How to benchmark new communities.

Community Benchmarking

Forrester research have created a Community Benchmarking Diagnostic tool. It was launched in a paper called the “Community Benchmarking Metrics – What To Expect For The Health Of Your Community” by Melissa Parrish who is one of my favorite Forrester analysts, and an expert on how to start up and run social communities.

Community managers just might love this!

I like this tool, especially useful for community managers to find out how they are managing their communities, especially when they are starting up. I would have found this particularly useful for me last year when I had to lead the management of a new community for my employer.

I strongly believe that communities grow through phases. The model for community maturity that I always use is from Telligent, and is called the “Telligent maturity model for communities and groups”. I knew we had reached the second stage when we started to get spammed on the weekends! This is just one of many signs that I believe signal when a community has become “Established”.

The community benchmarking diagnostic tool

The community benchmarking diagnostic tool first asks you to calculate the average number of community members that you can expect to join. Then the diagnostic tool can be used to see if you could expect below average, average, or above average results for the health of your community. It asks several questions, to which the response is yes or no, and here are just some of those questions:

Do you have a definition for “active” member, and measuring against that definition?
Do you have a promotional budget?
Are you using social media and email to promote the community?
Do you have a persistent link to the community in the main navigation of the website?
Do you have at least 1 full-time resource dedicated to maintaining and managing the community?
Do you have a set membership goals and are you measuring them?

Based on the results, it tells you if you are likely to fall short, meet, or outperform one or more of the average community health measures.

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Clive Roach

Social media marketing expert with +15 years’ experience. Creates and deploys strategy, social listening, tactical planning, analytics, campaign calendar management, all while achieving revenue opportunities and cost savings.

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