It’s tough to keep up with all of the tools and tricks for retaining and engaging your members. How do you measure online member engagement? And how does it correlate to increased revenue and greater satisfaction?
Success for your online community will never be one-size-fits-all, but rather a collection of ideas, performance metrics, suggestions from members and KPIs that align with your organization’s goals. Tracking your own performance allows you to measure how well (or not) you're doing in a specific area. Especially with associations, there are vast differences for trade vs. professional associations when it comes to online community—so a professional association looking to a trade association in terms of benchmarks for member-to-member interactions most likely wouldn't be a good comparison.
For a deeper dive into tracking your community engagement as compared with other organizations, be sure to check out my upcoming 2014 Community Benchmarking Report in collaboration with Marketing General Inc. In the meantime, here are a few tips to keep in mind when it comes to achieving your member engagement goals:
Industry awareness & SEO
Organizations that want to grow awareness for a mission or industry might focus on the number of publicly indexed pages in Google or other search engines, as well as the amount of new traffic to the site. The Society of Healthcare Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) is a good example of this. They have opened up much of their member-to-member conversations, so they are indexed by the search engines and subsequently can be found by prospects. They currently have about 30,000 pages of mostly user-generated content, which is crawled/indexed regularly by the search engines and generates a lot of traffic from the long end of the SEO tail.
Social mentoring
The Financial Planning Association launched a social mentoring platform. To them, success was all about the number of mentors and mentees who signed up and then ultimately the number of connections established.
Volunteer management (traditional and micro-volunteerism)
About 92 percent of association members reported volunteering with their association or another organization, according to ASAE’s Decision to Volunteer, which published the results of a survey of more than 26,000 association professionals. So it’s no surprise that volunteers are an essential resource for any organization, especially associations. Empower your members to get involved by making volunteer opportunities easy to access and in a format they find useful.
When the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) launched its volunteer management system, its goal was to facilitate micro and traditional volunteerism. In this case, success can easily be measured by the total number of members which have signed up to be notified of volunteer opportunities and the total number who subsequently signed up for an opportunity.
Member directory
If an organization’s objective is to improve member-to-member collaboration, then perhaps success is measured by the number of connections established in the member directory or the number of one-to-one messages posted. A “Find an Expert” directory can be created, with everyone who has a specific certification included in it. Or perhaps a “Speaker Bureau” or “Buyer’s Guide”—whatever the directory, there are many opportunities to measure success and track value.
Discussion groups
The most common measurement of success is usually focused around discussion groups. It’s interesting how success in this area can be measured in different ways. For example, you might look at the ratio of members who have contributed at least one message each month or the number of unique contributors, combined with the number of messages posted. This might be tied in with the number of unique threads. I’ve looked at an incredible amount of data surrounding discussions and it can be quite overwhelming at first. But when you start to dig into it, you realize that it can be quite simple if you focus on the low hanging, high-level fruit. For example, each month you can track the following engagement metrics:
- Total number of messages posted
- Total number of threads
- Total number of unique contributors
- Total number of first time contributors
Aligning member & staff definitions of success
When you set your success goals, be sure they align with the interests and needs of members. For example, you may have met your goal of having 300 messages posted within three months of the initial launch. From a staff perspective, 300 messages posted would be a success. However, if the messages are split among 50 discussion groups and only 10 percent of your members have subscribed to at least one discussion group, then the members' perspective of success might be very different. If they were among the few who subscribed to a discussion group, they may have only seen five or 10 messages posted over a one month period to that specific discussion group. From their perspective the engagement level along with the member value is weak at best.
Remain Nimble, Learn From Mistakes
It’s important to remember that every organization is different, so you can't just create a set of success metrics and simply declare the community a success or not within one time snapshot. Community takes time to build and success is not likely to be immediately apparent. It’s also not a perfect science, and people are not puppets you can simply dictate specific actions you'd like taken and they immediately follow suit. It's highly likely that you’ll make some mistakes with your community on your path to success. Mistakes are good—as long as you learn from them and then adapt.