Hey Everyone,
Advocacy is a crucial part of an evolved community strategy. About a month ago I was playing around with the custom dashboard builder on my demo site to think of some new ways it could be used. It got me thinking that there could be a lot of different ways to think about engagement and use that information to uncover who has the potential to be an advocate/ambassador / super user for your community.
It’s a common sentiment amongst advocate marketers and community professionals alike that the best advocates are intrinsically rather than strictly extrinsically motivated. Any evolved advocate marketing program will use a combination of both and having the right mix and touch will allow you to keep things fresh and ensure the program remains mutually beneficial. In this post, I wanted to discuss how you can leverage Vanilla’s analytics to build a custom dashboard of user-specific reports to better understand who your potentially most engaged users are.
We have discussed this several times before in webinars and eBooks if you are interested in learning more about the topic of advocate marketing.
Online communities are just one of several places where community professionals and advocate marketers can look to their customer base to identify potential brand advocates.
Gamification and point systems in an online community solution like Vanilla are based on reputation points. In Vanilla, users can earn reputation points for receiving positive reactions, earning badges (which could be for actions outside of Vanilla like completing a course in an LMS if you integrate via API or Zapier), answering questions or even having the idea they submitted voted on. All of these actions are the signs of an engaged user and can be tied to actions that are beneficial for your community.
- The member who gets reacted positively to posts some of the best content
- Members getting answers from a fellow member helps your support team and provides a unique insight to the fellow members
- Great ideas in your community help make great products
- Badges are tied to engagement activities and as mentioned could be tied to engagement activities outside the Vanilla platform.
Some of our customers have done a great job of this over the years. For example, Acer has their “ACE Team” program and they noted to us how they look for users ranking up in their community via the leaderboards and analytics to identify potential advocates. Similarly, Qualtrics does a great job of rewarding users for participating in their community and ranking up with their Ranks & Rewards program.
It got me thinking that there must be other ways through Vanilla’s analytics to help you and your team identify potential advocates. The way I’ve done this is through a custom dashboard with various user-specific reports to help identity who on average are your most engaged members in a variety of ways other than points. There certainly isn’t 100% correlation but generally, the more someone participates in the community the greater chance that person could be an advocate. From there it's really about the processes your team establishes for managing advocates. The eBooks and webinars previously shared do a great job of going into the different ways you can set up your program to suit your team’s goals.
Here is an example of the custom dashboard I made on my demo site:
The table charts in order 1 through 9 starting at the top left and moving to the right are as follows:
1.Visits by Users (how often are they visiting the community?)
To create this chart:
- Type: Table
- Preset: Traffic – Visits
- Group by: Username
- Order by: Result
2.Questions Solved by Users (who’s answering questions)
To create this chart:
- Type: Table
- Preset: Q&A – Questions Solved
- Group by: Username
- Order by: Result
3.Searches by users (How many searches in the community does the user perform?)
To create this chart:
- Type: Table
- Data source: Search
- Group by: Username
- Function: Count
- Order by: Result
4.Total posts by users (How often are they contributing in total?)
To create this chart:
- Type: Table
- Preset: Posting – Community Posts
- Group by: Username
- Order by: Result
5.Comments by users (The more comments the more engaged in discussion with other users they are)
To create this chart:
- Type: Table
- Preset: Posting – Comments
- Group by: Username
- Order by: Result
6.Members by Accumulated reputation or points (Still a good measure as it combines several factors in terms of engagement)
- To create this chart:
- Type: Advanced chart
- Chart: Members by Accumulated Reputation
7.Helpful votes by user (if using Vanilla KB, are they interacting with your articles?)
To create this chart:
- Type: Table
- Preset: KB – Helpful votes
- Group by: Username
- Order by: Result
8.Insights, or comments on ideas if using ideation (Are they discussing ideas in your ideation program?)
To create this chart:
- Type: Table
- Preset: Ideation – Idea Insights
- Group by: Username
- Order by: Result
9.Reactions by users (Are they reacting positively to other users and more passively participating but appreciating the content of others in your community?)
To create this chart:
Type: Table
- Data source: Reactions
- Group by: Reaction Type & Reacting User Name
- Function: Count
- Order by: Result
Generally, I used pre-sets to create these dashboards. Likewise, any type of user-specific report can give you ideas about different ways individuals are engaging in your community outside of total reputation points. I also want to add that this is certainly not the only way to identify advocates. However, these types of behaviours would show higher levels of engagement in your community and can give your team some ideas on who to approach in your community about taking on a potentially larger role.
If you have any other suggestions or ideas for charts we could include here please let me know in the comments below.
Now get cracking on those analytics!
