How to Measure the Impact of Community

“What used to be product-led growth is now becoming community-led growth.” But measuring the impact of community befuddles many companies, getting in the way of how they can maximize the impact of this incredible asset. 

‍

The Community Roundtable’s 2020 State of Community Management reports an interesting online community statistic: there’s a broad range of strategic maturity across communities. Among companies surveyed: 

• 22% have no documented strategy
• 24% have a draft strategy
• 14% have an approved strategy
• 17% have an approved, operational strategy
• 22% have an advanced strategy

‍

Community Management Explained 

Community management is a growing necessity as it relates to internet communities. “Community management, at its core, is about relationships and how a brand seizes opportunities to interact with its community in public online spaces.” This has shifted in a big way to the online community. 

Community management also gets confused with social media management. The two are interrelated, but the breadth of community management’s function is much wider. A good way to look at it is the SPACES Model to understand the full spectrum of community management. Each aspect of the model demonstrates how a community can contribute to a company’s overall success. 

• SUPPORT - members answer questions and solve problems for each other to reduce overall customer support costs and improve satisfaction.
• PRODUCT - the collective insight of a community provides ideas for innovative features, identifies important changes that will improve products, impacts design and development, and provides ongoing use information. 
• ADVOCACY - a community can become important brand advocates to promote products or service experiences, giving a powerful, authentic boost to marketing and sales. 
• CONTRIBUTION - users contribute authentic content that can add value to existing or new products and service experiences. 
• ENGAGEMENT - communities give people a common sense of identity and belonging. Brands that are able to facilitate that sense of identity will foster a stronger connection between users and their brand. 
• SUCCESS - these active communities connect customers with each other to share best practices, providing ways to upskill using products and developing strategy; brands can even identify potential instructors or specialists in these communities. 

‍‍

Harness the Power of Community

The problem companies face is understanding what actually happens within their community and how they can tap into these valuable resources. Research suggests that 86% of businesses believe community has value — but at least 45% are struggling to discover that value and put it to work. 

This is where AhoyConnect becomes an invaluable resource. This new, unique platform mines data from popular online community tools, such as Slack, Discord, Twitter, GitHub (a total of nine now and more all the time), and combines it with a company’s own internal data sources into one central dashboard. 

More than simply viewing community activity, businesses can dig deeper into the actual behavior of community members with powerful analytics. Connect the dots with that behavior to inform new marketing strategies and impact sales. AhoyConnect can unlock the full potential of a company’s community while keeping data secure and automating many tasks to make community engagement and analysis easier. Here are some suggested uses: 

1. Collate and view community data from across different platforms
2. Identify members of the community that are not engaged
3. Identify community touchpoints a member has made prior to conversion
4. Learn the percentage of new customers (conversions) made by existing community members
5. Learn the percentage of community-related conversions that happen after a particular event (e.g. joining a webinar/event)
6. Discover the most common community actions of converted members before the conversion event
7. Discover what community tool or set of tools users are engaging with 
8. Identify new potential brand ambassadors
9. Identify the most active community members
10. Perform valuable sentiment analysis

Centralizing data from a number of different platforms to create a single member view is the key to bringing community-led growth to another level. The ability to measure a range of important statistics across platforms will focus community into a vital role for any company. Effectiveness can be proven, ambassadors and promoters identified, and decisions can be made to improve products or services. AhoyConnect is one of the few solutions that can bring together the data in a way that is easily consumed to facilitate decision making. 

Measure the Impact of Community 

AhoyConnect will become a company’s valued data advisor, enabling community managers to identify the key platforms that drive new customers, identify sales prospects and product champions with the most influence, and automate repetitive community management tasks. 

Community-led growth is the wave of the future that is happening right now, and AhoyConnect provides a streamlined solution that harvests and organizes community data from a host of sources. This enables valuable decision making that will keep modern companies on the leading edge of their industry.