Back to Blog
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Member Profiles: Get to know your community

Product
June 6, 2022
Nick Johnson
Product Marketing Manager
Member Profiles: Get to know your community
Welcome to The Observatory, the community newsletter from Orbit.

Each week we go down rabbit holes so you don't have to. We share tactics, trends and valuable resources we've observed in the world of community building.
‍

💫  Subscribe to The Observatory

Members are one of the essential building blocks of your community. Without members, you don't have a community. Every member has unique interests, quirks, and needs, that’s what makes your community such a vibrant and exciting place to learn. Members also have different motivations for joining your events and engaging with other members. Maybe they want to learn more about your product, up-level their career, or are just curious people.

As a community professional, building relationships with and fostering relationships between your members increases the lifetime commitment of members in your community. Observing and keeping track of these relationships is hard work—to build a genuine connection you have to keep track of members' likes and dislikes, topics of interest, and more.

Member profiles help you manage relationships with—and between—your community members.

Here’s how it works

Log into Orbit and select Members from the left-hand menu. If you’ve already connected an integration like Twitter or LinkedIn, you’ll notice some members have already been created. Select a member profile to explore.

‍

Screenshot of member profile in Orbit workspace with numbers labeling the sections

Anatomy of a Member Profile

1️⃣ Member Bio

Quickly understand the essence of each member. You can find a short description of who they are, what they do, and what they’re interested in complete with social media accounts, email addresses, tags, love and reach scores, and company information.

💡Tip: Use Advanced Profile Enrichment to enhance the member profiles with all associated accounts.

2️⃣ Recent Activities Summary

View all the latest activities at a glance. Recent Activities summarizes the last 90 days of activities by activity type so it’s easy to see where the member is most active. This is helpful for knowing where to reach out to members and to help nudge them to other community platforms or forums the member might find helpful.

3️⃣ Activities

Understand how members engage in your community. The activities section gives you the most detail on how and where the member has contributed to community discussions and topics. You can view platforms, actions, and associated links right in each activity. This data is organized in chronological order so the newest activities from a member will appear at the top.

4️⃣ Activity Hotspots

Meet your members wherever they are. Activity Hotspots provide an overview of the platforms and channels each member is most active in so you know where to target your member outreach.

5️⃣ Member Activity by Source

Know when and where a member interacts with your community. Member Activity by Source shows where members participate with your community the most by platform month-over-month. The visual representation makes it easy to track changes in activity to quickly discover patterns that help you improve engagement strategy and messaging.

6️⃣ Member Notes

Never forget important conversation details by adding notes to member profiles. Record meeting notes, save key context about a person or a project and even store product feedback—right in the profile. Notes will appear in the member’s timeline as well as in the Activity feed so you can easily share context with others in your workspace. As a bonus, notes are indexed for searching, meaning it’s easy to uncover details and insights later.

7️⃣ Details

Get a holistic, quantitative view of each member. Details dives deep into member data points including the date a member joined the community, total number of activities completed since joining, and the number of days since the member’s last activity. You can even add an address to send swag, calculate how long they've been active, and view the most recent activity types.

8️⃣ Add activity

Unable to capture an activity via integration? No problem. You can manually add activities and weight them for those one-off activities like in-person events, speaking on a community panel, or meeting up for a coffee chat with a member.

Orbit Tip: View a tutorial on manually adding a member activity.

The Orbit Model

Under each member bio, you will find love and commitment scores. Love and commitment are essential to the Orbit Model. They're used to calculate community gravity.

Love scores in Orbit

Love is the measure of each member's level of involvement in the community. Every time a member activity is added, it impacts the member’s love score. Factors that impact love are presence and commitment. Presence is a measure of a member's pattern of activity as a function of the frequency and recency of activities.

Commitment is a measure of a member's depth of involvement and level of leadership.

If a member has a high love score, they will likely be receptive to calls to action and contributions. If a love score is low - it may indicate they need a little extra nudge and encouragement from the community.

Learn more about Love at orbitmodel.com/love.

Reach scores in Orbit

Reach is a measure of a member's sphere of influence and their degree of visibility and connectedness. High-reach members maintain a wide network of active relationships and help move information throughout the community. Whereas love is based on what a member does and how often, reach is concerned with who the member does activities with. The most connected members have the highest reach.

Reach is a measure of a community member’s sphere of influence, inside and outside the community taking reputation, credibility, and degree of connectedness into account. Factors that impact reach include direct and indirect interactions.

A direct interaction is one where two members speak directly to each other. This includes at-mentions and conversations on chat platforms, forums, and social media. Direct interactions create the most connection strength.

An indirect interaction is one where two members were in the same place at the same time, but without conversing with each other. Indirect interactions create less connection strength than direct ones.

Individuals with high reach will attract others to join them - so engaging these members in a strategic way can help others find and join your community and grow it.

Learn more about Reach at orbitmodel.com/reach.

Need help?

If you need a little extra help navigating your workspace, don’t hesitate to drop a question in our Discord server, attend a community event, or reach out to us directly.

We also have great resources on our blog, community page, and knowledge base page to help you get started.

💫  Orbit is Hiring Engineers in US/EMEA

Orbit helps grow and measure thousands of communities like Kubernetes and CircleCI. We're a remote-first company with a product-driven, empathetic engineering team that enjoys the occasional space pun! Check out our careers page for open opportunities.
‍

Related Articles