We’re leaning into our forum more, and although we also have spaces for discussion/show and tell, the primary focus right now is getting support-style questions out of Slack and somewhere that we can search and use an API with.
The result of this has been a significant (3-4x) increase on the other metrics measured on the admin homepage (Signups, Topics, Posts, Daily Engaged Users, New Contributors), but DAU/MAU is stagnant to slightly down.
not sure what’s going on for March '22
The UI says “aim for 30%” as a good indicator of stickiness. Is that an across the board recommendation, or do you think there’s different targets for a support forum vs a discussion forum? I can imagine support fora would be more transactional and so fewer people would return after getting their initial question handled (we notice this in our Slack community as well).
Excellent question @joellabes. The short answer is yes. When I designed the dashboard a few years ago, I had come from a very strong Community of Practice background, where stickiness was a vital health metric. 30% is a stretch, even then. I think we should drop that down to 20% these days because the landscape has changed.
If you are running a support community, you may want people to keep coming back (i.e. be sticky) if you store your documentation there or you have built such a strong community presence that people come back to help others. If it is pure customer support then no, ideally you don’t want people coming back because that implies that there is something to be fixed or simplified in your product.
@mcwumbly let’s revisit that number on the dashboard.
Thank you! I found this thread while searching before posting
and it was very funny to see your messages from before you were an employee look at you now!
This is definitely the goal! It might be that we need to lean a bit more into the community of practice side of things, so that there are interesting reasons to come back beyond “I wonder what people are confused about today”.
But we’re also balancing against not trying to forcibly re-platform 50,000 people from Slack… that’s a different conversation though
Longer term, I think a more nuanced approach could be powerful.
I’d love for communities to be able to set their own goals (with some guidance like what you shared above about why they might choose one vs. the other) and use the dashboard or other related features to help them track their results vs. what they are aiming for.
It’s funny just finding this topic now, because I always recalled the admin UI mentioning 30% and when looking again recently, I saw it was 20% and couldn’t remember if I actually saw 30 or not.
As this thread has discussed, it can depend on the community. Here are some other thoughts I have from our enterprise usage:
It would be nice to have a checkbox to ignore DAU/MAU on weekends.
Generally speaking, 99.99% of corporate users, even if they’re in your top contributors, aren’t going to contribute on weekends.
EDIT: Even more nuanced than this, it really helps us if they do contribute, but it doesn’t hurt us if they don’t. I wonder how that would work?
It would be nice to have visiblity into DAU/MAU by selecting one or more categories. While we want DAU/MAU to go up in our announcements, blog, “show and tell”, etc. categories, we actually want it to go down in our support categories.
look at you now!
