Vanilla Forums Blog

Launching a new community is an exciting yet nervous time. You have done the hard work and have a wonderfully customized platform that is primed for your target audience to join. Senior stakeholders have great expectations of what the community can provide in potential ROI.

Business leaders aren’t just accountable for determining the processes that add real value to an organization; they must also communicate that value to their internal and external stakeholders. There are only a few people in your company, or among your partners, who care about things like the ROI of your community; most people are more interested in your ability to demonstrate its value as a tool to improve business performance.

A business’ community is one of its greatest strengths. Yet community managers still find themselves struggling to articulate its value in the empirical terms demanded by the C-suite.

There are a number of reasons for this. The traditional ROI formula (as a %) is: (Profit/Total Investment)*100 = ROI. Easy enough. But understanding how to define ‘profit’ and ‘total investment’ is more difficult than it seems.

For starters, a community manager’s work is focused on creating human connections. This  places the realm of community management entirely outside the realm of empirical measurement. The web of individuals, tools and individual communications that CMs create would seem to be so complicated and emotional as to defy any useful data-driven classification.

Community management is both the oldest and newest responsibility at any modern company.

Keeping on top of your community of customers and engaging with them are one of the oldest tactics there is. At the same time, innovations in community management are changing the ways in which companies need to undertake this task at light speed.

As an API provider, you need to ask yourself: what’s the most important thing to your customers – or more accurately – your technical partners? Chances are you’re thinking along the lines of product benefits and features or ease of use. While these factors are indeed extremely important, the number one priority for most developers is the availability of support.