For community managers, having excellent metrics is one of the best ways to show your progress and help justify your efforts to management when talking about budgets and staffing for the community. It provides an early warning system and diagnostics for potential community issues, which gives you time to make corrections before things get too bad.

Here are a few tips for having great metrics:

• Measure many details to help you diagnose issues, but focus on a smaller subset that are used to determine success / failure.
• The smaller subset should map to your goals and strategies for your community as a whole to show that you are meeting your objectives.
• Share your metrics with your community. I have a public report with the data and a second internal report with more detailed analysis and suggestions for where the team can improve.
• Measure across a few categories. I use awareness, membership and participation / engagement.

Additional Reading

• Online Community Metrics Overview
• My Public Metrics and Process for MeeGo
• ForumOne Research on Online Community Metrics

Note: I hope to make this into a series of short posts (approximately weekly) to share quick tips for community managers.

Image by Flickr user Kevinzhengli used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.