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Your Online Community is a Data Goldmine

Build vital connections between your customers, members, and employees. Learn how to manage and take action on all your community data.

woman reviewing community data to gain insights

Online community data empowers your organization to become more human-focused.

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:

2 Types of Data You Can Find in Your Online Community

In general, there are two types of online community data you can learn from: active and passive insights.

Active 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

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:

  • Demographic data, such as ages, location, jobs,
    and more
  • Behavioral data that encompasses everything that your community members interact with in the community, such as blog views, search history, forum posts, and peer networking
  • Transactional data, from past purchases to subscription tier to returns and coupons used It’s one way to listen to your members without asking them directly.

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.

7 Ways to Use Your Community Data to Help Your Organization

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.

woman reviewing online community feedback to improve user experience

1. Build a better user experience

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:

  • Improve your product or program offerings. Your users are telling you what they want. Realistically, you may not always be able to make every item happen, but you’ll have a deep understanding of their real needs, which can guide your strategic roadmap.
  • Improve how users feel about you. Openness to feedback and transparent communication creates genuine relationships between you and your members, customers, or employees.
  • Improve market placement. As you improve your product and programs with real customer feedback, you’re
    fortifying yourself against the competition.
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man reviewing community data to identify brand advocates

2. Find advocates and volunteers

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:

  • Profile information. Demographic and professional information from user profiles provides insight into skillsets within your community, so you can see if they’re a good fit for volunteer needs.
  • Community contributions. The material your community members post is another way to identify people with the skills you need. Look for file uploads, published blogs, and experts who answer forum questions with knowledgeable information. The more often they’re helping other people, the better candidates for advocacy they’ll be.
  • Interest. See who has already visited your volunteer information pages and downloaded your volunteer guidelines and other documents. These folks are already interested enough in volunteering to seek out more information on their own, so they’re great candidates if you need more help. By analyzing their demographics and behavior, you’ll be able to determine candidates for these programs, who can help with creating content, doing interviews, and lending their expertise to event planning or business management tasks.

The Best Part?

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.

woman personalizing sales and marketing messages using community data

3. Personalize your marketing and sales efforts

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.

  • Leverage activity data from your online community to gain insight into their pain points, interests, and intents, and use those insights to personalize the experience. For example, some of your users may enjoy weekly emails, while others will hit delete without opening them. Some love posting in the community, while others prefer just to respond to posts others create.
  • Use activity data to personalize communication and content. For the group that loves events, send an email with information on upcoming registration periods or links to event speaker blogs. For those that prefer online interaction, give them information about ways that they can get involved and share their ideas in your online community.
  • Employ data to give users more of the content and programs they like. If passive insights show that event wrap-up blogs perform well, write more of them. If active insights contain requests for more professional development options, institute more training opportunities or mentoring programs.

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

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community manager using community data to improve engagement

4. Increase community participation

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:

  • Log in if they haven’t for a while
  • Fill out their profile
  • Make their first post
  • Add other members as connections
  • Upload, download, and view library resources
  • Mark responses as “best answer”
  • Participate in surveys and polls
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woman in a wheelchair using online community to identify engaged members

5. Identify ideal customers, members, and employees (and minimize churn risk)

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:

  • Inactive users: Keep in mind that the interaction that you don’t have is just as important as the interaction you do have. If your users are nowhere to be seen, that’s a clear warning sign.
  • Disgruntled and angry comments: When someone constantly posts upset or angry messages in your community, it’s a warning sign. Of course, if it’s a one-off post or once every three months or so, paired with positive posts, you don’t have to worry as much, but watch for trends by certain customers.
  • Elementary questions: If you notice people asking basic product or subscription questions long after they should be, it’s a sign that they won’t or haven’t fully adopted your offering

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.

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two community managers discussing revenue generation strategies

6. Drive additional revenue

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:

  • Has a new problem arisen from a recent event?
  • Has a member completed an educational course at one level that would indicate they might like to take a course at the next level?
  • Have there been any major shifts in communication or technology in their industry?
  • Has their company been acquired or obtained investment capital? Have there been any changes to their stock, if the company is publicly held?
  • Has your point of contact changed positions within the organization?
  • Has your point of contact reached a threshold of experience where they might now be qualified for a certification you offer?
  • And finally, the most important question…Do you have a product or service offering that could make things easier, help them bridge a gap, or help them advance in their career?

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.

More Engagement = More Revenue

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.

public policy team discussing advocacy feedback from their online community

7. Start the right advocacy initiatives

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.

 

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A direct channel to your members, customers, or employees

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!

Association Professional improving online community engagement