How to Calculate the ROI of Online Communities

Few organizations use their community to reduce the cost of hiring staff. This is often a huge oversight. An online community attracts many of the smartest and most passionate people in the topic sector. You can post job adverts to the community to dramatically reduce the cost of hiring new staff members. This can be achieved through advertising, qualifying, or training new hires most effectively than via current methods.

This can be calculated by measuring the cost of performing these activities via the community against the cost of performing these activities elsewhere.

While there are definitely a number of organizations who develop communities solely as a recruitment tool, we believe this is a very small number. Instead, we believe this is an additional benefit and we have thus factored this cost into benefits accrued elsewhere in the community. Therefore, we calculate these benefits solely by the additional cost of performing this activity.