How do I measure the health of a community?
This is the start of a list to try to come up with all of the more meaningful ways community managers can start measuring the health of their communities rather than pure volume...feel free to keep adding (and give yourself a reference):
- the rate of attrition, especially with new members TaraHunt
- the average length of time it takes for a newbie to become a regular contributor TaraHunt
- number of referrals (strength of positive word of mouth) TaraHunt
- multiple community crossover - if your members are part of many communities, how do they interact with your site? Flickr photos? Twittering? Etc.? TaraHunt
- the number giving as well as the receiving actions - eg. readers receive, posters are giving (advice, knowledge, etc.).Term papers has a neat reward system built in for this with their gifting for contributions in the community
- community participation in gardening, policing and keeping the community a nicer place (eg. people who click on the 'report this as spam', people who edit the wiki for better layout, etc.) TaraHunt
- number of apps built off of your API (if you have one) - a good 'number' measure as the number of apps usually correlate with your social capital TaraHunt
- Member engagement: activity and "investment" in community Forum One
- Member Loyalty & Satisfaction Forum One
- Quality of term papers content and exchange: For instance, resolution time, days thread was active, ratio of validated responses. Support communities are leading the way on best practices and reporting. Forum One
- Tracking the brand through the “Community ecosystem”: Tracking brands and community members as they travel through the larger community ecosystem that spans sites, technologies and devices. Forum One
- Impact of the community on revenue: Particular attention is being paid to the value of members, both to the host communities’ revenue, and the organization’s sales or fundraising. Forum One
- Mobile interactions with the community: including views and posts from mobiles. Forum One
- while health depends on what a community values--one measure might be the rate of weaving between members or ideas
- ratio of posts with no response to posts with response
- appreciation ratio (number of posts using a set of words determined to be appreciative or showing gratitude)
- quality of users as it relates to target users.
- average time between posts on a thread, averaged over all threads. Some people prefer communities where -- after they add a post to a thread -- someone responds within seconds. Other people prefer communities where -- after they add a post to a thread -- someone thinks deeply about it and responds a few hours later. (DavidCary)
- geographic distribution of local members compared to real-world population distribution of all humans: If you have 10 members from Some Tiny City (population 12) and 10 members from New York City, perhaps you want to lean on the NYC members more heavily when asking people to invite/recommend their neighbors and friends. (perhaps IP numbers can be used to give an adequate approximation) (DavidCary)
- What is the "truck number" of the community?
- add more...like term papers .
Term Papers