Forrester research have created a Community Benchmarking Diagnostic tool. It was launched in August in a paper called the “Community Benchmarking Metrics - What To Expect For The Health Of Your Community” by Melissa Parrish who is one of my favorite Forrester analysts, and an expert on how to start up and run social communities.

Community managers just might love this!

I like this tool, especially useful for community managers to find out how they are managing their communities, especially when they are starting up. I would have found this particularly useful for me last year when I had to lead the management of a new community for my employer, Philips.

I strongly believe that communities grow through phases. The model for community maturity that I always use is from Telligent, and is called the “Telligent maturity model for communities and groups”. I knew we had reached the second stage when we started to get spammed on the weekends! This is just one of many signs that I believe signal when a community has become “Established”.

The community benchmarking diagnostic tool

The community benchmarking diagnostic tool first asks you to calculate the average number of community members that you can expect to join. Then the diagnostic tool can be used to see if you could expect below average, average, or above average results for the health of your community. It asks several questions, to which the response is yes or no, and here are just some of those questions:

• Do you have a definition for “active” member, and measuring against that definition?
• Do you have a promotional budget?
• Are you using social media and email to promote the community?
• Do you have a persistent link to the community in the main navigation of the website?
• Do you have at least 1 full-time resource dedicated to maintaining and managing the community?
• Do you have a set membership goals and are you measuring them?

Based on the results, it tells you if you are likely to fall short, meet, or outperform one or more of the average community health measures. The diagnostic tool was based on Forrester’s June 2011 North American Community Benchmarking Online Survey.

“A guideline, not a rulebook”

The full research paper can be found here. It can be used to get a feel for what you might expect to encounter after setting up and starting a community, but it is a guideline, not a rulebook. There are many factors that all have to work together to ensure community success, but this is a good tool to use, especially if you have nothing else to guide you other than member counts and page views.

When you are starting, it is way too early to try and answer questions like “What is the impact on our business results, in terms of new customers acquired and their value to our enterprise?” Do not ask these questions in the first phase of the Telligent maturity model, just use the community benchmarking diagnostic tool to get yourself up and running first, with all the other activities and actions that are a given to create great Social media success with communities.