What metrics does your boss ask you for?

metrics
roi
(Richard Millington) #1

Working on a big ROI project with a client at the moment.

Have two quick questions I’m keen to get the community’s take on.

  1. What metrics does your boss ask for? What do they care about most?

  2. How do you collect and send through these metrics?

(Richard Millington) #2

Giving this a quick bump to see if anyone has any answers here.

(Nick Emmett) #3

in fairness, my bosses haven’t asked for anything to date - i produce a monthly report that shows:

  • of Active Users (per week, per month and Last 30 Days)

  • Contributions (again per week, month and L30D)

  • Contributions per active member (per month and L30D)

  • Page Views

  • Most Popular groups

  • Most popular conversations

  • of Ideas generated on our Ideas board

  • Top contributors

I think that’s it from the top of my head.
Hope it helps.

(Sarah Hawk) #4

Responding for future posterity, since it’s a given that you know what my boss asks for @richard_millington

  • new visitors to the entire site
  • new members
  • new member conversion rate

  • new members that made a contribution

  • members that made their first contribution

  • % of new members that contributed
  • active members
  • total members
  • total posts for month
  • posts per active member
  • total posts for month (less mine)
  • posts per active member (less mine)

Active members and total posts are the two stats that I care the most about, with member conversion rate third. The first two feel like a reflection of the way that I do my job (or the strength of the community concept). The last is indicative of platform health.

Total members isn’t really even worth recording.

Pulling these stats is really manual at the moment, partly because the dashboarding & analytics tools that I have all return different numbers.

(Jessica Malnik) #5

I had a previous boss tell me that if I’m spending more than 2 hours a week on reporting, something is broken. It really forced me to simplify and hone in on the 3-4 key metrics that really matter. It is stuck with me ever since. Do you and @richard_millington find it useful to spend so much time manually pulling data?

(Sarah Hawk) #6

I agree with your boss! This takes me half an hour per month.

(Richard Millington) #7

I think it really depends on what your goal is (and how much time you spend pulling metrics).

If you’re making a major strategic decision about the future of the community, then you really can’t spend enough time pulling together data. You don’t want to save time here and pay the much bigger cost further down the line. If you want to know where to allocate your time to get the best results, then making sure your basing that decision on good data is going to be pretty critical too.

But usually metrics are something that gets passed on without knowing why they’re collected or what people do with them. In which case you really want to spend as little time on them as possible.

So my first question would be, what did you do with yours?

Aside, I’d be happy to outsource metrics to a virtual assistant if it became too much of a problem.

(Bas van Leeuwen) #8

Spend the least amount of time on reporting, spend as much time as you can on analysing…

One is make-work, that is required to keep your job and allow your boss to show your worth to his boss. The other allows you to increase your worth by becoming better at your job.

(Jessica Malnik) #9

Love this!