Beginning in 2019, we began scraping millions of data points from dozens of top communities to find the best-managed community.
The idea was to use it for our clients to explain how they’re doing in comparison with competitors/similar communities. And also to urge them to adopt the strategies which would take them in the right direction.
We decided to benchmark communities in three areas:
- Size of the community.
- % of posts that receive a response.
- Avg. speed to first response.
This is far harder than it looks. But after a long process of scraping and cleaning data – along with my amateur coding skills – I want to share a small sample with you.
In short, the closer to the bottom left an organization is, the better they’re performing.
Of course, size matters too. It’s not hard to answer every question in minutes if you only get 2 or 3 per day. So you can see the relative size.
On this basis, I would say FitBit, Upwork, Vodafone, and Alteryx are all top performers.
And this is just a small snippet of a far larger dataset.
Why Community Benchmarks Matter
It doesn’t really help to have data if you don’t know if the metrics you’re seeing are good or bad.
Our benchmarks help you overcome these problems and see what good actually looks like and what you can realistically aspire towards.
One thing we’ll do extensively as part of our Community Strategy course is help you benchmark your community in a multitude of different ways to help you determine how you’re doing today and what you should be focusing on.
We’re going to provide you with data points on growth rates, levels of participation, conversion rates, community design principles and even help you benchmark the skills of you and your team.
Having been through this process many times, it’s genuinely one of the most useful things you can do. I hope we can help you do it.
Whether you’re just getting started or have a mature community today, you need a community strategy.
[Course begins on Feb 24]
