Guides
Get all your community data in one place
Introduction
In this playbook, we’ll show you how to identify the data sources you need and connect them so that you can start getting value from Orbit. This is a great starting ground to learning how can help you achieve your community goals. Let’s begin!
Pre-requisites
- You need an Orbit workspace. Go here to create one. We have a step-by-step walkthrough if you get stuck: Create an Orbit workspace
- Make sure you’re a workspace owner since only owners can connect integrations to the workspace. Go to the Collaborators tab to see your role and ask an owner to change your role if needed.
Steps
1) Know your community goals
Your community goal will directly affect how you use Orbit. It dictates the data sources you need to connect, the member groups you will monitor, and the actions you want to take. For now, choose just one goal to use with Orbit.
Some common goals that people come into Orbit include:
- Growing your community
- Engaging your community (via events, ambassador programs, etc)
- Selling to your community
- Showing community impact to your company
2) Determine what data you need to bring into Orbit
Orbit’s power comes from its ability to aggregate all your community data into one place.
However, depending on your community goal, connecting more data isn’t always better. More data can also mean more noise.
Rather than connect every single community related data source, let’s figure out which data sources are imperative to your chosen community goal. Orbit tracks members in your community and the activities they do - so what members and activities do you care about, and where does this data currently live?
Here’s a chart that you can use to determine the data sources you need.
Community goal | Data you might want to track | Data sources to connect |
Any community goal | who is sending messages in your product’s community | |
Growing your community | who is mentioning your company/community | |
Engaging your community | who is registering for your events
who are your current ambassadors | Events platforms like:
Meetup, Bevy, Eventbrite, Luma, Hopin
Manual data entry platforms like:
Google Sheets, Airtable |
Selling to your community | Who has signed up for your product
Who is already a customer | Product data platforms like:
Segment
CRM platforms like:
Hubspot, Salesforce |
Write down the data sources you will need for your community goal and hang on to it. You’ll need it in Step 3.
3) Connect your integrations
Now that you’ve selected the data sources you need to connect in Orbit, let’s connect them. Some are easier to connect than others, so let’s set up the easiest integrations first. This way you can see how Orbit works with some of your community data before investing time into additional integrations.
To see which integrations we directly support, go to the Integrations tab in your Orbit workspace.
Click on the integration you need and follow the steps in the app. After you connect an integration, your community data will be populated into your workspace.
If you run into any trouble, we also have integration setup docs for each platform here: https://orbit.love/docs/integrations
What if you need a data integration that is not listed in the app? Don’t worry! There are many alternate ways to integrate more data. Check out the following guide to explore using our no-code solutions, CSV imports, and Orbit API:
Next steps
Now that you’ve connected a few key data sources, it’s time to learn more about the members in your community. If you would like to know how you can gain insights about your members check out this playbook:
If you feel ready to start acting on these members, check out these playbooks for examples of what you can do: