Hello, and welcome to bad community advice.
I am your host.
My name is Seth Resler, and I am the founder of Community Marketing Revolution.
And this is the show where we talk to community professionals, and we get terrible tips and toxic takeaways.
We find out the worst advice that they have ever gotten, and we find out why it's so bad.
We talk to them about what you should do instead.
I'm really excited for my guest today.
She is the principal of Confident Communities Consulting.
Please welcome, Catherine Hackney.
Hi, Catherine.
How are you? Hi, Seth.
I'm doing good today.
How are you? Good.
Thank you so much for being here.
Uh, I'm really excited because we're gonna talk about a topic that I think matters a lot to people who are, uh, interested in building communities, but can also be somewhat confusing, uh, and somewhat confounding, and that is metrics.
We're gonna get to your terrible piece of advice in just a couple of minutes.
But before we do, I wanna talk to you a little bit about what you do there at confident, uh, communities.
Tell me about the types of communities that you're building.
Yeah.
I, uh, for the last eleven years, have been focused specifically on professional associations and their online membership communities to bring additional value and benefit to the members of the organizations.
So give me an example of a professional associate.
Would we're talking about, like, plumbers that all get together? Are we talking about, uh, I don't know, bartenders? What does that look like? Yes.
Right.
Uh, it is surprising.
There does seem to be a professional association or trade association for every career or profession or job title out there.
So what really is the common factor of the members of my communities is that they are all in a similar job role or industry for their career.
Um, so like American metal medical association is a good example of that kind of organization.
So we're talking about communities that I assume have a large number of members.
Right? Often, um, but you'll really see professional associations of all sizes.
Right? I've worked with communities that are 500 members large.
Um, there's also associations for the state dots or the departments of transportation per state.
So it's technically only got 50 members, and those are organizational members, or you work with global engineering associations with 500,000 members, potentially.
So, uh, run the gamut of all possible sizes.
Wow.
Uh, and are you working on a particular platform when it comes to building your online communities? Yeah.
Uh, my tree has been a, uh, being a partner of the Hirelogic platform.
So Hirelogic is where I got my start in online community building.
Uh, I also work on the Trade Wing and Forage platform as well at this point and have great partnerships there to help out their association customers build better membership communities.
Got it.
And and so we often talk about, you know, both the shared mission of the communities, what they're all trying to do.
And it sounds like in your case, it's mostly professional development, ongoing training, and learning, uh, but then we also talk about the business purpose of the communities, which is why the organizers are actually putting that together.
What is the business purpose for most of your clients? Yeah.
Right.
A professional, so association builds an online community to be an additional member benefit, uh, and often in many of the associations I work with, members will cite the online community as the number one member benefit that they get direct value out of.
So it's a reason that members renew their membership and stick with the association.
Yeah.
So you're in a kind of a unique situation here where the community is actually the product.
That is the thing that is being sold as opposed to a community being a customer support or customer success community where the goal is ticket deflection or whether it's it's marketing or something else.
Yes.
Right.
I I definitely like the types of communities I get to work with where I see real value being created between the members of the community, not necessarily, you know, like a sneaky marketing channel or, uh, right.
It's not ticket deflection that this is just not that type of organization building the communities, but its members coming together to volunteer, mentor, help one another answer day to day questions to make their lives, professional lives easier.
Alright.
Well, let's take a look at the terrible advice that you got, and that is this.
There's no need to track engagement metrics or activity.
Uh, let's talk a little bit about that.
Um, first of all, tell me more about that.
Where where did you get this advice? Is this something that you actually followed? Yeah.
So I've heard it a few different times, and I've certainly seen it at organizations.
Um, so like I said, many professional associations already have online communities and have for quite a while because it is such an obvious member benefit for their type of situation, for the type of organization they are.
Uh, so just because it seems like the obvious standard thing that you do, there are some organizations out there who don't put the time and resources into measuring what is going on inside their online community.
Some people just don't think that it is worth it and they can't do much with that data.
Often, uh, professional associations have smaller budgets if there's smaller organizations and do not have data scientists on staff to really potentially understand the data or be able to do much with it.
But I don't believe that's a good reason to not track your data.
Uh, I have not followed this advice because I always want to understand what is going on in my community.
Right? Even if I'm not doing too much with it or necessarily creating board reports or reports for executives, as a community manager or strategist, I believe people in that role really need to keep a pulse of what's on in their community so that you can change with the times, right, understand how your member activity is adjusting so that you can adjust content and programming to continue to provide the maximum value to the members of your community, or you will find yourself with a stagnant community over time.
And, you know, if you're not really paying attention, that can happen all too easily.
And that's also often when I get hired, um, I should say.
So my main, um, type of business is really coming in to help revive a dying online community.
And a lot of the time, my customers are not already tracking their engagement activity.
So we don't understand what's been going on in the past, what might have changed.
So that's always something that I recommend to do and keep a pulse on so that they, uh, can shift their community management activities to better take care of their communities and not get into that situation again? You know, before I came to community, my background was essentially marketing.
And one of the changes that I have watched with the internet is that marketing has moved from being an art to being much more of a science, that it used to be Don Draper from Madman going in, going, oh, look at this fancy drawing, and here's the clever slogan.
And now it's, alright, how many clicks and what, you know, where do people leak out of the funnel and, you know, what can the analytics tell us? And I feel like that shift is somewhat similar in community building, especially when we start talking about online community building because we have all these data points that we can measure, but I can also see the pushback from people who are like, no, no, no, communities in art.
This is about just people coming and building relationships, how do you find the balance between those two between community as an art and community as a science with data points? Yes.
That is very fair to say.
Right? Online communities, there's a psychology to it.
You're not, um, dealing with math equations and numbers.
These are human beings.
We are trying to get to do certain activities over time.
And that requires both qualitative and quantitative data.
So, you know, when you can survey or do polls within your communities of your members to understand what is their sentiment you know, would they recommend your community as well as where are they clicking? What, you know, threads or conversations or pages are they spending time on? So you can bring the full story together to really understand both sides of it.
I think that's really necessary for online community, uh, measurement and to understand what's really going on.
So it's a balance.
So, yeah, you bring up some interesting data points, and that was one of my questions to you is what are data points that you actually care about.
What other match? I I sounded it sounded like you were mentioning something that is, like, net promoter score, which is how likely are you to recommend? Is that one of your data points? So what are some other ones that you really care about? Yeah.
Absolutely.
Right.
Net promoter score is a big and something that you just have to do a poll on to ask people that question.
Um, it's really difficult to get that kind of information, but it tells you, do people like your community? Do they find value in it so that they wanna share it? So that's a big one.
Uh, it really depends to you on the tools you have available, what your platform is.
So when I'm working with organizations, I dig in to understand the tools they have available what platform they're on and what data points are there so that we can, um, get actionable insights.
But usually, something that I like to measure is also average number of replies per conversation or per new question, uh, to understand the people are really having a dialogue.
Right? We wanna have at least an average number of two, if not three or four responses per conversation so that you understand that your members are truly engaging and talking with one another versus, uh, you know, maybe in a customer support community where your average rate of response might be one.
And that's okay.
If it's the right answer, you know, there is a single answer to the conversation, um, and that's fine.
But in associations, very little is black and white that members are talking about in the community.
So a health metric that I like to watch is, are they debating? Are they having back and forth conversations? Um, because so rarely is there a single right answer to questions that are coming up? And that's how you know members continue to come back and continue the conversation and, um, create something that's even more valuable for new members coming in and searching past conversations that if there's a full dialogue there, somebody can learn a lot more from that.
Um, so, yes, that's that's one of the big ones that I like to pay attention to for my situation.
So let me make sure I understand this.
This is fascinating to me, um, in a customer support community where people somebody somebody goes in and says, look, my printer's broken.
Here's the problem.
How do I fix it? You just want the right answer.
And it's not necessarily about building a relationship between the person with the broken printer and the person with the fixed printer, uh, as opposed to a professional association where it's not necessarily about looking for a right answer, it's about I don't know.
Hey, here's this situation.
This came up.
What would you do? Give me advice, and that's where it becomes much more.
So it actually affects the metrics, the type of community.
And so there isn't one right answer for this is how many replies you should be getting per post.
It's it's contextual.
Is that what you're saying? Yes.
That's definitely what I'm saying, right? Depending on the type of community that you are managing or running, your benchmarks are going to be different.
That's one of the reasons it's so difficult to have a global online community benchmarks that I feel people ask for all the time.
Well, it's situational.
It depends on your type of community, right, and in professional associations, in their communities, members want to build their professional network.
They want to make connections and showcase their own expertise and, uh, learn together through dialogue versus you know, get an answer from the organization.
So it yeah.
It's situational, and, uh, that's, yeah, different reasons for, uh, participating in a community.
Got it.
So we talked about Net Promoter score, which is again, how likely people are to recommend the community to other people.
They they know.
The number of replies on average per post, what other metrics do you care about? Yeah.
So the online communities I work with, uh, almost always have email notifications that go out to members, uh, as a great way to help push them back in the community over time, right, and keep up to date on the conversations.
So at least they can read the conversations and get value out of it even if they're not posting.
So a big metric we also watch is percentage of unsubscribes from those community notifications.
If, uh, 20 of your membership is unsubscribing from those emails, maybe they're not seeing the value, and you need to put a little extra effort into the community to bring value into that space.
So that's fascinating because that's a warning sign metric.
Uh, interesting.
I I Email unsubscribe was not at the top of my list.
Uh, let's talk about things that we can measure because I think there is this temptation to think that just because we can measure something, it is important.
And the truth is some data points are more important than others.
What are some data points that people often think are important? That you're like, yeah, that really doesn't mean as much as you think it means.
Yeah.
Right.
So in online communities, I see often search data, um, most platforms have a search functionality.
They should, if it's an online community platform, so that other members can benefit from conversations that have already happened.
And we'll see people measure number of searches happening or number of unique users searching, whereas It's an interesting number, maybe, but are you actually taking an action on that number? Not usually or not that I've seen.
Um, what's a more interesting metric is what are the most common search terms? What are people looking for then we can actually do something with that, like create content or surface, uh, relevant conversations in an easier way or make them easier to find, um, because people are searching for it, we know they want more of that content.
Nice.
Alright.
So that's, uh, that's interesting is that you're you're using the search to really and it makes sense.
You're saying what are people asking about? Let's give them some answers and and build some stuff, uh, around that.
When you sit down with clients and go through metrics, What does that look like? Do you have a dashboard? Do you meet with them on a regular basis? What what kind of review process do you use? Yes.
Definitely.
I like to create a custom dashboard for each of my communities, uh, and organizations that I'm helping out Um, because again, every platform is a little bit different.
Uh, every community is a little bit different.
And based on the goals that you've set for your community, that's really where I'm gonna understand what KPIs are most important so that we're not wasting time measuring, uh, and capturing data points we don't need and can't take action on.
Uh, so we can focus, um, that customized dashboard, uh, yep, for the organization.
So I like to pull data monthly if possible, um, if that's not possible, at least quarterly to have a bird's eye view of what's going on in the community over time, but how you're really gonna understand the health and, um, growth over time of your community is when you look at full year over full year metrics, uh, it kinda takes the seasonality.
And, you know, February was so much bigger than July.
Well, we must have done something great in February.
No.
Not really.
Most people are just on in July or something like that.
Right? So, uh, I do like to do a annual assessment with my customers to look at their year over year metrics to understand did the community really grow because you can get a false sense of either positive or negative movement when you're looking month to month.
So I like having that data as a community manager to know, okay, we need to make some content shifts or programming shifts maybe, but really understanding the health of your community is year over year data.
And that's where we wanna do a sit down and dig into what's going on and make, uh, adjustments to the goals of the community for the next year and have that larger strategic conversation.
Got it.
And that's the quantitative data.
Uh, this is the stuff that and I'm assuming this is mostly spit out by higher logic.
Are you using any other tools, uh, whether it's Google Analytics or anything else to measure, uh, your community? Yes.
There are platforms, especially like higher logic that allow you to plug in Google Analytics, um, or another analytics tool that'll, uh, give you additional supplemental data.
So that can be very interesting, especially if you're using those kinds of tools for your main website or other areas of your organization.
Um, of course, for an association, we also want to bring in membership data from their AMS or association management system so that we can understand, you know, how many new members did we get in this time frame and how many new members did we see log in to the community so we can compare that data across the different platforms and understand again just the health of the community.
Uh, do members know about it our new members getting in, do we need to, you know, do a better campaign about raising awareness? Um, so I really like to bring especially membership data together in the same place as we're looking at community data to really understand what's going on.
And again, adjust our goals as needed.
Yeah.
So this is really important because you don't want the data for your community to sort of live in a silo separate from all your other data.
So it sounds like the ability to move it from one place to another and to kinda know, hey, this system, this platform is gonna be the home for all of our data and being able to tie that in is is really important.
That's the quantitative data.
You also mentioned qualitative data.
Talk a little bit about what that looks like.
How do you gather that And then how do you use that? Yes.
Right.
This is, I think, the more important side of it, honestly, um, because it's often harder to capture.
So for me, anytime that I'm watching an online community or working with a community, uh, I'm paying attention to the posts that are coming in daily.
And anytime that I see a member post something like a thank you, this is why I love this community or, uh, you know, first time posting, but I've been watching the conversations and I've learned a lot from it.
And here's my question.
Um, anytime there's something like that sort of organic comment that a member is sharing.
I save that.
I screenshot that.
I hold on to it.
Maybe that's a person to reach out to for a specific quote about the community to learn more or just as, um, somebody working with the community to ask them more questions about what they appreciate about the community so you can better understand why are they seeing value and expressing that? Because that's great and we want to do more of that and bring that value to others.
So having those direct conversations with members of your community, uh, who are willing to share is really helpful.
Um, it also helps you build that story because in a community, we are working with people.
And if you do have to present data to executives.
Number of clicks or views or posts and things like that is very dry.
And sometimes it just doesn't look as great as you may want it to, often because people have really realistic expectations about community and the KPIs I see there.
Um, so a great way to get executives or other people who aren't in the community every day to understand it is to tell the story of your members and have testimonials pulling out those specific quotes of people talking about your community in a positive way, wherever that may happen, save it, hold on to it, ask if you can quote them, um, as well as most associations do run something like a membership survey, uh, that will ask about all of the membership benefits that the organization offers and community should definitely be part of that survey, asking them, you know, how much value do you find in the if you ask that NPS question in that survey or if you have maybe a pop up survey that opens up in your community when people log in to ask an NPS type of question, um, and allow for open comments as well.
That's a really great place that you'll get to really understand how your community is valuable for members in a way that numbers will never actually tell you.
Yeah.
So surveys are a really important tool, but it sounds like you're really having a community portion folded into a survey that they're already doing that is larger than that.
Um, are you ever doing focus groups or one on one conversations, you know, whether it's Zoom calls or or anything like that that something that your clients typically do? That's something that's really good to do when you're reviewing the community or need to make any kinds of adjustments, or you're building a brand new community.
Right? So that's definitely a time.
We wanna interview individual rules, even if you can have 10 interviews with 10 different members one on one, you can get a lot of information about what they find valuable, whether it is of a, you know, a potential community you wanna build or a community that already exists.
I don't often see it happening enough between those types of situations though.
Right? I do think it's really important for staff at associations to have a pulse on what's going on with their member right, keeping those personal relationships with the members as well, and that's actually another benefit of having an online community is if you have your staff engaging in the community as well, it puts us a face to the organization.
Right? It humanizes your organization to your members, um, and just helps to build more of those relationships.
And then I think more organically, you'll have staff having conversations with members.
Maybe it's you know, a hallway conversation at a in person event, their annual conference, um, and they get some information or hear something about the community or ask the member about community in that situation.
That's a great time to just bring it up, um, and have an organic conversation and then potentially follow-up with that person and say, hey, can I quote you or can I, you know, have you share a little bit more about your experience? We'd love to share that with higher ups of the organization or share it with new members who are coming into the community so that they can understand the value that existing members are already getting.
Yeah.
So I know one of the things that's really important here is feedback loops.
So it's not enough that we just collect these data points.
Uh, we actually have to do something with it to improve the community and and make it.
You know, do you have best best practices or things that you recommend to your clients when it comes to how do you actually use this information? Yeah.
So often, right, it kinda, again, comes down to how many resources or what are the resources and time available at an organization of what they can do, but that's where I love to see something like, the search, the most common searches, uh, the most common topics that are coming up in questions or conversations, or what are the most downloaded resources that are in your community, those things that are, especially related to content helps an organization like a professional association understand what other types of content should we create.
You know, we're getting a lot of questions about this specific topic clearly there's a gap and that the association as a whole can fill that gap in a better way than just through the online community.
Um, and that creates, again, just additional member value through the association, which makes, uh, helps that member retention number.
Right? So for my organizations, community is really affecting their member retention, uh, making sure that members are getting value so they stick around.
Um, so right.
Being able to build content that people care about, that is an insight from an online community that an association may not be able to get another way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now that makes so much And I love this idea of using feedback loops to shape content in particular, uh, because you're right.
Maybe all of a sudden there's a bunch of questions about AI, and everybody wants to know about AI.
And so it tells you, oh, we don't have anything about AI.
So we need to here's how AI is gonna affect this particular industry.
One of the things that I hear a lot of people in the community industry talk about and I don't know if this is as true for you because, like we said at the beginning, community is your product.
It is the the thing that's driving these membership organizations as opposed to other organizations where the community is really in support of some other product or service.
But I hear a lot about the need to prove the value of community internally within the to essentially get stakeholder buy in from management or or other portions of the organization.
Um, you know, is that something that is a challenge in the particular space that you're working in? And if so, how do you use these metrics and these data, you know, this data to tell that story? Yeah.
Right.
That goes back to one of the first things I was talking about of, uh, this advice comes from the fact that there's this belief in associations that stakeholders are already bought in.
Community is just an automatic thing you do at an association.
And that's not always the case.
And you never know if a new stakeholder is hired or you get a new manager what's their attitude toward community going to be.
And when the economy does change and budgets get cut, it's best for you to already have a history of your engagement data for the community, right, again, qualitative and quantitative.
Those member quotes that are saying why members care about it, so that community does not end up the first thing on the chopping block when times get tight or tough.
Um, you need to be able to showcase the value of the community, even if you feel like your stakeholders are already bought in, again, having that history, uh, is valuable in and of itself for a lot of reasons, but especially when times become uncertain.
Alright.
Uh, and then another question that I hear all the time is the dreaded ROI question.
Uh, you know, I know that there are a lot of organizations that are trying to figure out how community relates to the bottom line.
Uh, is that something that you deal with, uh, in your particular space? And are you able to draw that connection? And if so, how? Right.
That is a big one.
Um, like I've been saying for associations, community engagement is tied to member renewals.
So, uh, keeping members around is important, is a big way that associations maintain their budgets and make money.
Um, one interesting way to connect this is higher logics form offers activity sync, a tool they call activity sync that can push data from the community back into your AMS or CRM or your membership data also lives so that you can compare, you know, level of activity in the community compared to, uh, renewals.
Right? Are people who are more engaged in the community actually the ones who are more likely to renew or keeping up longer memberships year over year? Um, so there are some mechanisms out there depending on platforms and depending on tools you have available that really can help tie those two things together to prove, yes, when we're using the community and members benefit from it, they are more likely to stick around and stay members in the long run.
And then also are they more likely to be advocates of the organization? Um, I talk a lot about word-of-mouth marketing.
Right? We know that that is so much more effective than other forms of marketing, and it is community is one of those ways that you can get members to be advocates for your organization if they're getting continuous value from that.
Um, that's another area where, like, qualitative data is really helpful to understand on that NPS.
Like, are you sharing about our community, do you tell your peers or your coworkers that this exists? And, you know, gently encouraging people to do that too really helps.
But where it's possible, right, again, bringing your community engagement data together with your membership data is going to help you better explain the ROI in the situation of a membership organization, of course.
Uh, alright.
So this has been fascinating.
So I'm going to stop telling people data doesn't matter, because clearly that's bad advice.
But I I I I've really learned a lot here in terms of why it's important and how to use it.
And so, uh, I really appreciate you coming on to talk about all this stuff.
There's one final question that I ask everybody before they leave, and that is this.
I want you to make a prediction.
In five years, what do you think we're gonna be talking about in the community building space? Yeah.
You know, if I had the ability to predict the future, I'd be much happier.
But, um, what I think or at least maybe hope that we see a lot more of is building the communities that we do more directly with the members of the community, right, bringing in more of the participants of our community to help us build the space.
Uh, I often advocate for using, um, volunteers and engaging community champions and advocates very deeply in our online community space to maintain the health and longevity of our online communities.
I think there is still a lot of opportunity for that to happen more often in more types of communities where it hasn't always historically happened.
So I think in five years, we may figure that out, and that may become much more common where a community builder manager strategist is not just doing it alone, but they're building community purposefully with the members or with, specific participant stakeholders of the community so that they're actually building something the members want and not something we're assuming they want.
So there's a lot of room for collaboration and delegation it sounds like.
What's holding us back from that? Is that, uh, limitations in software? Is that just the mindset of community managers? What, what do you think, you know, is getting in the way of us getting there? Yeah.
Uh, again, it kinda goes back a bit to resources.
Right? Volunteer management is a skill in and of itself and is not always overlapping with community management skills.
Um, but I think it should be more often.
Or if your community has a team, you want somebody with volunteer management skills.
Even if you're not a nonprofit or an association, engaging members and customers who want to volunteer to help within your online community.
Um, that's such a great way to engage your audience.
Make sure your community, actually, like I said, is some thing your members want or customers want, um, it also is quite a mindset.
Like you said, uh, I think going back to the fact that a professional association's just assume online community is something they do.
It it just is done.
There it's not really a question.
So staff also assume, well, we just build this thing, and then it will be great.
And our members will love it, but they're not always asking the right questions of what exactly does a member want.
Right? So they have an online community, and it might be okay.
But there's so much room for improvement that they just haven't dug into yet and having those conversations and engaging volunteers and members more deeply and closely to build community together will just skyrocket the value.
Yeah.
You know, it's, uh, interesting to hear you say that because I work a lot with content creators.
And when you are a content creator, you are in control of the content until you hit publish and whether it's a podcast episode or a video or whatever it is, you know, it it goes out the door, and then it sort of changes hands and goes out to the audience.
And like you said, a community is much more collaborative, and that is a different skill of being able to have conversation, have dialogue, and adapt, and, you know, those those feedback loops that we were talking about earlier.
It's it's different.
It's a different mindset for a lot of people.
So, um It's different and scary.
Yeah.
It it can be it because it's a it's a loss of control in some ways.
You know, it's sort of, uh, we're gonna build defenses and just see how the people bounce around inside the perimeter, and we'll see what happens.
Um, look, Kevin hackney you so much.
The company is confident communities consulting.
People can check it out at confidentcommunities.
com, especially if, uh, you are a professional association and you want help building your community, uh, and, and like we said, especially if you, uh, are using higher logic and wanna use higher logic, I really appreciate you coming on and and sharing your thoughts with me.
Yeah.
Thanks for your time today, Seth.
It was a great conversation.
Uh,
