Measuring the community impact of company programs

Measuring the impact of various projects is important, even when they’re not specifically community team projects. In this video, we explore the real-world ramifications of Orbit’s recent Gravity Magazine launch.

In exploring the data, we’ll set up a custom dashboard to use in tracking the community health of members coming into our community via Gravity magazine. The dashboard measures the following impacts:

• Members who signed up for Gravity by Orbit Level
• Gravity member activities in the community
• Which Discord channels have active Gravity members

By tracking these impacts, we get a longer understanding of how this initiative has helped and grown our community.

In order to track these initiatives, we’ll be using a few features of Orbit to make our lives easier.

• Member Tags: We’ll use member tags to keep track of which community members have requested Gravity
• Reports: We’ll create a custom dashboard in the Reports section of our workflow to house multiple reports
• Report Filtering: We’ll create a filter based on the member tag and activity types
• Data Grouping: We’ll group our charts by various aspects to see the overall and granular impact this initiative had.

Transcript

All right. So here at Orbit, we just launched our first ever print magazine. Yeah. Don't adjust your speakers. Print is still alive. You heard it here first. Honestly, it's a great little publication. You can still sign up for it to get a copy over at orbit.love/gravity. It's pretty rad, but I wanted to see the effects that this had on our community and keep track of it in the longterm.

Creating a dashboard

So let's take a look at how I set that up in our orbit workspace. So here's the orbit workspace. I'm going to go over to the report section and I want to create a dashboard. So click the new button on dashboards and create a new dashboard here. We're going to call this gravity tracking and I can share this with the entire workspace.

I'll keep it personal for now. So I'm gonna submit that, continue editing this chart. And as you can see, this is just a generic members chart that comes up. What I want to do first is see. The orbit levels of the various folks that signed up for gravity. Now, when you go to the gravity website and you scroll down and you say, you want one of the print additions, it's going to take you to a form.

Anyone that fills out this form is going to a, have an activity tracked inside of our orbit workspace, but also have a tag added to their mail. Profile that tag is just gravity. So I can actually filter my report based on that member tag. So set up a member tag, I'll do a search for gravity. We love tags and orbits.

So you can see, we actually have quite a few people who have that gravity tag. I'm going to apply that I'm going to change our presentation from line lines, find by like bar. And I want to look at this on a weekly basis. So you can see there's a huge spike here. That's when we actually launched on product hunt and I want to see this grouped by the orbit level.

And I like to go, instead of grouped, I want to see it stacked gives me kind of a nice view of everything here. And you can see there is a lot of orbit level four and a decent chunk of three and two. So this was actually a really great outreach program. It wasn't necessarily for everyone in our orbits, this is actually pulling in a lot of new.

So I'm going to go ahead and actually we need to do one more filter here. I'm gonna change it from all to members. I don't care about our internal members doing this. So in doing that, you can see we've got our tag of gravity. I'm going to add this to that dashboard, but we'll call this gravity requests by orbit level and we'll add it to our gravity tracking dashboard.

Adding charts

There it is. It's the first chart on this gravity tracking dashboard. I'm going to add a new chart now that I know that it was a great outreach program. I want to see what these members do in various other avenues of our workspace. So I'm going to create a new chart we're to analyze this time, the activities instead of the members, and I'm going to keep it at weekly and I like bar view overall.

So we're going to go ahead and do those same filters again. I want this only members I want to check on only gravity members. So we'll do that same membership. Gravity apply that. And now we can see how many activities those numbers are doing. I'm going to go ahead and do a relative time period and say maybe the last 45 days, something like that.

This will be a little bit too far back for the overall view, but going forward, this will be a great view as well. And then I want to group our activities by the activity. And you can choose how many of these you want to see, I'm gonna go ahead and limit it to 10 for the moment. And again, I like stacked view so we can see that a lot of people requested gravity.

We can see that there are some of those same people that were active in our discord. I subscribed to our newsletter so we can start correlating data around this very important long-term. So we'll give this a name. We'll say this is. Gravity member activity types. And we're going to add this to our dashboard as well.

And I want to track one more thing with this too. We have a home base for our community. It's our discord community. And I want to see how these members are also being active in our discourse. They're not being super active as we saw from the last chart, but I want to see a more granular picture of what they're doing.

So we're going to add a new. Um, uh, view the activities again, and we need to have that same filter set. So members that had the tag of gravity. And also have the activity type of any of our discord activities. So either joining or one of these various messaging replies or threads, again, I like to view these as a bar chart, and now I want to break these activities down, not just by their activity type, but by their actions.

Property. And you can see when I choose activity property, I get this new menu here, which is the activity property menu. And I can select any of the activity properties by default or discord integration is going to come through with the category. If we had multiple servers, it would be the server as well as the channel category.

We'll give you a nice high level by one, a little bit more in depth. So I'm going to go by the discord channel. Again, I can limit it to the top 10. If you have a whole bunch of activity, maybe you go up to 25 or 50 and then I've got it in stacked mode again. And we can see a little bit of activity happening around the time of the gravity release.

So they came in, we had some people on the help channel. We also had quite a bit in our event channel, which is makes sense. Cause. We hosted a couple events in our discord and they were active in there as well, but we can see going forward, you can see people talking about the orbit model. We can see people talking in the help channel.

Oh, this is an interesting week. The week of April 4th, we see community chat show and tell this was actually a very granularly active week. So a lot of insights that we can get out of this going forward, seeing how our gravity users are doing it. We'll name this chart, discord channel. Say gravity members, discord channels, save that in.

Monitoring community impact of initiatives

And now we have a fully featured dashboard for what I currently care about in our gravity members. Going forward with this dashboard, I can get the overall understanding of the impact. The overall understanding of the health by this impact is also helpful. For the community team to go back and report in the community impact of this initiative, back to the project team, back to the company, and really see was this a great community initiative as well as a great company initiative.