Measuring the number of unique contributors per topic - benchmark


Conversations can be measured by the number of contributors in each thread (depth of the thread). The absolute number of contributors is not necessarily a reliable measure since it can give you a distorted picture of reality. For example, a thread with 10 comments contributed by 2 people is less valuable than a thread with 10 comments contributed by 4 people. The conversation composed of 4 unique contributors gives a better indication of the sense of community.





When doing our analysis we accounted for the number of unique contributors for a set of communities across our database. The average across the communities is 3.79 unique contributors per topic (including the topic starter). The unique contributors per topic are being calculated on an all time basis, where we calculate the average of unique contributors per community. To strive for an ideal sense of community is it advised to focus on an average amount of unique contributors per topic of 3.5 and above.




4 replies

Userlevel 1
Badge
How does this benchmark work for support communities?



In my opinion, a topic with 2 contributors and a "best answer" can easily be of high support value; whereas a long, hot topic with 50+ contributors may start to degrade the support value.
Userlevel 2
Badge +3
Hey Ditte! :)



I understand what you mean with this. What this KPI is measuring is a bit in conflict with what support communities try to achieve (direct answers, so ideally a low amount of contributions).



Maybe it would make sense to refine this KPI, and exclude all topics which are questions from it?



This way you would only measure actual discussions instead of questions & answers.



Let me know what you are thinking of this, as I am currently working on something related. 🔬



Cheers,



Julian
Userlevel 1
Badge
@Julian refining the data sounds like a great place to start. I'll be happy to have a chat with you about it :)



Cheers,

Ditte
Userlevel 2
Badge +3
Sounds like a plan! 🙂 I'll contact you so that we can have a chat about this!

Reply