get the metric value for your community and “apply the ruler” — see where the metric value for your community is relative to other public communities.
Briefly about the dataset
At the time of writing, the dataset on which I build the metrics includes over 200 public communities of varying sizes with more than 2 million active users on board who have created over 27 millions of posts over about 1800 years in total.
In the application, I calculate the value of more than two dozen different metrics. Please register to see the list.
Please note that at the time of writing, all communities analyzed are forums. As a result, the metrics may not be relevant for communities operating on chat platforms (e.g., Slack, Telegram, Discord, etc). In the near future, I plan to add data for communities operating on chat platforms as well.
I’d love to hear your feedback!
Please visit the app.practical-cm.com app and let me know what you think by replying to this post or mailing me. Would you like to see more metrics, more communities or data for some specific platforms (Vanilla Forums, Telegram, Whatsapp)? Maybe you are looking for some specific metrics? — Please let me know! I will be happy to improve the app so that you can get the most out of it!