Measuring Sense of Community

  • 13 February 2017
  • 6 replies
  • 522 views

We believe Sense of Community is important as it shows the level of liveliness within your community and it tells you something about the likelihood of people to contribute.



We looked into three different metrics:



1. The number of unique contributors in a thread

2. Percentage of single user topics

3. The relationship between unique contributors and posts per topic



The research found that a higher number of contributors per topic has a positive impact on the amount of conversation in your community.



Want to know more about the benchmarks created and how to measure the Sense of Community within your online community? Go to our knowledge base to find out more.



Do you have more questions? Make sure to ask and let us know how you keep your Sense of Community happening :)




6 replies

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Hi Stephanie,



I love the idea of a sense of community metric! I'm wondering which export you used for this? Specifically the "number of unique contributors in a thread".

Any tips on how to pivot table my way to a monthly result that I can track? :)



Best,

Ditte
Hi Ditte,



Knowing the number of unique contributors can indeed give you a lot of interesting insights. You can even take it a step further to see how many unique contributors per forum or category and therefore see how certain forums are better to generate conversations in comparison to others.



Measuring the number of unique contributors per topic is easy to do using our exports. Simply follow these steps:



1) Download a Post export for the selected period you want to evaluate (we suggest to take at least 6 months of data)

2) Open the export and create a table in a new sheet, selecting all the Post data

3) Insert a Pivot Table and make sure to check the box Add Data to model as appears below:





4) Once you do that all the following fields to your pivot table:





5) To make the Distinct Post Creator field you simply need to first add the field post_creator

6) Click this field on your Pivot Table Fields and the click on Value Field Settings



7) Under Summarize Field by choose Distinct count as appears below:





😎 You are done and your pivot table is ready! You can now see the number of unique contributions per topic :)



Hope this helps and let us know what interesting things you find!
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That's super helpful, Daniel. Thank you for sharing 🙂
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Go to our knowledge base to find out more.



It's asking for a username and password 🙂
Hey Jurgen,



We have sent an invite to your email so you can access the knowledge base. As this may have been lost by now I have resent it. Please take a look in your spam folder, in case it landed there 🙂
Hey guys, we have made a new video on Sense of Community...if the topic still interests you check it out here: https://community.insided.com/community-strategy-15/watch-our-new-video-on-sense-community-99

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