Hello! My name is Nicolas, I am working on an analytics service for online communities that use Discourse. I am looking for people who could give me feedback.
What is the service about?
Every community manager I have seen over the past 15 years understands the importance of metrics, but very few of them do measurements or use metrics when making decisions. This happens for various reasons, including lack of time and technical knowledge. I want to offer a solution to this problem. I launched the Practical Community Management project, which consists of a community to discuss various aspects of Data Science for online communities and an application that automates the most common tasks related to metrics and reports.
At the moment, the application contains three main parts:
- Metrics for your community. I have collected several dozen metrics that get automatically calculated for your communities monthly.
- Industry benchmarks. In addition to the metrics for your community, I calculate each available metric on a dataset consisting of 200+ public communities. This way, you can compare the value of a metric in your community with industry benchmarks.
- Monthly Reports. The report brings together a minimal set of metrics that tell a specific story about your community. I have prepared a dozen reports on the most important topics, such as community health and engagement.
Why do we need a separate app if there are built-in reports?
At the moment, Discourse has the best built-in analytics among all forum engines. No doubt, it is a well done one. At the same time, I believe that I can do even better. For example, in addition to the metrics themselves, my service provides forecasts, evaluates trends and much more, which, quite probable, will not be implemented in built-in analytics.
Would you like to give me feedback in exchange for free access?
While I still have a lot of work to do to improve the app, the core functionality is already working and I would like to invite you to use the app. I would really appreciate your feedback on the idea itself, the proposed implementation, or just any other thoughts you might have on the topic of metrics.
If you have a community on Discourse that you want to collect metrics and get reports for and you have some free time to give me feedback on the app, could you please do the following:
- Go to https://app.practical-cm.com/ and create an account.
- Send me an email (nicolas.chabanovsky@gmail.com) that you would like to help with the the app, and mention the email you used to create the account.
As soon as I receive an email from you, I will grant full access to all sections of the site for the account with the specified email.
Thanks everyone in advance for the help. I hope you find the app useful.