Can you explain the value of your community to senior leadership? Seventy-five percent of community managers say they can, but less than half have the data to back it up.
These stats come from Hivebrite’s new benchmark report, which found that 53.7% of community managers don’t compare metrics between members and non-members, and 19% don’t consistently track metrics at all.
That’s a problem.
When budgets tighten, community managers need to show why their work matters.
Everyone agrees community matters. That’s not the problem anymore.
Online communities have come a long way in the last ten years. Almost all the organizations we surveyed (89.1%) said they expect their community to become more important in the next 12-24 months.
To support the growth, organizations are investing more money and resources into their communities. We found that 36.1% plan to increase their community budgets with 42.4% keeping it at current levels.
All of that is great news for community managers. But there’s a sticking point. Investment and expectations are rising faster than the discipline to measure whether their efforts are working. When the importance—and budget—of your community increases, senior leadership will want to know the value it provides. They will want to know that it delivers on its promise. And according to our research, most programs can’t provide the data to say it does.
Why this is a survival skill, not a reporting task
The data points to a profession under pressure. Even as interest in private communities continues to grow, two challenges stand out: sustaining engagement (63.3%) and proving the value of the community (36.7%).
Taken together, these numbers could be interpreted as follows: the takeaway isn’t that community professionals are bad at proving value, it’s that they’re not focused on it yet. And that’s exactly the gap that shows up at budget time, when engagement stories stop being enough and leadership wants numbers.
Community managers don’t need a complex reporting system to make this shift. They need to connect the activity they already track to the outcomes their organization already cares about. That’s how community teams protect their work and budget over time.
Start with what you already track
The good news is that most community managers already measure some performance metrics. Among those who do, the most common metrics tracked are active users (75.5%), event attendance (55.1%), and participation rate (51%).
While those are a starting point, the above metrics describe community activity, not its impact. While they tell you what’s happening inside your community, they don’t describe what that activity is worth to the organization.
And that’s your opportunity to prove your community’s worth.
For example, let’s say your company offers a professional association in which some members join the online community, engage with content, attend events, connect with peers. Others pay their dues and activate their online community profile. Knowing that your community has 500 engaged members is useful. But what if you knew that those members renew their membership at twice the rate of members who do not engage with the community? That’s your business case.
We want to show the comparison that changes the conversation, and it’s the one that 53.7% of community teams currently skip.
So don’t let the idea of “building a measurement framework” become the reason nothing changes. You don’t need a new system, a new tool, or a new reporting structure to get started.
You just need one comparison.
Take your most-tracked metric — active users, event attendance, participation — and cut it by the number of community members versus the number of your customers who are not non-members. Look at renewal rates, product adoption, support ticket volume, revenue. Pick whichever matters most to your leadership team right now, and run the numbers.
That single data point, done once, will do more to justify your community’s existence than a year of vanity metrics.
It’s time to back that confidence up
As community building gains increasing traction, it marks a fundamental shift in how organizations think about their customers and audiences. The good news is that this trend shows a real staying power with an overwhelming majority of our survey respondents saying they expect community projects to become more important in the next year. Now’s the time to show the value of this investment to both your organization and members.
For more insights and recommendations on demonstrating your community’s value, check out The Community Growth & Benchmark Report 2026.
