Understanding and tracking community metrics are only half of the battle. They are necessary to understand how campaigns and initiatives are landing, and having an idea of your overall community health is priceless!
So why isn’t it enough? Frankly, most of your executive leadership team isn’t really interested in how many new members you have, or even how many members are engaging. They are interested in how the community is helping meet organizational goals.
This means you need to understand the goals of the organization and learn to speak the language of the various executive stakeholders.
I want to emphasize that this is such a critical part of community management that we will spend some time in the future talking about how to figure out what each executive leader cares about and share some templates that make it easier to tell the story of how community is more than just a ‘great place for our customers to chat’.
For now, let’s take a look at some of the top ways you can begin to align community information with those org goals.
Important Note: this part of metric storytelling is part causation, part correlation. It can be difficult to say that the community is the reason for retention, sales, etc. But by building relationships with other ‘keepers of the data’, you are going to be able to show that regardless of whether you can absolutely, positively say that community was the reason for all the good things, you can definitely show that it makes a difference!
If you have any questions or need a hand, just let us know!