There’s a lot going into every single decision you make with and for your community. Community building doesn’t just happen in one part of your business. Community intertwines with sales, marketing, customer support, events, and so much more. 

What are you basing your decision on? Data should be your decision. A data-driven decision is an informed decision. There’s no guessing, just straightforward answers. 

Everything Community wants your community to grow, and we’ve got proven ways to make decisions through the data & analytics from your community.

What are Data-Driven Decisions?

Data-driven decisions are ones based on tangible metrics produced by your community. These metrics are pulled from your community’s tool stacks. Tool stacks are the products and software your community uses daily. Examples include your Slack channels, social media platforms, and forum & event planning tools. 

Learn about common community tool stacks here.

Leveraging all of your tools is one way to make informed decisions. Your community members make decisions every day to engage with you and the tools your community provides. It’s valuable to be able to track these metrics. 

Without data, you are forced to make educated guesses. While experienced and veteran community members will have a better understanding of decisions for the community, you can't always rely on this. Data and analytics help see what your community is doing well and where it can improve.

Data You Should Be Collecting

Data is all nice and dandy, but not knowing the correct metrics to pull and how to use them can still be a shot in the dark. The data you should be collecting is based on your community’s use case. 

Everything Community has researched use cases including: marketing, product innovation, customer support & success, sports, community spaces, accelerators/incubators. Learn more about community use cases here.

Go Beyond the Vanity Metrics 

Many time vanity metrics are sent to executives and promoted to community members. Vanity metrics are those that just give a baseline understanding of a community. These metrics tend to start with “number of…”. While some of these metrics are valuable, you must dive deeper. 

More on vanity metrics in our chat with Aly Merritt.

Real metrics should be able to prove community ROI. Metrics like the percentage of members that are returning to events, connections made between members at a specific event, and how many touchpoints until a deal was closed, are what you need to be looking for. 

Read more on proving your community ROI.

Simple Data Dashboards 

For many folks (and most days, us included), data is just a jumble of numbers that’s hard to make heads or tails of. We don’t expect everyone to instantly understand how to use their community’s metrics. That’s why we suggest using tools that turn your data into simple data dashboards. 

Before simple data dashboards, communities would need a data engineer and a software developer. Let’s be honest, that’s expensive, especially for scrappy new communities (we know). Investing in tools like Spontivly, allows communities to integrate with their tool stacks and pull real-time data and analytics on their community. 

Simple data dashboards will display your communities metrics in charts, graphs, and other simple-to-read ways. Drag and drop abilities, as seen within Spontivly, make it so any type of report on your community can be pulled. You should be able to understand social media engagement, ticket sales, and event attendance when looking for a simple data dashboard solution.

Data can be overwhelming. Look for a lightweight and agile solution so your entire team can learn quickly and effectively. It should be able to simply integrate with your communities tool stack and be a no-code tool. Anyone from executives to interns should be able to create and pull reports from the data dashboard.

Data = Future of Community

With all the decisions your community has to make, be sure they’re informed. Numbers don’t lie – data-driven decisions are the way to make impactful decisions. 

Your community’s growth relies on community builders, like yourself, going beyond baseline understanding and vanity metrics. Investing in simple data dashboards and learning what key metrics are valuable to your community is crucial to success and continued growth.