Most community initiatives are somehow related to building, growing or maintaining the community.
Community growth metrics
Essential part of growing a community is acquiring new users. It means one needs to run initiatives that make people join the community and then onboard those who did. Example of metrics that help us measure that:
- Number of signups
- Number of users who start acting for the first time
Community building metrics
Community building initiatives are directed to existing users. Their goal is to make the existing users become more active. Most of such initiatives happen at the special place that is dedicated for that. It might be a chat for core users, a dedicated site for meta discussions, etc. Typical measurements for community building initiatives are:
- Number of meta discussions initiated by staff
- Number of meta discussions initiated by the users
- Number of users participated per discussion
- Number of new unique users participated for the first time per discussion
- Number of replies per discussion (non-employee only)
Helping users and guiding them by answering their questions play a special role in community building. You might want to have a special metric for that:
- Number of employees’ replies to users’ questions.
A lot of community building initiatives are intended to connect users to each other. A connection is created when one acts towards the other person and they both are aware of the action and its author:
- Number of unique connections between users per discussion.
Community maintenance metrics
This kind of metrics that quantify how community managers support users and moderators and how moderators together with community managers support the users. Also, if you have some internal people who you provide the support, you might want to measure it here as well.
- Number of tickets received and solved
- Time to resolve a ticket
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.