Finding Quantitative Value in Community

One of the essential annual activities of running any kind of user group is to check in with your members on what is working, what is not working, and what changes need to take place. Basic metrics have limited usefulness. You can track attendance, of course, and maybe you’ll dig a little bit deeper by segmenting feedback based on topic, speaker, or event type (session, networking, lunch versus dinner, etc), but even then, the metrics may not tell you what was “successful” as the results couple be very subjective. A popular topic or speaker might bring in more people, but a speaker presenting bleeding-edge technology might be exactly what a smaller subset of your members wants to see and hear. Fewer people reported in your metrics, but those who attended might have shown greater enthusiasm than the larger crowd.

While the creation of communities around specific technologies or industries is nothing new, we live in an era of rapidly expanding collaboration and networking solutions, which opens up new possibilities for the development of community. In fact, social has become the primary method through which we connect, utilizing many disparate systems, tools, and processes.

During the pandemic, I was able to present at or join in as an attendee to community events based in Singapore, South Africa, Germany, UK, Australia, Canada and across the United States. I don’t think I’m overstating things when I say that the role of social and collaboration technology has become essential to community. They have expanded our ability to create and connect to various community whenever and wherever they are held in the world.

When I started attending and then organizing user groups and community events in the late 1990's, I spent many (my wife would say too many) weeknights and weekends at face-to-face networking sessions in the San Francisco Bay Area to help my startup connect with investors and prospective employees alike. Now, from the comfort of my basement office, I can "plug in" to various online communities and connect with people anywhere in the world.

As quickly as communities come to life — whether online or offline — the rules on how to make community successful remain largely unchanged:

• Community requires leadership.
• They need people with passion to keep things moving forward.
• They also need to allow organic growth to happen.

On that last point -- while there should be guidelines for operation of your community (a simple charter that outlines your purpose and guiding principles) the most successful communities are grown and managed organically. The community itself manages the community, with members sharing the responsibilities of organizing and running things.

How do you measure community?

But how do we measure the value of the communities we create? And specifically, how should organizations measure the value of community -- both the communities they help create and manage, as well as those their employees participate in?

Just as I pointed out at the start of this post, the default attendance metrics will likely not tell you what you want to know about the success of your community efforts, certainly not your purely virtual communities. There are many directions you can go in capturing metrics – the question is: what is right for your company and your community?

There is no shortage of tools and platforms available to track and measure the performance of communities – the hard part is translating that data into value. My approach is a somewhat different, requiring a solid understanding of your overall community strategy, breaking the value of community into three core areas:

Personal Value.

This may seem out of place, but one of your first “measurements” should be to confirm whether or not you’re receiving any personal value out of your community efforts. If you are not – and many people just don’t feel comfortable with the community model, which is fine – your lack of connection could be skewing the results (or your perception of the results) of other value or success measurements. Ask yourself whether you are learning anything. Does it inspire you? Do you enjoy the relationships you have with other members? Just remember that not every interaction will bring an immediate benefit back to you personally, but your participation may benefit others. Value provided is equally important as value received within a community construct.

Business Value.

Here’s the gist of what most organizations who are trying to understand about the value of their employees participating in community efforts: How many connections were made, how many business transactions were completed, and how many partnerships identified? In other words, what is the value to the business? Business value tends to be tied to number of leads, number of opportunities, number of contacts made, number of proposals sent. Of the three core areas, this is the most quantitative measurement, and likely also has the clearest connection to your overall strategy.

Community Value.

I know this sounds redundant, but it's not. Just as it's important to understand your personal value, this one is about understanding and measuring the value to members within a community (the little ‘c’ community aspect of the big ‘C’ Community). What are other people learning, how are their businesses benefitting, what kind of financial value are they realizing by participating?

Be supportive, not controlling

Organizations tend to push for quantitative measurement of community. It's understandable, because managers look at the the world through the lens of business value. But one thing we've learned through this pandemic is that there is also long-term business value in supporting the much-more-difficult-to-measure qualitative benefits of community. As more and more organizations start to focus on the employee experience and try to measure and understand the health and well-being of their employees, the more our metrics will evolve and change.

Some companies are better than others at tracking their community activities, such as through their CRM platforms where every customer interaction is tracked as a separate activity, or by tracking activity on every box, button, and text box on a community site to better understand where people are spending their time, and how they are interacting with others. But we need to expand these data points and also include community efforts.

Organizations need to improve their ability to mine this data, looking for trends, better interpreting and taking action on both customer AND employee feedback. Organizations need to be able to quantify the value of their activities, but not forget that community is by and large a qualitative activity — a way of reaching out across customers, partners, and employees to improve relationships, and to build trust.

If you approach your community measurements with a firm understanding of your personal, business, and community strategies, you’re more likely to see the value.