Man, what a topic! Measuring the impact of your community on your business can sometimes be a tricky beast to tame. Each community is different, and each business may have a different purpose for measuring their community.  Before you can truly begin to measure the impact of your community, a few items need to be defined and agreed upon by your internal stakeholders.

Define Community Success

Defining what your definition of community success means is the first step in measuring your community impact. How you measure community impact largely depends on how you want to define what a “successful” community means for your business. For some, having a large community is important, while others may see a small but tight-knit community as the most valuable to their business. Some communities will come together around support and training topics, while others may center themselves around your philanthropic and local community projects. The definitions of success for these communities may vary greatly, so it’s important to have a solid definition of what you consider to be a successful community.

Combining Metrics

Chances are, there are metrics and KPIs in place across all departments of your business. Metrics like leads generated, sales closed, support calls answered, inquiries received, and number of website visitors within a set timeframe are all commonly-measured metrics, and ones that can be used to help measure your community impact. In our support and training case, support calls answered or tickets opened/closed may be two metrics that you can include to give a bigger picture of how your community is impacting your business. For our philanthropic community, inquiries received and website visitor metrics may be more appropriate to include in your measurement reports.

Benchmarking

Before you go wild and crazy with measuring community impact, define the metrics you’ll use and set benchmarks for each of those metrics.  Look at the metrics you’re going to tie in from your current measurement practices, and then look at the metrics that you’ll be introducing as new success metrics for your community.  Three big measurement areas are; cost savings, leads, conversions and sales, and awareness, attention and reach. We cover these in our March eBook in case you’d like to dig deeper.

Once you have your metrics defined, set your benchmarks and make sure everyone on your team is clear what they are. Start measuring your community impact from there.

Set SMART Goals

SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely goals are hands-down the best, yet often hardest, to set. For each metric you want to measure, look at your benchmark and come up with SMART goals which you will use to measure against as time progresses. Are you looking for a 5% increase in inquiries received that reference your community and philanthropic projects throughout the year? Perhaps you’re looking to reduce call center costs by enabling your customers to reach out online, or help each other by sharing learnings and solutions to commonly-occurring questions or problems. Whatever your goals are, make sure they have parameters and timelines.

Tying it all Together

So far you’ve created your definition of what a successful community looks like to your business, discovered which departments your community impacts, looked at how they currently measure success, lined up your measurement plan to tie in with those metrics, set a base level through benchmarking, and created SMART community goals.

Great, now what?

Put your measurement plan into action. Take time, whether it’s weekly or monthly, to sit aside and review both your metrics and goals, as well as the metrics your business already measures.

If your community ties in closely with your customer service department, look at how many cases opened/closed took place within the time period you’re measuring.  Did your community come to the rescue of a fellow member and help them solve something with minimal/no involvement from your customer support team? If so, look at what the value of a customer support rep is for an hour, or a day, and show how much money your community just helped you save.

If part of your successful community includes lead generation, look at how many leads generated are directly attributed to your community. Did a member recommend you to a colleague? Are there notes in your CRM indicating the source of a lead? Do you have these segmented and tracked in your monitoring solution? Did any leads that came from your community close this month? Leads generated and sales closed are wonderful numbers to show how your community is helping to grow your business.

When measuring your community impact it’s important to tie together your existing metrics and measurement practices with the ones you’re establishing that focus exclusively on your community. The goal is to get a big picture of how your community ties in with your business and helps you achieve your goals, NOT to show how great your community is in a silo.

There are many ways of measuring community impact, and this blog post doesn’t cover them all! Share your stories in the comments.