Online Communities: What Does Good Look Like?

Community Management is a relatively mature discipline, rising to prominence within large enterprises as a key outcome from Knowledge Management programs of the 1990s. Today, communities - both internal and external - are part of everyday operations. Substantial resources have been built to support community managers e.g. see The Community Roundtable and CMX. There are mature processes for assessing what good looks like for communities.   

Mature communities will have a digital space to facilitate formal community activities. These communities are typically formally recognised by the organisation, often being resourced with full-time staff. These formally recognised communities, however, will be significantly outnumbered by the informal communities that typically form online. While they will often be encouraged by the executive, the extent to which they are supported is usually limited to the provision of an online platform like Yammer or Workplace from Facebook. These communities are our focus.  

In our 2020 Microsoft Teams benchmarking report we acknowledged many of the teams formed were in fact behaving like communities. Since the arrival of COVID-19 and Work From Home (WFH) we have noticed the proportion of Teams being operated as Communities has dropped in favour of self-directed teams. We are also seeing a growing appreciation for the role of Yammer as the community tool in the M365 suite, substantially on the back of the launch of the “New Yammer”, placing community at the centre of its enterprise mission.  

Online Community Best Practices

As part of our 2020 Microsoft Teams benchmarking report, we undertook a comprehensive review of the literation to identify the key best practice dimensions for teams, communities and forums. We then looked to match the key SWOOP indicators to these dimensions to create a comprehensive measure of “what good looks like” for online communities. In particular, we focused on “communities of practice”; those communities focused on building competence and capabilities within enterprises. There is rich literature on communities of practice, dating back to Etienne Wenger’s original text which launched the term in the 1990s. Long-term knowledge management guru and prolific author Stan Garfield has summarised the industry advice that has guided our communities best practice measurement model for online communities of practice. We have now updated the community measures for application in our sixth global Yammer benchmarking report. Here is a preview of what this will look like: 

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT How members engage with each other online
Aligned SWOOP Measure	Goal	Commentary
Activity/Member	Maximise	Spread of activity across membership
%Reciprocity	Maximise	Reciprocity is a proxy for trust
%Response Rate	Maximise	Membership responsiveness to other members
%Participation	Maximise	Active/passive member ratio
COMMUNITY SIZE Research indicates there is an optimal size for communities
Aligned SWOOP Measure	Goal	Commentary
Community Membership	> 100, 200 optimal	Active/passive member ratio
VOLUNTEERISM Volunteered time and resources seen as a key performance indicator
Aligned SWOOP Measure	Goal	Commentary
Influencer Risk	Minimise	Non-reliance on a selected few members infers higher levels of volunteering
Reciprocity	Maximise	Volunteers are more likely to reciprocate with each other
PEOPLE FOCUS A people (rather than position) focus is seen as a key performance indicator
Aligned SWOOP Measure	Goal	Commentary
%Responders + %Engagers	Maximise	The SWOOP Responder persona is seen as the ‘care-giver’; the Engager is a people connector.
HEALTHY Q&A Asking for help and receiving it is seen as a key performance indicator
Aligned SWOOP Measure	Goal	Commentary
%Curiosity	Maximise	Curiosity measures posts framed as questions.
%Reply Response Rate	Maximise	Written replies are evidence of help provided
CROSS-FORMAL ORGANISATION Communities are seen as a cross formal lines of business structure
Aligned SWOOP Measure	Goal	Commentary
Cross formal lines membership spread	Maximise	Measures interactions that bridge formal lines of business
Multi-group participation (Diversity)	Maximise	The degree to which members participate in multiple communities suggests cross organisation experience
% Public Messages	Maximise	Open communities are more likely cross-organisational

SWOOP Community Collaboration Score 

As a preview for our 2020 Yammer benchmarking report, we have analysed some 3,000+ communities from 46 organisations using our new SWOOP Community Collaboration Score. The score is created by using percentiles to provide a 10-point scale for each SWOOP measure. The exception is the Community size measure, where a 10-point distribution is made with 200 members as the optimal size. For the Influencer Risk measure, the maximum points are allocated to the lowest raw score.  

Weightings are provided for each factor to come up with the weighted sum composite score. Over time we anticipate these weighting and factors to be finessed as we validate our scoring, not unlike other well-known indices like a consumer price index or stock market index: 

The above community collaboration score is 5.05. It is rated in the fifth decile (ninth decile is top 10%), from our sample of 3,000+ communities benchmarked over a six month period. The collaboration scores ranged from a high of 7.6 to a low of 1.9.  

The polar chart provides a quick view of areas for improvement e.g. %Response Rate, Community Size (too small or too large). 

Using the SWOOP Community Collaboration Score 

The Community Roundtable has a valued survey-based community health instrument largely used by formal communities, more so than the informal communities that exist on Yammer. That said, that does not preclude their use if the Yammer community leaders are so inclined. The SWOOP Community Collaboration assessment is a complementary assessment for online communities using their actual online interactions. For formal communities of practice, it can be used as a cross check on whether their collaboration behaviours reflect what their policies and governance measures aim to achieve. For informal communities struggling to lift their collaboration score, the Community Roundtable assessment may uncover structural or organisational limitations that might need to be addressed.  

Over the coming 12 months, SWOOP will be re-engineering our products to lead the end user through an Insight->Direction->Data experience. Rather than being immediately exposed to the full breadth of the SWOOP dashboard, we will be leading with a key insight narrative. This will be followed by an enhanced “nudge” function, before the user is offered the opportunity to explore the full dashboard. The SWOOP Community Collaboration Score will play an important role in this movement. Insights and nudges will be automatically drawn from the summarised data it makes available.