7 Things You Can Do When You Start Measuring Community
Measuring the well-being of your residential community can be tricky. Only a few operators have figured out how to measure “community”
Measuring the well-being of your residential community can be tricky. And while everybody in the coliving ecosystem talks about the importance of community, only a few operators have figured out how to measure “community” and use these insights strategically to further drive their business.
But instead of going deep into the “how” of measuring community, let’s start with “why”.
Here are 7 things that you can start doing, once you start getting an understanding of where your community and its members are at by measuring community:
- Empower your community stars — Understand who your most engaged members are — perhaps even per segment of your community, and see how you can further empower them to keep bringing your community to life.
- Segment your community and engage accordingly — Once you understand what the engagement profiles of your individual members are, you can approach them accordingly. For example, if one of your residents is naturally connecting with many newcomers see if you can involve them more strategically in your onboarding program.
- Help your team allocate their time better — everyone only has 24 hours in their day, so measuring your community allows you and your team to allocate time better: Who did not yet have the right onboarding experience yet, who are the members that are not integrated yet, who are the super connectors and what do they need to thrive, etc.
- Ensure onboarding success — how you onboard your members is critical to their overall engagement with your community. So making sure they get off to the right start (are they connecting and interacting? Were they properly welcomed by the community?) will make them, and in turn you, more successful.
- See who needs help — who are the less engaged members in your community, or those whose engagement dropped? It is perhaps good to proactively check in with them to see how they are doing and if everything is alright (maybe, you can help them get back into the groove and as result, help increase the probability of them sticking around for longer).
- Optimise your engagement strategy — measure what works for your community and focus more on that. For example, what types of events are more popular than others? Are some people more engaged than others, and what do they have in common? Did your new onboarding flow result in a more, or less engaged cohort? Keep measuring, and do more of what works!
- Understand how community impacts your bottom line — track the duration of stay not only per person, but also aggregate it across the various segments. How much longer are people staying once they are engaged with your community? Add referrals and your increased reach to it and start seeing how your community-building activities directly translate into business success!
All of these are very powerful things that can aid you on your mission to bring your residential community to life. So the big question becomes — how can you start measuring community? :)
Either you can read into the Orbit model here if you’d like to go deeper into this. Or simply take advantage of the magic that we are putting into Obeyo and start getting insights into how your community is doing, and how to make it even stronger without doing the heavy lifting yourself.
About the author
Michael Steinmann is the Co-Founder and CEO of Obeyo. With more than 15 years of experience in growing and scaling SaaS companies, he is always up for connecting and conversing about the present and the future of residential community building.