#64 The Most Important Community KPI

Last week I shared that I've been, as they say, "going through it" the last few weeks... and so many of you reached out saying that you were struggling with feeling creative and motivated, too.

I appreciate your responses SO MUCH. I felt so much better this week, and I think that's because I connected with so many of you.

It's really powerful to build community and share what you're going through – let this be your sign to share the real, real!

I've been working with my client ​Bosses in Beauty​ on their alumni membership and we opened doors this week. I thought I'd share a little bts of how I plan to track progress and measure success!

... because it's not the same as your classic product KPIs when we're talkin' about human connection.

And human connection is what we talk about here...

Let's get into it –


The most important community KPI, which is hard (read: time consuming) to track, is sentiment.

If you have access to a community forum of your people, whether that is a Facebook group, a reddit thread, a discord, slack community, or a full blown membership product ... you're sitting on a gold mine.

Whether you're the one running it, or you're wanting to build a product for that community, there is so much quality data to help you make business and product decisions in the conversations people have.

Every week my amazing teammates and I are pulling together the qualitative themes from forums for our clients:

  • Who are we celebrating?

  • What conversations are catching on?

  • What is the overall vibe & energy of our members?

  • What challenges have we heard 3 or more times?

Like I said, this isn't your average KPI tracker…

We track this data week to week so that we can see short-term and long-term trends. As for how to track it, I like to keep a "pretty" dashboard for the client, and a messy Miro board for my team.

You can also capture a lot of data from chat threads during live calls and events (aka the zoom chat). What we're looking for is the themes and common challenges members are having.

As a bonus, you can use this same data to create a members only weekly newsletter. Share the conversations that are catching on and celebrate your members in that email. It will pull people in that have been disengaged in your forum.

Data is meant to be used

The phrase "use member data" is often a "no thanks" or "not ethical" to people ... but knowing how to leverage data ethically can take an average community to an active community with high retention.

Community data can be used to design your programming for upcoming months or even adjust your curriculum.

This doesn't mean you ask people exactly what they want. This means you pay attention to what they're already sharing.

Here's an example:

Let's say you notice many of your members are struggling with understanding finances. You see this question and discourse come up in many ways. But you don't currently offer anything to help them with finances... or you do, but it isn't being viewed/used.

How can you plan programming to address this common theme?

  • You add 2 types of finance events to your events schedule (notice which get higher RSVPs to get closer to the root problem).

  • You share out a budget tracker, or another appropriate finance template, with a video on how to use it (if it's a gap in your curriculum, you might even add it there).

  • You bring in a financial partner to teach and pitch their services so that your members can get more support (plus you can set up a referral deal with them).

This will leave your members feeling like you, to be dramatic, answered their prayers! And guess what that leads to? Retention and community-led growth... aka your community telling others to join.

Oh and these are the other two KPIs I track, but I hope that now you can see how sentiment is the driver for the other two: retention & referral.

This is the exact strategy I used to increase retention by 4% at bossbabe.

We completely adjusted our programming based on community conversations instead of worrying about the "original promise" from years prior.

This is why you have to be SO careful what you promise on a community or membership sales page, you need to leave room for experimentation ... but I'll leave that for another issue!

Tracking Retention

Tracking sentiment is the secret sauce to improving your retention.

That's how you know if you're responding to sentiment well, and creating an incredible experience.

So how should you actually measure retention?

Your accountant should be able to set up a retention chart for you. It looks something like this:

In a retention chart you can see monthly retention based on "cohort", or the month they joined.

This is also helpful to tie back to programming or any kind of special bonus offer – if one cohort does much better than others, you can go back and look at what you did differently that month.

How should you set retention goals?

You might remember my article explaining the difference between ​content subscriptions and transformational memberships​.

There is going to be a different retention goal for each.

Content subscriptions will typically have a lower retention than transformational memberships, but it really depends on the industry so I'm not going to provide a baseline.

For transformational memberships, I like to see a retention rate over 90%. That's a "we're in the green!" level retention.

Price point plays a factor too – you'll see more churn (cancellations) with a membership that is designed for "everyone" at a low price point and stadium-type experience than a high-quality, high ticket membership.

But no matter how you track retention, focusing on your member experience and sentiment is going to drive retention up ... so if you take one thing away from this, start looking for weekly themes in your forum or event chats.


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#65 Avoid One-Size Communities

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#63 Experience-Driven Pricing