Five KPIs you need to start tracking for your Community in 2021
By: Sangeeta Gupta
Tags: Community Management, Metrics, Growth, Community, Community Engagement

Five KPIs you need to start tracking for your Community in 2021 Sangeeta Gupta Follow Sep 3 · 4 min read

Community KPIs are key performance indicators that help you monitor and narrate your community’s progress and contribution towards larger organizational outcomes. Each community KPI is a clearly defined, quantifiable goal of your work that is tied to a measurable metric and can be easily communicated back to relevant team members or leaders in your organisation.

FOUR REASONS WHY YOUR COMMUNITY NEEDS KPIs

Improved trust on community value

Since the benefits of a community for any brand are usually indirect, KPIs come handy in quantifying some of these values to the leadership team. This also makes it easier for a community team to justify and seek support for additional resources.

Improved accountability

When the purpose and goals of your community are well documented, it is easier to delegate responsibility and accountability to members of your community team.

Improved decision making

KPIs contribute in making data driven decisions that in turn helps you identify, track and achieve your community goals faster.

Measure community program value

KPIs provide a means for you to attach goals to your community programs and understand whether they succeeded or not.

FIVE KPIs THAT YOU SHOULD START TRACKING FOR YOUR COMMUNITY

Active members rate

Active members rate is used for tracking the count of unique members who engage in your community on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. Infact, according to State of Indian Community Management Report, this is the most popular metric among both brand and independent community builders.

New member acquisition

Tracking newly acquired members over a week / month helps you analyze membership growth of your community. This KPI could also be attached to any of your public community initiatives and will tell you what % of those contributed in transforming from your potential audience to community members.

Content volume

Tracking the total content volume generated helps you track the member interactions and content growth of your online community, Additionally, analyzing the % of member generated content will help you measure community stickiness.

Count of product ideas /feedback submissions

Tracking this metric over a monthly / annual period tells you how involved members are in the growth of your brand product and how in turn a community contributes to product innovation. On that note, I remember, in the last quarter at LikeMinds, over 70% bugs and 100% feature requests were reported from our community members which was a moment of celebration for the Community Team.

No. of community impact / success stories generated

At the end of the day, every community focuses on member growth. This metric helps you track the count of real people lives you touched through your community.

Create a collection of every text, audio, video clip that showcases — your community helped someone grow from point A to point B, your community was the source of support when someone was going through a difficult time etc. While you should definitely use these stories to project the outside world of the amazing things that happen in your community, this collection can also serve as your source of motivation during the difficult days.