How To Set Meaningful KPIs for Your Brand Community: A 2024 Guide
It doesn’t matter if you have been building community for days, months, or years. There is one topic that gives most community builders pause: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
For those of us building brand communities, KPIs are not always easy, but they are essential to checking your progress and sharing it back to your organization.
Let’s face it, even though your company has invested in community (that’s, after all, the reason you have a job), you must show progress toward outcomes that have a meaningful connection to organization goals. KPIs are a storytelling tool, helping you narrate your community’s progress. They are therefore a powerful tool to secure the resources and support your community needs.
This work is not easy, but in this blog post, you will learn a simple framework for setting KPIs for your brand community. First, you’ll learn what KPIs are, and then you’ll learn a framework to create your own. Finally, you’ll find a list of KPIs to inspire your own.
Note: Some organizations use Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) instead of KPIs. While KPIs and OKRs are two different structures for setting goals, you can use the framework here to set OKRs too.
The Basics of KPIs
KPIs are defined by Rapid BI as “financial and non-financial measures used to help an organization measure progress towards a stated organizational goal or objective.”
In layman’s terms, a KPI is:
A clearly defined, quantifiable goal for your work
Tied to a measurable metric
Vital to the team or organization’s goal
Easily communicated back to relevant team members or leaders in your organization
A community KPI is a key performance indicator that helps you monitor your community’s contribution toward larger organizational outcomes.
KPIs should always teach you something. If you set KPIs and, in tracking them, you have not gleaned any new information, it means they are not meaningful; it is time to change course. It is important to remember that KPIs, like everything else about your community, should be reconsidered at regular intervals to ensure they remain useful as storytelling and progress-tracking tools. They have to help you make decisions and track progress.
You should reconsider them systematically, as changing them may mean starting your story over again: On the one hand, if you track KPIs and do nothing with them, they are effectively useless. On the other hand, if you change them often, you lose your benchmarks for progress, so the story you tell of your community’s progress gets disjointed.
“KPIS are a storytelling tool, helping you narrate your community’s progress. They are therefore a powerful tool to secure the resources and support your community needs.”
Leading vs. Lagging Indicators
KPIs fall into two categories: Leading indicators for success and lagging indicators for success. You need both to gauge your efforts and see the big picture.
Leading Indicators
Leading indicators are measures of your input into the community. They measure your (and your team’s) efforts to make the community a success.
This definition is a little abstract, so let’s clarify with an example in context. If you manage a brand community that connects customers for peer-to-peer support, you may have an overarching goal to increase your members’ customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores by 10% this quarter (that is a lagging indicator of success, which we will discuss in a moment).
What inputs into the community might help make that happen? You may need to look at retention of members who have been in the community for over a year, an increase in the number of questions answered by members, and speed of response. If you increase these numbers, you are more likely to increase CSAT too. You will, therefore, need to spearhead initiatives to increase all of these metrics. You could then measure the impact of those initiatives (or inputs) in the community.
Those input measures that ladder up into the CSAT score would be your leading indicators. These tend to be measures you can monitor daily, weekly, or monthly so you can quickly make changes to your initiatives to increase these scores so that your lagging indicator also increases.
Leading indicators might not mean much to those outside your team, but they will be extremely valuable to your day-to-day community operations and initiatives.
Lagging Indicators
Now, why should those outside your team care that you’ve, say, retained 100% of your year-long members? What they probably mostly care about is bettering the customer’s experience or efficiency of the organization. They will care less about your leading indicators unless you tie them explicitly to the impact they have on your lagging indicators.
As the name suggests, lagging indicators are the KPIs of the results that follow or “lag” the inputs you make.
In a community context, your lagging indicator might be CSAT scores or another high-level important organizational outcome. If you were to only include CSAT scores in what you monitored, though, you would have no idea what to do to increase the score; you would just see the number changing over time and retroactively guess what inputs affect it most.
Lagging indicators depend on the purpose of your community but they should point back to community outcomes or organizational outcomes at the highest level, perhaps that even your company’s CEO or founder cares about. Some examples include Net Promoter Score (NPS) of members, CSAT, customer referrals, or sales of supply-side community members (in a two-sided marketplace community like Etsy or Lyft).
You need both leading and lagging indicators to tell the full story of your work.
The ABCs of KPIs
Now that you know the basics of KPIs, let’s learn a three-step framework to set your very own community KPIs.
Sparking a conversation about KPIs (especially if you’ve been in your role for a while and still feel uncertain) requires courage and curiosity. But if you choose to do so, especially across the organization and beyond your immediate team, your work will multiply in its impact. That’s because, whether your organization knows it yet or not, your work, directly and indirectly, impacts some of the most vital customer-related outcomes of your organization. Community will likely impact revenue-related metrics, innovation speed and possibilities, and even cost savings.
Let’s take a breath and remember it’s not easy, but it’s simple. In this case, setting KPIs is as simple as knowing your ABCs: Assess, Brainstorm, Choose.
Phase 1: Assess
The first phase of creating meaningful community KPIs involves assessing your team’s strategic objectives and aligning with your internal stakeholders. If the strategic objectives of the community are not clear, you will need to gather input from stakeholders to give their feedback on how the community should impact organizational outcomes.
If you have been in your role for a while or have been hired at a director-level or above, this may seem scary: you do not want to appear as if you do not have the answers to how community should impact organizational outcomes. But you also cannot declare your community’s ideal results on the organization and assume everyone will understand what you mean and agree with you. So, instead, this phase focuses on you creating a hypothesis for how community should impact the organization, getting buy-in and agreement that this hypothesis is correct, and then keeping people looped into how you plan to tell the story of progress.
There are three steps in the Assess phase:
Refer to your team’s strategic objectives.
Strategic objectives are broad goals that your team/company works to achieve. These are unlikely to be community-specific, though it depends on the organization.
For example, if your company has a goal to “capture 75% market share by August 2025,” you can think about how community can contribute to that goal. Perhaps a music app has the goal to “connect more listeners than any other music streaming site.” The KPIs you set should contribute to reaching this goal, measuring what you can do to help tell a story about how the community contributes to this goal.
List your stakeholders.
To ensure organizational support, let stakeholders know you are re-working (or initially setting) your KPIs. This way, as you are solidifying the KPIs, stakeholders can provide feedback or support that is important to your final decision.
According to KPI Strategist Bernie Smith, there are a few strategic people you should include in the updates or setting of your KPIs:
Data originators: people closest to where data is collected - probably includes you!
Data aggregators: people who package the data together - usually IT
Data analysts: Business Intelligence team members
Internal users of data: people who need the data to make decisions
Also, be on the lookout for other departments that do an excellent job of selling their impact. Bring them into the initial discovery by chatting with them informally about how they found success.
Create a communications plan.
KPIs give you a story to tell, but that story does you no good if you do not share it. The critical part of a communications plan is deciding which people will (1) help you make decisions about KPIs and which people are only needed to (2) inform the discovery phase, (3) give you approvals, or (4) be informed of the final decision.
Write down a list of who needs to be involved in each of these four kinds of conversations and take note of when you plan to speak to them and through which channels. For those in category 1, you will likely bring them together in Phase 2.
Bear in mind that there are a handful of situations where this process will need to be adapted:
When leadership cannot give you enough information about strategic objectives or what outcomes are meaningful to the company. When this happens, you have two routes you can take:
Bring the issue to leadership and offer to help determine the most meaningful outcomes (if you are at a large company or have yet to establish authority, I do not recommend this option).
Skip to #3 in this section.
If you run a hobby- or movement-based community. Make sure the purpose and goals of your community are documented. For you, the community’s success (perhaps measured by growth, retention, sense of community index) is a meaningful outcome, so your lagging KPIs can include these measures.
If you work in an early-stage startup or organization in which goals and business models undergo rapid shifts. You can still create clarity even in uncertain environments, though it is admittedly going to be challenging. If this is the case, it is okay for you to create an educated guess about the most meaningful organizational outcomes. Know that your lagging KPIs may need to shift, but that you can closely monitor the same leading KPIs to create a healthy community that can contribute to multiple business goals, even if those goals change in the future.
“Your work, directly and indirectly, impacts some of the most vital customer-related outcomes of your organization.”
Phase 2: Brainstorm
Our next step is getting people together to brainstorm a long list of KPIs. While you can do this solo, this section will be far more effective (and fun!) with others involved.
You should invite the stakeholders you defined in your communications plan (as many as you can, but no more than 10). Make sure to be clear about the purpose of the brainstorm: you know what data are possible to capture and what may be most meaningful, but you want help seeing any blind spots you may have. Together, you will brainstorm a very long list of possible KPIs and then rank them so that everyone agrees with what is most important to measure.
During the brainstorm, for each strategic objective, you can create KPI Trees to brainstorm the relevant KPIs.
KPI Trees are rooted in a strategic goal and allow you to branch out into the following:
Themes
Tactics
Measures
As an example, if one objective is “to be the best-performing makeup community in the world,” this is how you might break that down.
Themes: Service, Experience, Experimentation
Tactics: Respond to questions in less than 15 minutes, create an empowering experience, offer tangible value to members, increase feedback for products.
Measures: Response time, number of questions answered by the community, customer satisfaction rating in community, Net Promoter score, event attendance, customer satisfaction in store. These can be either leading or lagging measures of success.
The goal here is to end the brainstorm with a long list. After that, either solo or with 1-2 team members, you will refine that list by which KPIs would be most understandable to the team, tell the most compelling story, and are possible to measure (e.g., you might be desperate to measure the conversion rate from Facebook Group activity to purchase rate, but the Facebook Groups API makes this impossible - this is also a good reason not to build your community on a third-party platform 😉).
Phase 3: Choose
We have assessed our strategic objectives, brainstormed a long list of potential KPIs, and now we need to choose 3-7 KPIs to measure regularly.
Create a spreadsheet or write on a whiteboard to rank each of the long-list KPIs by the following:
Accessibility of the data
Ability to affect change after monitoring
Level of impact on strategic objectives or organizational outcomes
The priority of the strategic objective
Sum up the totals for each potential metric and determine which are most highly-ranked from that list.
Once you have determined the KPIs you will measure, it’s time to get even more specific. Decide:
How you will calculate
Source(s) of the data
Data collector and stakeholders
The target for your performance period
How often to report
Now it is time to set up your beta dashboard of KPIs. After you run the numbers for the first time, circulate the dashboard internally with your stakeholders and ask for feedback. As a result of seeing this dashboard, will you and your team be able to make changes to their tactical or strategic work? If not, it needs more refinement.
Here is an excellent example of a community health dashboard, but you can create something even more straightforward in a Google Sheet or even more complicated in a Looker or Tableau dashboard:
Back to Assess
KPIs are not one-and-done. You need to measure, report, and revisit your KPIs to ensure they help you tell a story and make decisions.
How often do you need to revisit? OpenTable’s CMO says, “I’ve found that people can really light the path and set more aggressive targets for 90 days out. Then you get information and signal in those 90 days, and then you set the next target.” Ninety days is a good benchmark, but ultimately, you will need to do what works in your organization; it all depends on the culture of goal measurement already in place.
When reassessing, you may find some of your KPIs continue to demonstrate insight that shows the value of your work. That is great, keep what is working and either adjust the others or find new ones to measure and keep moving ahead!
Example KPIs for Communities
By now, you may have noticed that this process will yield wildly different KPIs depending on the varying strategic objectives of your organization or the purpose of your community. You brainstorm will look completely different from other community builders, as will your final KPI dashboard. That is normal! KPIs are meaningless unless you customize them.
Keep this in mind as you look at the example KPIs below. These are a starting point, meant to guide you, not be the final word.
“KPIs are not always easy, but they are essential to checking your progress and sharing it with your organization.”
KPIs for Brand Communities
Here is a mix of lagging indicators of success for brand communities, categorized by the organizational outcomes you seek.
Community KPIs for Innovation
Number of ideas submitted
Number of ideas accepted
Rating of ideation sessions
Number of members interviewed by the research team
Community KPIs for Support
CES (Customer Effort Score)
Time to the first answer
Time to resolution (best answer)
Ticket deflection
Community KPIs for Marketing
New names added to a customer database
Number of links shared online
Number of leads to download content
Increase in SEO traffic, by Pageviews
Community KPIs for Sales
Time to sale for community members versus non-community members
Conversion rate from membership to sales conversation
Satisfaction with sales interactions
Repurchase intent
Community KPIs for Advocacy
NPS
Referrals
Brand sentiment
Community KPIs for Product
Usage
Adoption
Feedback
Most of these KPIs are lagging indicators of community success, and are easy to measure but hard to impact without also taking into account leading indicators of community success (see below).
KPIs For Brand Communities
Community Member Growth
Community Contribution Growth
Community Satisfaction Scores
Community Engagement: the definition of engagement will depend on the platform you use, but commonly includes post frequency, time to response, online event attendance, and activity rates
Sense of Community Index or Brief Sense of Community Index scores
Rate of one-to-one connections or direct messages in the community
Subgroup expansion and growth
Community safety scores (usually assessed by custom surveys)
These KPI examples apply to almost all communities as leading indicators of community success, but not lagging indicators of business impact.
Conclusion
Setting meaningful KPIs certainly isn’t easy, but with this foundation, you can take on the task. Sparking conversations and setting meaningful KPIs inside your company will multiply the impact of your work. Bringing your team together to determine these KPIs will not only result in inspiring others with your community’s progress but will also help set you apart as an internal leader of your organization. Choosing meaningful KPIs is hard work; your willingness to do it means you are leaps ahead of the pack.
