The One Thing All Amazing Community Managers Do

Tue Jul 16 00:07:00 UTC 2019

Failure can be a nagging fear in the back of your mind for all new community initiatives. It’s not just you and it’s not just paranoia: over 30% of communities reported failure due to lack of internal support.

Just by knowing this, you are on on your way to becoming an amazing community manager for your organization. 

You’ve put your blood, sweat, tears, and budget into your current community. Don’t let that effort go to waste. You can increase your internal support through having a tactical measurement strategy.

Measure, Measure, Measure

What about all those communities that are succeeding today? What do they have or do that the others didn’t?

Maybe they have outrageously engaged members. Maybe they work for a company that totally “gets it”. Maybe they were blessed by a magical unicorn!

In reality, it’s this: they created a strategy to measure how their community was performing. Funny things start happening when you begin gathering data on something: 93% of community managers reported more internal support from other departments upon measuring. 90% reported increased leadership support too!

  

Data can be more magical than the unicorn’s blessing and if presented correctly, it can bring an entire organization together around a common goal.

Okay That’s Great, But Measure What?

32% of community leaders are unsure that they are measuring the “right” things. 

“At the end of the day, what you think is important is nowhere near as important as what executives want to see,” says Rob Shapiro, Community Strategist and Former Sr. Director of My Oracle Support Community.

We found a correlation between confidence in metrics and revenue. The community managers that are able to be confident happen to be in successful companies. Companies that pull in more than $10b in revenue average a whole point higher than those in the $250-500k bucket.

Confident community leaders with solid metrics positively affect their companies, not just with regard to revenue. How do we get you there? One way to begin being confident is to determine which metrics are the “right” ones for your business. Check out the framework here to see what business value your community provides, and then map all your metrics to these business values. 

In the full research study, you’ll also see some examples of metrics that are traditionally used for certain values. For example, if your community’s business value is customer support, a metric you might want to measure is percent of answered questions.

Need More Proof? Check This Out

42% of community managers agreed that it is extremely important to have the ability to quickly run reports that show community value. 

In order to be successful, you need to measure your community, with the right metrics, quickly. Make sure that the technology you are using supports your new measuring strategy.  

Forumbee does this in their own platform by giving you a dedicated analytics section.

Here are three categories of data that you’re able to look at via Forumbee’s analytics:

  1. Activity metrics, where you can measure community growth and engagement. Things like new members, active members, new posts.
  2. Response metrics, where you’re able to measure content value through views and votes.
  3. You’ll also be able to measure support success through new questions and resolved questions. For support communities, this is the number one most important metric among our respondents. 

One bonus that is extremely helpful - Forumbee allows you to capture community activity data and send to hundreds of tools for analytics, marketing, and data warehousing. Make that data work for you!

If you are able to access your analytics quickly to prove value, you have the competitive edge.

Measure For Your Community’s Success

According to Forrester, 74% of businesses say they want to be “data-driven” but only 29% say they are good at connecting analytics to action. That means that 71% of companies are NOT good at connecting analytics to action. 

Help your company to be the exception - build a measurement strategy for your community to connect where your executives want to be with where you are and where you can go. Utilize tools like Forumbee to quickly pull reports and be able to showcase your work.

Begin your measurement strategy journey to becoming an amazing community manager by reading the research paper “The 2017 Community Value and Metrics Report”.

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