Build vital connections between your customers, members, and employees. Learn how to manage and take action on all your community data.
Being customer, member, or employee-centric is no longer a nice-to-have. If you want to compete in today’s highly personalized market, you need to put your people at the center of everything you do, from product development and program offerings to your sales cycle and onboarding journey.
The fuel that powers that human-focus? Data.
One enormous and often overlooked benefit of building an online community is the data it can provide. When you create an online community for your organization, you’re building vital connections between your customers, members, and employees, and with you. This unlocks collective knowledge, giving your organization an extremely powerful way to know how your community members think and feel.
Think about it: Your users are conversing every day, asking each other questions, giving feedback, suggesting improvements – and you have access to all of that. This data gives you insights you can use to improve your product roadmap, create better educational, materials, inform your marketing, and more.
Want to unleash the power of community data for your organization? Let’s dive into:
In general, there are two types of online community data you can learn from: active and passive insights.
Active insights are derived from asking someone about their preferences, through surveys, exit polls, and feedback-specific threads within your community and via email.
If you’re thinking about implementing new offers, programs, events, or making large changes, begin with active insights so your community members can tell you exactly what they think about the idea.
Active insights primarily gauge reactions to ideas and can be a faster way to get insights — enough so you know if it’s worth investing in more research on a specific offer or prototyping a product.
The downside of active insights is that they only go so far. Just because your members don’t ask for something directly doesn’t mean they don’t need or want it.
Passive insights are derived from behavioral, demographic, and transactional data within the community, such as search history, most popular threads, common questions, and community usage.
Passive insights are the real magic of an online community. There are three types of passive insights:
With Higher Logic you can use data from your community, and across your other integrated technology solutions, to provide relevant, personalized content based on user roles, interests, and even the actions they take. Unlike other community solutions, Higher Logic’s integrations with your member or customer database gives you a 360-degree view of your members.
There’s so much you can do with your online community data. From planning marketing campaigns to sentiment analysis, your community provides a wealth of information. Here’s how to use it to improve both your community and your organization.
An online community gives you direct access to what your customers, members, or employees want and need. With an engaged online community, you don’t have to wonder what they’re thinking – they’re talking about it. Communicating with users and actively seeking their feedback on processes, programs, and product roadmaps
is key to transparency.
By creating a private channel where you can listen to your customers, members, and employees, your community can help you:
Your best salespeople already exist in your pipeline: your loyal members or customers. Advocates build loyalty, help crowdsource new ideas and products, increase renewals and upsells, and get more clients through referrals. They’re incredible resources for your organization.
Identifying the right candidates for advocacy opportunities, like inviting a community member to speak at an event on your behalf, or finding volunteers for your new mentoring program, is just a matter of using the community data in front of you:
Higher Logic’s automation rules cut out so much manual work – categorize and act on data, easily. For example, let’s say you’re looking for enthusiastic community members to help moderate your community. Use automation rules to identify a group of community members who have posted over 30 times this year and automate an email to these members inviting them to become volunteers.
To keep up with your users’ expectations, you need to tailor and personalize the member experience. Customize their experiences in your online community to help members, customers, or employees feel appreciated and understood – and even grow your revenue.
Act on the insights your community’s activity data provides and build custom content and programs that are hyperrelevant. This builds trust in your brand and keeps your members coming back to your community again and again
Your own online community generates a wealth of data you can use to improve community engagement. For example, you might use community to update your community engagement strategy based on performance or create content in the community around hot topics.
You can easily identify individual activity problems by running engagement reports or viewing dashboards. Look at the number of members who have performed important activities. If the numbers are low, you have a specific
activity problem. Knowing if you have an individual activity problem or a general, big-picture participation problem will help you develop the right strategies to combat the issue. It will also help you target your strategies toward only members who have not been engaging in your community.
Use your data to improve participation by encouraging members to:
Community data helps you identify your ideal users — the people who not only purchase from you, but purchase from you again and again. One way to do this is to understand the commonalities between your renewing members: How often do they log in to the community? Do they participate in community engagement activities? Are they at a certain subscription level, or a specific price point?
The ability to identify these ideal members also means you can isolate disengaged users before they choose not to renew. Not all customers, members, or employees are going to tell you directly that they’re dissatisfied, but you might see signs in your online community. Look for:
Community feedback is an opportunity to build loyalty and trust
Perhaps every organization’s worst fear is having customer criticism front and center in a public place. Odds are, you will get negative feedback in your community. And that’s okay! It’s better to have occasional cranky comments on your own platform than on social media, or somewhere else you might not see it.
When you get a complaint in your community, you have direct access to the individual and the problem, so you can address it immediately and/or take the conversation offline. Critical comments and venting can also provide you with insight into areas you can improve.
Using the data sources at your disposal can help you spot key sales opportunities in your existing user base. Combine new business development techniques with analysis from your customer, member, or employee digital footprint to gain a clearer picture of their future needs or wants. Look for indicators like these:
This type of opening is particularly easy to spot if your users are discussing current events or recent changes in your online community’s discussion forum. Take notice of what issues affect them and find ways to help. Gathering data points from external or integrated sources (like a job board, learning management system (LMS), or certification platform) can also help create a more complete profile with many behavior indicators. The more engagement points and data you can monitor, the easier it is to identify and prioritize your accounts or opportunities.
American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) discovered that members with at least 1 community activity per month generate 5x more revenue than users with lower engagement. Their Collaborate community is a huge part of how they drive success across their programs.
Like we shared earlier, your online community gives you a wealth of insight into what members want. In addition to applying this to your benefits and marketing, associations with advocacy directives can turn use these insights for public policy, government relations, and advocacy initiatives. You can use the community to collect feedback from your members. And community discussions may even alert you to member concerns you didn’t know about
The policy team at Engineers Australia, for example, uses the community as a two-way channel to get member input on their advocacy. They no longer have to solicit members via email or post a general call to an entire audience on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Becoming user-centric requires an ongoing investment in data. An online community helps you learn more about your members, customers, or employees in real-time than any other channel. You can then use that data to drive better experiences and outcomes for your users and your organization!