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Reading your community's pulse without a dashboard
Five simple signals you can check by hand each week to see whether your community is healthy.
Analytics dashboards are useful, but in a small community you can learn more from fifteen minutes of reading than from an hour of charts. This lesson gives you a short weekly check you can do by hand.
Five questions to ask each week
- How many people posted or commented, not just visited?
- How many of them were not you or your team?
- Did any new member get a reply from another member rather than from you?
- Which post got the most replies, and why?
- Who used to be active and hasn't appeared for a few weeks?
The third question is my favourite. A community starts looking after itself the day members begin answering each other without waiting for the host.
Write it down
Keep a short weekly note with your answers. After a couple of months you'll see trends that no single week shows: a ritual slowly losing steam, a topic that always lights up the feed, a handful of members carrying most of the conversation.
The last question deserves action, not just a note. A short personal message such as "Haven't seen you in a while, hope all is well" brings back more quiet members than any newsletter.
This week's task: answer the five questions for last week and send one "haven't seen you in a while" message.