Francisco and I met some time ago online. We talked, we clicked and we keep poking at each other. Also online. Good fun. Always learning something.

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This time he challenged me to write a blog about a value model I developed. The days where #members and #unique logins are meaningful metrics for community success are waning. They never were a good metric but with the erosion of transactional interactions it is now clear that a new model is needed.

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Community Leaders Forum

We are now nearly five years underway with our own community of customers and other community managers interested in the profession. We meet online ten times a year. Join if you want. The mix of community use cases and discussions about real struggles of the Community Managers gives us all input to push the envelope. In August 2023 we first discussed the idea of measuring value interactions in the group.

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Why do people come to your community?

Why do people come to your community? And more importantly, why do they come back? The answer is ‘relevancy’ and the currency is ‘value’. If people experience value, they are likely to return.

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So, the question is: why do we not measure value exchanges in our community? It's probably because it is a bit harder to report on than logins and registrations. Likely because nobody touched on the topic so far. Also, how do we then measure it?

A fair exchange of value

When we sit down with an organization to discuss a community program, we start with business outcomes. How would you like to quantify the value of the community effort?

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You, as an organization, are putting in time and money. How do you want to see that back? Once we answer that, we talk about “And why would anybody ever come to you?” What is the value that a member experiences when it comes to you? And why would they want to come back?

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Those two discussions are linked. If you have the right model, then the more value members experience, the more value the company will experience. So here we shift from ‘more members’ to ‘more members with valuable interactions’.

The value nucleus

Everybody will recognize this. You are staring at a dashboard and are thinking: “What am I actually looking at?” After looking up and down I ended up with the value nucleus of any human interaction:

“How much value was received and how much value was given?”

I call that the value nucleus. People either receive or give value. It is the job of the community manager to grow that marketplace of value exchanges.

Measuring value exchange

In most community platforms it is possible to allocate points to certain behaviors. Instead of using those points only for leaderboards, that very same point system can be used to look at “the total amount of points awarded in a month”. Here is a simple example

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This collection of interactions that you as a community manager have decided is the most valuable, then leads to the total sum of points during a month. Key Indicators of success then become: Value interaction growth and Average Value per active member.

Once you get going with this model, it will open the door for tactics that increase the value experience of a member and as a result the value for the organization.

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