A guide to measure "Sense of Community"

Why is Sense of Community important?

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 set and therefore see how certain forums are better to generate conversations in comparison to others.

A guide to measure Sense of Community

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.

Number of posts per topic combined and unique contributors

Next, we’ll have a look at the relationship between the number of unique contributors and the number of posts per topic. The findings show that communities with a higher number of unique contributors per topic relatively also have more posts per topic and therefore have more conversation going on. Meaning that unique contributors trigger the conversation and therefore it is important to stimulate in order to get a livelier community. For example, as shown in the graph below, by having 3 unique contributors per topic you are likely to have between 4 and 5 posts per topic. Moving along to the other side of the chart, you see when having 4 unique contributors per topic you have around 8 posts per topic which indicates more conversation going on in the community.

Recommendation

If sense of community is important for you we recommend you to track the above outlined metrics on a regular basis. However it is important not to look at these metrics in isolation, but rather to see them as a subset of your total community health metrics.