#10-community

If your product is “showable” then I’d set a goal for a templates or inspiration posts in a section, too.

<@U07V02XU2CB> can you please give a little more detail on "customer $ retention"?

@Joel Primack good idea! I don't think we're a showable solution though. My former employer was a data analytics company and they had a spot in their community to show off their dashboards. 📈

<@U07V02XU2CB> I'm just not sure what is meant by "customer $ retention". Can you write that out in more detail?

FWIW, I’d go on a listening tour with members/potential members first to learn if they can actively participate in a digital-first community program.

I’m calling this out, because I noticed yall work with a lot of highly regulated industries where participation might not be possible in the traditional sense.

Spotted this blog on Discourse recently in case it helps: https://blog.discourse.org/2025/04/20-community-metrics-explained/

@Shelly Ryder - hopefully not too late for you, but this is how I shared impact of our community across the business.
The key here was that we had associated KPIs that were aligned and shared with those departments, which is what helped us prove business value. The ones that are in green are ones we actively measured and were tied to specific metrics.
Ultimately, the only things my execs cared about was money saved and money earned, so we needed to make sure that whatever we did with our community was able to translate into that.

This is great <@U08R6SQJA4X>! Thanks so much. Was it difficult to identify the metrics that can be measured such as Ideas Delivered, NPS Score impact, Cost Avoidance and Pipeline Influenced? CRM integration could help with Pipeline Influence -- but it seems like a manual intervention to follow a discussion thread to see if the conversation resulted in a new logo or upsell opp. I'd guess that Cost Avoidance would be a count of customer answered questions in the community = support tickets avoided (pretty easy). Ideas Delivered -- we use Product Board to collect and prioritize customer ideas for product development, so it won't be managed within the Community. How are you tracking product ideas delivered from Community sourced ideas?

@Shelly Ryder - the difficulty was to get people aligned and bought in, the actual process design and solutioning is actually relatively straightforward. My goal was to make the community part of as many departments as possible, but for that they needed to get value from it, and for it to be part of their day to day.

Ideas delivered = product management had accountability for including community-sourced ideas in their product lifecycle, as well as maintaining the status and progress of ideas.

NPS = program execution sat in my team, so it was relatively simple to measure the delta between community users vs. non

Cost avoidance = we used relatively industry standard methods for that through sample surveying, where we prompt visitors to tell us the purpose of their visit, which is similar to what you are suggesting

Pipeline influenced = we included our community and programs as touchpoints within our demand gen/lead scoring. Even without the CRM integration; every webinar they attend, program they engage with, etc. we made sure we used the processes and toolings on place from marketing operations and tracked via campaigns.

<@U08R6SQJA4X> Once we get approval for a community platform purchase (hoping for Gainsight), I plan to set up cross-functional steering committee to start the process of internal alignment. Here's a look at our phase 1 plan including overall goals, tactics and proposed success measures, which may be modified based on steering committee input:

Gainsight's platform is great, if the rest of your CS org use it, it's a customer marketing goldmine. Good luck with your community project! Community building is one of my favourite things ever (I helped launch over 30 brand communities when working with Gainsight's main competitor ;))