How to fully leverage community analytics

The basics of community analytics

Community analytics provide the insights that drive your community’s health, performance, and long-term success. These analytics can be drawn from a wide range of data points, offering both quantitative insights—such as membership growth or activity rates—and qualitative insights, like testimonials or member success stories. And, as you’ll soon see, community analytics isn’t about tracking everything—it’s about tracking the right metrics for your community.

Let’s look at the five key steps to effectively leveraging your community analytics using the fictional Eco Innovators Network (EIN) as an example:

1. Define what success looks like for your community. What are your goals? Why did you start the community, and what purpose does it serve? Consider why people would want to join and what actions you want them to take once they do.

For example, the EIN aims to foster innovation in sustainable living by connecting eco-conscious individuals to share ideas and projects. Their success will be measured by webinar participation, projects shared, and collaboration amongst members on sustainability initiatives.

2. Identify the KPIs and metrics that align with your goals. Determine which KPIs and specific metrics will help you measure whether or not you’re meeting your goals.

EIN will measure their goals via:

1. Membership growth
2. Engagement rate
3. Number of projects initiated
4. Frequency of posts or resources shared by members
5. Sustainability impact

3. Create a plan for tracking your metrics. Establish a system for collecting and organizing your CRM analytics so that they’re easy to access and review. For example, Hivebrite’s community analytics tools track growth and engagement in one easy-to-access place.

While many of EIN’s metrics will be available through their community’s dashboard, others—like measuring sustainability impact—will need to be tracked separately via surveys or feedback forms. To stay organized and consistent, they’ll need a clear system for collecting all their KPIs efficiently in a centralized hub.

4. Review and analyze your metrics regularly. Schedule time to evaluate your community’s performance and look for trends, wins, and areas of improvement. Monthly will be most effective, but you can try quarterly if it’s too daunting. The trick is consistency!

For example, the Community Manager for the Eco Innovators Network may collaborate closely with the organization’s marketing team. Together, they could streamline the analytics review process by creating a monthly report that summarizes key KPIs and tracks progress toward goals.

5. Develop strategies or make adjustments based on your analytics. Use the insights from your analysis to refine your approach, develop new initiatives, or pivot as needed to keep your community healthy and engaged.

As the EIN team reviews their monthly reports, they will already have a good sense of what’s working (and what’s not). This provides the opportunity to assess their communications efforts, conversation prompts, and even effectiveness of event types—webinars vs. virtual workshops, for example.

The key is to think critically about your team’s efforts and desired outcomes, using your metrics as a guide!

How to leverage your community analytics

Unlike public social media platforms, private community platforms allow you to create deeper, more meaningful engagement using detailed analytics. There’s no shortage of metrics you could track, but trying to monitor all of them would be overwhelming at best—and a distraction at worst. Instead of wasting time on data that doesn’t drive results, let’s focus on the metrics that align with your community’s goals.

Key metrics for online communities

Take a moment to think about what you want your community to achieve. Your goals are going to be unique to you—maybe it’s about helping members build new business connections, stay in touch with former colleagues, or even converting members into customers or donors. Whatever your goals are, make sure they’re specific. The clearer you are about what success looks like, the easier it’ll be to define which KPIs to track. Learn more about establishing goals for your community here.

The next step is to choose the most relevant KPIs and metrics to measure your progress. Here are some of the most common quantitative metrics available to community managers:

1. Membership growth

• Monthly membership growth: the number of new sign-ups each month.
• New member retention rate: the percentage of new members who log in a second time.
• Membership churn rate: the percentage of deactivated accounts each month.

2. Membership engagement and participation

FYI: Engagement and participation are different! Engagement metrics track the specific actions taken by community members (such as likes or comments), while participation measures the proportion of members actively contributing to the community within a given period of time.

• Participation rate: the percentage of total members who are active.
• Number of interactions: the total number of actions performed by members.
• Profile update made: the percentage of members who have updated their profiles to gauge ongoing interest in the community. 
• Content creation trends: the number of Live Feed posts created each month to understand member adoption of and comfort using the community.
• Content reaction trends: the number of likes or comments on posts by members to evaluate how relevant the content is.
• Event attendance: the percentage of community members who have registered for or attended events.

3. Community-specific metrics

In addition to tracking general member and engagement data, it can also be valuable to gather more specific profile information about your community members. For example, if your community focuses on business support, you may want to know which industries your members work in to create events tailored to their interests.

In Hivebrite, some questions are built into the platform, but you also have the option to create custom profile questions to capture details that are specific to your community’s needs.

Here’s are some common profile metrics to track:

• Top member locations: Identify where your community is most popular. This insight can help you tailor recruitment and engagement strategies for specific regions.
• Top industries: Understand what fields your members work in to create more relevant content and resources tailored to their needs.
• Member skills: Track the members’ skill sets to develop events or networking opportunities that connect people with shared expertise.

4. Qualitative community metrics 

Let’s face it—collecting and analyzing qualitative metrics can be tricky. But insights like member success stories, testimonials, and overall community sentiment can give you a more complete picture of your community’s health. You can gather this information via surveys, interviews, or feedback forms. Here are some common, qualitative metrics to start tracking right away:

• Member satisfaction rate: Measures the percentage of members who would recommend the community to others, providing an indicator of overall satisfaction.
• Member sentiment analysis: Evaluates the tone of member engagement when discussing the community. This may be performed via a manual review of Live Feed posts or feedback surveys.  
• Community impact: Tracks the percentage of members who have achieved success or reached a goal as a result of participating in your community.
• Member success stories: Gather short anecdotes about how the community helped members reach their goals. These stories are great for showcasing the human element of your community in reports and presentations. 

For an even deeper look at community metrics, check out our guide here.

Putting community analytics to work

Now that you’ve developed comprehensive CRM analytics for your community, what’s next? It’s time to put those analytics to work! Use your data to identify growth opportunities, such as targeting high-potential member segments or improving your onboarding process to boost recruitment. Your insights can also inform engagement strategies, like creating content that aligns with member interests or organizing events that encourage meaningful connections. Remember, regularly reviewing your analytics will help you spot trends and address potential issues before they affect community health.

Hivebrite provides integrations with a wide range of customer relationship management and association management systems like HubSpot and Fonteva. This empowers you to synchronize data for seamless data flows between your community and other systems. Additionally, our API allows for customized integrations if you wish to develop analytics dashboards in other third-party apps.  

To learn more about community analytics, see how Hivebrite leverages data to empower community managers. Our intelligent analytics tools measure content performance, visualize key metrics with multi-dimensional dashboards, and track engagement trends over time—giving you the insights you need to build a thriving, data-driven community.