Calling all community managers using Discourse

Community
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Hey all,
The Community Round Table publish an annual report called the State of Community Management.
It provides critical insights for community management practitioners and the industry as a whole.

I’ve been informed that Discourse communities are currently underrepresented in the data they have collected so far for 2018 so I’ve promised to put the word out.

If you manage a Discourse based community please take 20mins to fill out the survey below.

State of Community Management 2018

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This is an interesting questionnaire in how it applies to volunteer or community organisations. The questions are focussed on business/enterprise use of “Communities” so around half of the questions don’t apply to various communities, e.g. open-source projects don’t tend to have “Executives” who require “reporting and metrics of impact and KPI”.

Potentially more interesting, however, is the calculation of “Average Financial Value of an Answer”. I’d be very interested to know how anyone would calculate that.

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I agree. It’s not as widely applicable as I’d like. The spread of Discourse communities tends to wider than other platforms because we’re OS.

Have you seen this resource? How to Calculate the ROI of Online Communities | FeverBee

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Completed the survey :+1:

It took a little bit more than those 20 minutes, but it’s the least that can be done in thanks to this free software :sweat_smile:

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@phi @Carson1 this may concern you Guys :slight_smile:

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  • Average monthly number of answers generated by your community
  • Average monthly number of searches on your community
  • Percent of searches that result in a click-through
  • Monthly community budget (including platform & staff)

I don’t know if we have such metrics in Discourse. Moreover, it’s unclear what ‘searches’ mean here: is it internal searches or searches from external sites? These metrics totally fail to account for private/public parts of the community. In a community that’s mostly private work platform, these metrics don’t mean much. Besides it’s unclear whether the questionnaire belongs to public research or private research – in which case the focus on commercial communities and non-free-software solutions becomes obvious. I almost got sucked in, but no thanks, I have no time to answer this.

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