TL:DR – If you want to make better decisions, create a better strategy, and track progress, benchmark your community against a comparable group of other communities.
Why Your Community Won’t Be Like Salesforce Trailblazer
When we ask clients about their goals, we sometimes get responses like:
“We want our community to be like Salesforce Trailblazer!”
Now, sure, if you have a vast and rapidly growing customer base, can hire a dozen-strong team, and prioritise the community with more resources than almost any other community team for over a decade – then go for it.
However, the inevitable reality is that many organisations’ dreams for their community extend significantly beyond their budget and capabilities.
If you want to set better goals, know how you’re doing, and make better decisions, you must create a more comparable set of communities to work from.
In short, you need to benchmark your community.
Benchmarks Give You Better Data
When you undertake competitive benchmarking, you get a rich data set that can finally answer many of the key questions you can’t answer today.
It’s common to see questions in community channels like:
- How many active members should we have?
- What percentage of our members should be active?
- How much activity should we have?
The problem with these questions is that they presume a correct industry-wide answer.
It’s a bit like a tech company asking how many customers they should have.
….umm, well, it depends.
The reality is that the answers vary significantly depending on a range of factors.
For example:
- The size of your audience. The bigger your audience or customer base, the more active members you should have. Comparing an organisation with a smaller audience to a big audience will give you the wrong answers.
- Type of community you’re building. Support communities are transactional. Members are less likely to stick around after they’ve gotten the answer. This means the participation ratio will be lower.
- Age of the community. The older the community, the lower ratio of active to registered members (unless you prune old members). This happens because people don’t delete old accounts and drift from the topic over time. It also includes people forgetting their passwords, losing access to their email, and creating new accounts.
Without considering these factors, the answers you get are unlikely to apply to you.
This is why we need to benchmark communities against comparable communities to get real, meaningful data.
The Benefits of Community Benchmarking
There are plenty of benefits of benchmarking a community, but seven are the most prevalent.
- Make community a competitive advantage. A community should be a competitive advantage – but if your competitors are ahead of you, that’s not the case. By benchmarking your community, you can see your community’s strengths and weaknesses and adapt accordingly.
- Identify best practices. Comparing against others can reveal emerging trends and new opportunities to innovate. By building the correct comparison set and tracking changes over time, you can quickly identify emerging best practices and adapt to them.
- Improve community performance. Identify where your community can improve efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. If you notice you’re behind in some areas, there is a clear scope for improvement. You can figure out what you’re doing wrong and make changes.
- Make better decisions. Knowing how you compare against your closest competitors (or comparable communities) lets you decide what to focus on to achieve the best results quickly. You can usually identify the lowest-hanging fruit.
- Hold yourself and your team accountable. By comparing yourself to the right communities, you can set measurable benchmarks and hold yourself accountable for achieving them. You have a defensible set of targets to aim for.
- Identify and overcome potential risks. By identifying performance gaps, you can identify potential issues early and overcome them. Often, things you might not notice are glaringly obvious weaknesses compared to other organisations.
- Increase internal resources. We’ve found a sense of competition to be curiously powerful in increasing internal support and resources (especially if competitive communities are better resourced).
I can’t stress enough just how valuable this data is. It’s helpful in almost every internal presentation in all the decisions you need to make.
Compare Your Community Against Competitors Using This Criteria
Over the past few years, FeverBee has benchmarked a large number of communities by a criterion which often includes:
- [Community] Size
- Age/Maturity
- Type
- Sector
- Sub-sector
- Platform
- Company Size/customer base (where feasible)
- etc….
When we have a new client, we can quickly identify similar communities to their own, they should compare themselves against and:
- If they’re launching a community, help them set realistic goals, timeframes, and roadmaps based on evidence of other communities’ performance. This helps build our objectives for the short, medium, and long term.
- If they have an existing community, help them evaluate their performance, identify strengths and weaknesses, set priorities, and provide any insights hidden in the success/struggles of similar organisations/communities.
Some organisations hire us annually to evaluate their performance against their competitors over time. This provides terrific data that clearly shows the specific impact of the community team’s performance.
(You can build out this set on your own if you have communities you want to compare against, but if you wish to help – drop us a line.)
Aside – this is also a fantastic tool for measuring the long-term impact of things like:
- Migration between community platforms.
- Increasing or decreasing the size of the community team.
- Prioritising or deprioritising attention given to the community.
Everything becomes easier once you see how your community compares to competitors. You can begin identifying where and how to invest your limited time and resources for the most significant impact.
It’s not hard to look at data like this and identify where each community can concentrate its efforts to drive meaningful improvement.
We might also combine this with our subjective analysis
This is where we might review things against our community standards and bring our own expertise to bear.
We might rank things like:
- The quality of events, content, and discussions?
- Aesthetics and design of the community?
- Strategy and positioning of the community etc…
- Is the community a fun, positive, and friendly place?
- Does it offer a good mobile experience?
- Is it well integrated with the company website and/or products?
These are the kinds of questions which have a rating scale rather than a fixed metric. But, again, provide a comparative set of data where you can identify exactly where you need to improve.
In short, benchmarking your community is worth doing to track progress over time.
p.s. If you want us to help benchmark your community against our database, contact us.
Summary
- Benchmark Your Community – Identify comparable communities based on size, type, sector, and maturity to set realistic goals and track performance.
- Use Data to Improve Performance – Collect and analyze metrics to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for growth.
- Compare Against Competitors – Evaluate how your community stacks up against others to spot trends, best practices, and areas for improvement.
- Make Data-Driven Decisions – Use benchmarking insights to prioritize investments, resource allocation, and strategic initiatives.
- Hold Your Team Accountable – Set measurable benchmarks to track progress and demonstrate the community’s impact internally.
- Identify Risks Early – Spot gaps in performance before they become major problems and adjust accordingly.
- Seek Expert Assistance – If needed, reach out to FeverBee for professional benchmarking to gain deeper insights and actionable recommendations.
