Build With Users Curated #4
🎯 KPIs & Metrics. Measuring community success
Heeyyy there! 👋
Curated #4 is here! In this issue, we decided to center some content around the topic of measuring community success. It’s not so trivial and we’ve seen a lot of community managers struggle with it in general. So, we bundled up some cool things for you to check out.
Besides some fun content, we’re also doing a little experiment with a LIVE Build With Users interview next week that you can join! We’ll just do our regular casual call to ask some questions, but you’ll have a chance to chime in and ask yours too! 🤩
See our awesome guest below 👇
🧐 Question of the week
What is your current approach to measuring community success?
There are different takes and people working on this. I’d love to learn more about how you currently approach this. Reply to this email or leave a comment.
📣 A little announcement – Next week Feb 16, we’re doing a little experiment with a LIVE Build With Users interview on Twitch with Erik Martin, Chief Community Officer at Teal. Besides our casual chat where we’re asking questions, you can ask yours too! (some will end up in the written piece for this newsletter — credits included)
🖐 Favorite Five
In every one of these bi-weekly issues, we’ll highlight at least one cool read, video, podcast episode, tool, and person to follow on Twitter. You’ll find some mixed resources with an emphasis on KPIs & Metrics: measuring community success for this issue.
📖 Favorite Read(s)
Why 'Feeling Metrics' are Just as Important as Engagement Metrics
15 min read – Four additional things every CX professional needs to measure against to understand not just the true success of their Community, but the entirety of a customer's experience.
How To Measure Success in DevRel Between Companies and Communities
9 min read – Running a community is hard work and keeping community members happy is a big part of it. This article takes the discipline of Developer Relations and covers how DevRel is essential to company survival, the importance of DevRel to developer communities, how community members can help out, and a couple of things more.
📽 Favorite Vid(s)
Amplify Your Impact: Defining, Instrumenting, and Tracking Community KPI Metrics
55 min video – Whether you manage a thriving community or plan to get one off the ground, it's important to understand, articulate, and share the impact of your community. Chris Anderson — Community at Guru, shares a framework you can use to define your KPI metrics and map them to organizational outcome goals. He shares tips on implementation, getting buy-in and engagement from key stakeholders, tracking and analyzing your metrics, and how to leverage KPI data to maximize your community's impact.
🎧 Favorite Podcast Episode(s)
a16z Podcast: Measuring & Managing Community Orgs, Developer Relations and Beyond
33 min episode – We know community is important — whether for developer relations for your platform or just other types of communities — but how do we measure the success of community initiatives and even artifacts (like events or swag), given how indirect so much of it is? How do we know we’re measuring the right things, and is there one key metric for measuring the health of a community?
When it comes to developer relations specifically, where should DevRel sit in an organization (product, sales, engineering)? How do you reconcile developer as customer vs. developer as community member? And what’s the difference between evangelism and advocacy?
Amir Shevat — former VP of Product and Developer Experience at Twitch and former Director of Developer Relations at Slack — drew on his experiences to share insights and answers to these questions. It’s followed by a Q&A with Mikeal Rogers, who works on Community Operations at Protocol Labs, and was formerly Community Manager of the Node.js foundation.
🛠 Favorite Tool(s)
Airtable Community CRM – The Orbit model translated into an Airtable template that functions as your community CRM. It’s a free alternative and something we recently started trying in a much more lightweight twist for Build With Users. We’re having lots of conversations with different people behind the scenes besides the interviews we do and are exploring things that are beyond just this newsletter.
🐦 Follow on Twitter
Danielle Maveal, @daniellexo – Danielle is all about community. She worked on community at Etsy, Airbnb, and Barkbox. She’s also doing some gatherings for community folks, in case you’re interested.
Excited about Build With Users? share some ❤️ on Twitter
Cheers,