Author: Richard Millington

Community Cloud is a powerful business and collaboration platform that’s built right into Salesforce’s core trusted platform — so it connects seamlessly with your business data, Salesforce applications, and even third-party apps, like Microsoft and SAP.

For Community Managers, we include preconfigured and customizable dashboards in the community management console help you manage your community, drive maximum engagement, and directly measure business value / ROI of your community.

Your strategic plan is a living document. Keep it regularly updated. You will be getting new metrics every day. Incorporate them into your strategy. Let people know the strategy has been updated.

Make Strategic Thinking Central To Your Approach

Don’t let the strategy be a theoretical exercise that is then consigned to go out of date and gather digital dust. Make it the central focus in every decision you take and every person you hire.

If an employee is asking to attend a conference, see if the conference sessions match the information that would help them execute their tactics. If you are asking for more resources, you can be really specific at what the additional resources will let you achieve. If you are in a senior meeting, you can talk about how the objectives are helping the organization achieve its goals. If you are recruiting a new hire, see if their skills and passion match the steps required in the strategy.

When change does inevitably happen, the strategic plan should be updated relatively quickly to accommodate those changes. You might still have your team, your resources, and your audience analysis to work from. There are very few situations when an entire strategic plan needs to be recreated from scratch. If you move on to a new role, you can assign someone else to be in charge of the strategy and let them execute it.

Far too many communities struggle once the community manager or team leader leaves. Very often, the community manager was a great practitioner but a bad strategist. Yet, it’s the strategic plan that will ensure the community survives and thrives once you have left. If you want to leave a great legacy, you need to do more than build a great community. You need to build a living, active community plan.

There are several types of change, which you can categorize as follows:

1. The community goals change. This is where there is a major shift in the objectives of the organization or the department and the goals of the community change. For example, the goal might no longer be to increase customer satisfaction, but to reduce costs. This is also the most dangerous from a community management perspective. The viability or value of the community itself might be called into doubt.
2. The stakeholders change. This is where key stakeholders change or members of your team leave. This might have two major impacts. The first is you no longer have the same level of support as you once did. This often happens if your boss leaves. In this situation, you have to re-establish the link between the community and their goals. You have to get approval and understanding on the strategy again. You need to be proactive in this process, not reactive.
3. The resources are cut (or increased). This is the most common. Your resources are reduced (or, rarely, increased) and you need to adapt. This usually happens when more work is dropped on your desk and you have less time for the community, your team members leave and you cannot get the budget to replace them, or your budget is cut. It might also be when you lose the permission to do what you want to do, or a resource you counted on (e.g. support of a designer) is eliminated. In this case, you need to review what you can do effectively and adjust your work at the tactical level.

At the beginning of this project, we mentioned that most community management careers are defined by constant, unpredictable changesTweet This . Your boss might leave, your resources might be cut, you might move on, a new product might be launched, etc.

These are not anecdotal stories, rather they are the constant change you must appreciate. Most strategies go out of date very quickly. Sometimes, they go out of date even before they are written.

This leaves too many community projects without a strategy. It leads too many people to give up on the process of strategy altogether.

This is a big mistake. It’s the result of smaller mistakes.

Strategic Plan Is A Living Process

A strategy isn’t a published document, but a living process. This process is constantly tweaked and refined. This process needs to adapt rapidly to external changes because external changes happen often.

Now you need to answer perhaps the most important question. Are the objectives achieving your goals? If your objective was to get existing members to share their best tips within the community, did that achieve the goal of the community?

It’s easier to set objectives from above. It’s far more difficult to determine if you set the right objectives. It’s hard to be critical of your own work to determine whether it was a success.

Measuring Objectives

At this level, you can usually rely upon more standard proxies of success. A CSAT score, for example, is measured by a survey asking members to rate their level of satisfaction with the product on a scale of 1 to 10. A net promoter score (NPS) is measured by asking customers how likely they are to recommend the product to a friend.

You want to measure the score of members via a survey. Then you need to use a survey to measure the score of visitors. You might use a pop-up survey to non-registered visitors to track the latter or email a sample of your total audience. Ideally, you want to measure this over an ongoing period of time (i.e. send the survey out to a different group each month) or have it pop up at random each month. Be careful of the non-response bias:

• Before and after surveys measuring CSAT score of members.
• Before and after surveys measuring CSAT score of visitors.

This will tell you whether customer satisfaction increased. However, it can’t tell you whether this was due to you achieving your objectives or some random factor.

This leads into the second question. Is the change in CSAT score attributable to the community?

Once again, you can look at the correlation between the two scores. You can see the correlation below:

This shows that the goal was achieved to some degree (i.e. the CSAT score increased by a significant amount of both members and non-members). However, the correlation is stronger for non-members than members.

Improve

Now you can figure out what we need to do differently.

• If the correlation is high between objectives and goals, and the goal was achieved, you need to allocate more resources to the community. This might come at the expense of other objectives or simply acquiring more resources from the organization.
• If the correlation is high between objectives and goals, but the goal was not achieved, you need to change the strategy to achieve the objectives. You have the right objectives but the strategy is not succeeding.
• If the correlation is low between objectives and goals, and the goal was achieved, you need to figure out what is working. It is likely that other objectives are succeeding, or your actions are causing another behavior which is increasing customer satisfaction.
• If the correlation is low between objectives and the goal was not achieved, you need to change the objectives. In practice, this often means ending the community efforts as a strategy.

You can go one level further again and use a multiple regression analysis to determine what impact each of the objectives had on the goal and allocate your resources accordingly. This is the best option but requires an understanding of statistics and statistical packages.

Notice the key insights here. These might be hard to extract. If the correlation is much higher for non-members, it suggests that there could be a natural ceiling to the degree to which a community can influence the CSAT score of members.

This might mean the best additional investment might come from getting more people to see the tips in the first place and, thus, a shift in resources to attract newcomers.

At the next level, you want to know if you’re using the right strategy to achieve the behavior change (objectives) you wish to see.

Remember the example of the strategic objective and strategy, set out below.

You want to measure if the change in attitude (jealousy/awe /envy of top experts) is actually causing the desired behavior change you wish to see. This means you first examine whether the objective is being achieved and then we look at whether this is due to the strategy or is in spite of the strategy.

Measuring Success of The Strategy

Now you need to figure out how you will collect this data.

How exactly will you define a ‘tip’ shared by a member? This might be the number of long-form articles created by members, or number of responses to a discussion. In this situation, you can simplify it to number of active users in the community and number of replies to discussions.

This will show you if more people are answering questions. You will have to either individually count the number of articles created (and multiply by day/week/month, if using sampling) or collect the data directly from the platform metrics. Google Analytics might also be able to yield this data using the /create page URL you can track unique sessions to.

This will broadly reveal if you are achieving your objectives. It doesn’t reveal, however, whether it is your strategy which is driving that success.

This reveals the following:

You can see here that the attitude change from surveys rises, suggesting the strategy itself is successfully implemented. You can also see that the number of tips shared per active member rose at the same time. This is 68.68% correlated, which is a moderate to strong correlation.

Improve

You can now use this analysis to improve your efforts.

This will broadly explain whether you need to keep doing what you’re doing, spend more time on the strategy, or change the strategy. In this example, you can see the obvious improvement would be to keep this objective.

Now you have looked at the execution of the tactics, you need to determine if the tactics themselves are helping you fulfil your strategy. This will highlight if you are using the right tactics.

If the tactics have been well-executed but there hasn’t been been a clear change, then you are probably using the wrong tactics to fulfil your strategy.

If the tactics have been badly executed, then it doesn’t really matter what you do. It is likely your results will fall somewhere between the two. This makes measurement a little more difficult (and even more important). This means you need to measure the degree to which the tactics have fulfilled the strategy.

Measuring The Impact Of Tactics

Once you know what to measure, you need to know how to measure it. This often means we need to measure before and after outcomes.

• Change in attitude. There are some complex methods to measure attitudes. Some of these are worth exploring. Most likely, however, you want to run a before and after survey asking about attitudes towards top members. You can then compare the before and after to see the impact of the tactics. Another approach might be to run a sentiment analysis and see how people feel about the issue before and after.
• Change in social norm. You might measure whether the tactics have created a sustained new behavior you believe is correlated with the change in attitude. That behavior might be encapsulated by mentions of a specific phrase, a particular type of discussion, or a medium of sharing information.
• Change in visible behavior. You might measure another behavior change that would reflect a change in attitude. If the goal is to provoke envy, what behaviors would suggest it’s working? This might be others also performing that behavior, for example. Or increased positive mentions of the members featured, etc.

This will tell you whether the strategy is being fulfilled. But it will not tell you why something is or is not working.

Improve

Now you can start making some useful assumptions about what to spend more or less time on.

You want to stop doing the tactics with low correlations to the success of the strategy and invest more time in things which have a high correlation with a successful strategy. You might also consider which tactics are the best bang for our buck. What tactics have a high correlation with success but do not require a lot of time and money?

Once again, you can start allocating our time and resources to be as effective as they can possible be. There will always be some repetitive tasks you will need to do. But the rest needs to be ruthlessly optimized to achieve the best results.

It’s worth noting here that correlation does not prove causation. To prove correlation, you need to run an experiment and measure the outcomes. However, once you have established correlation, you can track these metrics in future and see if the correlation holds true as you allocate more time to the resources. The more data-points you have, the more accurate your predictions will be.

In the situation above, additional investment in higher-quality video would likely lead to a bigger increase in attitude change. Thus, you might allocate more time and resources to finding a better video editor and improving the production quality of the video.

This is a clear actionable improvement based upon data and a logical conclusion. This is the level you want to be working at. You’re using your data to make effective decisions.

One of the biggest mistakes is to measure the success of a tactic without checking if the tactic itself was well-executed. This can lead you to changing your tactics instead of improving your execution. If a tactic has been badly executed, then the community will not fulfil its strategy and the strategy will not achieve its objective.

At this level, you’re not measuring whether they were the correct tactics in the first place. This will come next. You are simply measuring whether the tactics were well-executed.

This means you first need to define good… Fortunately, we already have.

Measuring Execution of Expert Interviews

You can use this process to measure the ‘interviews with top experts’ tactic we explored earlier. The purpose of this tactic is to foster a sense of awe and jealousy in other members. This means a lot of members need to watch the videos. This provides an easy set of metrics.

1. Reach: The number of people watching the video / total size of the target audience. This is an obvious metric to track. If very few people sign up or watch the video, clearly it’s not a relevant or useful video to the audience. Try to make sure you have an approximate idea of how many active members you are trying to reach with this video.
2. Depth: The number of questions, discussions or ratings about the video. These are relatively easy to track. We simply measure the number of questions asked, length of time someone watched the video (video analytics), or the rating the video was given. Pick one metric you feel is most relevant to you.
3. Length: Views per month. You might measure friend connections, increased followings on Twitter, or broader levels of respect for those featured in interviews. These show the long-term impact of the videos.

These are all relatively good indicators that the tactic is being executed well. This might lead to some simple tracking metrics:

1. Combined views of the video / number of active members.
2. Number of questions asked in comments of the video or related discussion.
3. Length of time video was watched (we assume the longer the video is watched, the more impact it will have).
4. Twitter followings of experts.

You might set broad targets here, too. For example, you want 15% of members to watch the videos, 30% of them to ask questions, at least 50% of the video to be watched on average and to see a 20% increase in the following of experts.

You can see an example below.

Improve

This stage is relatively simple. You have 4 options to improve any tactic. These are:

• Fix the mistake. If the tactic didn’t work because of an obvious mistake, fix the mistake. If the open rates of the email promoting the videos were low, you might tweak the subject line or who they appear from. If not many people attended despite being registered, you might schedule the interview to take place at a more convenient time.
• Allocate more resources. If the tactic didn’t work because of a clear resource problem, allocate more resources if they are available. if there is a clear resource that would make a tactic successful, you can allocate that resource from elsewhere. Likewise, if it would work better with even more resources, you might want to commit more resources.
• Kill it. If the execution was bad and you cannot easily or predictably (with more resources) fix it, you should stop executing those steps and (most likely) kill the tactic to free up resources for more effective tactics.

The improve stage should be explicit in stating the conditions under which you might spend more or less time on any specific tactic.You should put these in place beforehand to avoid your own biases later (or your team’s own biases).

Now you can easily apply the insight from our example to a practical step to improve the tactic. You have a clear action that might fix the video before you abandon the tactic. This is where measurement, analysis, and improvement combines so well.

You can do this for each of your tactics. This should not take too long and leads to continuous improvement in everything you do.

You should never have to ask what to measure. If you don’t know what to measure, then you don’t know what you are trying to achieve. If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, then why measure anything?

A far better question to ask is how to measure. How do you measure if your objectives are achieving your goals? How do you measure if your strategies are achieving your objectives? How do you measure if your tactics are coming through on your strategy? How do you measure if the tactics themselves are well executed? These are the key things worth measuring.

Why bother measuring anything?

Why go to the effort of measuring anything? What do you want to know? What do you plan to do with the data?

There are two common reasons here. The first is you might measure to impress your boss. This helps you keep your job and get more resources for future efforts. This is often part-vanity, too. You want to know how you personally are doing to increase the level of engagement.

The second reason is you measure to improve the work you do. This doesn’t get anywhere near as much attention as it should. Almost all discussions concern ‘what’ you should measure instead of ‘why’ you measure. Data is a valuable tool to make future decisions. You should use data to better allocate your resources to achieve your goal. Data tells you where you have been wasting time and where you can better spend your time to achieve your goals.

This means you need a decision tree in place to handle data. For example, if the level of people participating in a type of discussion falls. Does this mean you need to spend less time on this discussion or spend more time promoting it? If you are collecting data without a decision tree, you’re wasting your time.

The goal of measurement is not to find out what has been happening. The goal of measurement is to improve what you’ve been doing.

DEFINE: What Should You Measure?

Measure execution first

Notice these are in reverse chronological order from the strategy. This is important. It’s pointless to measure whether the strategy achieved the objectives if the tactics were not well executed in the first place.

Your data might tell you that the strategy failed. Yet, the tactics to execute the strategy only reached a tiny percentage of the entire audience. It was the execution of the tactic that failed, not the strategy.

The first step is to define what variables you intend to measure. There are four critical questions you want to answer here. These are:

1. Were the tactics well-executed? (success of the action plan)
2. Did the tactics amplify the emotion? (success of tactics)
3. Did the emotion change the behavior? (success of strategy)
4. Did the behavior generate a return? (success of objectives)

This tells you whether the action plan was successfully executed, whether you chose the right tactics, whether you used the right strategy, and whether you had the right objectives in the first place.

The challenge here is to identify the right proxy metrics for each of these questions. Proxy metrics are metrics that are presumed to reflect the variable we wish to measure.

For example, you might not be able to measure if more of the community members bought a specific new product, but you might be able to track how many members mention a new product or visited a purchase page.

ANALYZE: Explain what happened

The data above will explain whether the variables changed, but it won’t answer the really critical question of why it did or didn’t change. To understand ‘why’, you usually need some context. This usually means more data-points and information than you have collected so far.

Why Did Traffic Increase

For example, you might notice that visitor numbers have risen. This is usually good news. But it’s not actionable news. We might dig into the data a little more and see that this is because search traffic has risen. Digging a little further, we might identify what specific pages and search terms are being targeted.

Analysis usually means making comparisons. This includes:

1. Examining antecedents. What happened before, after, or duration the change in the variable? Did anything closely correlate with the variables we’re measuring? Correlation doesn’t prove causation, but it might suggest a possible relationship you can test. For example, if the number of new registrations rose, is this because the conversion rate increased, or were you attracting more people to the site in the first place? You could compare the registration rate with the new visitor rate to find the answer. This is an example of an antecedent.
2. Comparing trends. You might also look at the long-term trends. What is the long-term trend here? Has the trend line changed? If so, by what degree? If you look at the long-term trend of that variable, you will find more information. For example, you might find that the number of new registrations has been rising for several months. This means your activities in the past month might not be the cause. It’s a longer-term trend.
3. Comparing dates. A similar approach is to compare dates against similar periods. Trend lines can be influenced by holiday or weather, for example. How does the variable change compare against a comparable date? The previous day, week, month, or year for example. How does the number of new registrations compare with the same period last year? Are external factors a likely cause or not?
4. Comparing against benchmarks. Another approach is to look at benchmarks. How does this compare against other activities of similar size? Are you more or less successful than them? For example, you might notice mentions of your product rose in your community. However, if the level of activity or members also rose by a similar percentage, it’s probably the result of an extraneous variable. Alternatively, you might benchmark against communities of similar size. How does your registration rate compare with theirs? This might reveal what you are doing better or worse than others.
5. Feedback from team members or community members. Another useful datapoint is feedback from team members or community members. They are often closer to the action and can highlight any small changes which might have had a big impact. For example, small changes in wording on title tags can have a big impact on search rankings. If no-one told you this has changed, you might struggle to explain the data you see. The registration rate might have increased because of something one of your team has changed.

At this stage, you do not want to describe what happened, but you want to explain why it happened. Once you know why something failed or succeeded, you can begin to make useful extrapolations about what to do next.

Have you noticed that things tend to get organized around your calendar?

The Power of the Calendar

If something is in your calendar, it’s considered important. If it’s not, it’s often bumped for a meeting or something that will be put in the calendar for that time. The best way to ensure anything gets done is to make sure it’s in your calendar long in advance.

The final step is hopefully the easiest. You need to ensure you and your team have each of these steps added into their Google calendar (or whichever calendar tool you use). This is a really important step to complete. Once something is scheduled in a calendar it becomes a priority that gets done. If it’s not in a calendar, it’s often pushed back in favor of other meetings or things that are.

Remember, all those other daily community tasks you need to do? Removing spam, updating information, etc? They need to be organized around the tactical steps in your calendar today, not the other way round.

So, make sure the steps are in the calendar for you and your team. You do not need to do this for an entire year in advance. However, you might want to do this weekly, staying one month ahead of when the tasks need to be complete.

There are two simple steps to do this. The first is to ask people to go through the steps and put each one in their calendar themselves. This is the easiest for you, but also the least effective.

The second is simply to invite people, via a calendar invitation, to participate in that activity at that time and for the duration of time it is supposed to take. They only have to click accept and it’s scheduled in for them. You can do this for every single task and let Google do the reminding.

Now everything is pencilled into the calendar and you should be good to go. Good luck.

Your Strategic Plan Is Nearly Complete

Your strategic plan is now almost complete. You have an agreed goal, you have strategic objectives set. You have developed strategies to achieve each of those strategic objectives. You have prioritized tactics to execute those strategies and reallocated your resources to execute those tactics.

You have also identified what great execution would look like and broken this down into individual steps. You have discovered who is the best person to perform this step and any skill, knowledge, or resource gaps you need to close. You have ensured each step is assigned to a person and scheduled within their calendar.

At this point, everything is set for the successful execution of your strategy. Now you just need to do one more thing, which is to figure out if the strategy succeeded.