Guides
Monitor engagement for a group of members
Introduction
In this guide, you’ll learn how to use Orbit to easily monitor activity in your community. It works for checking in on specific subsets (like your ambassadors or key prospects) or for your entire community.
After you complete this guide you’ll find that it’s much faster and easier for you to check on groups of members, identify anomalies, and act promptly.
In this guide, we’ll cover how to:
- Create your member subset
- Create an engagement report for a subset of members
- Set up Slack notifications for when members do something of interest.
Let’s begin!
Step 1: Create your member subset
First, we should mark the subset of members you’d like to monitor. We’ll do this by using tags.
To create your member group, go to the Members tab and use the available filters to narrow down your group. For more info on how all the filter work, check out this doc:
Then click Select All (the top leftmost) → Select all members with current filters → Apply Tag.
Step 2: Create an Engagement Report
Engagement reports are a great way to quickly check on a group of members. It’s a more passive way of monitoring your community - you likely only need to open your reports every week or month to check for activity spikes or observe overall trends.
Create a quick report
To create an quick engagement report, do the following:
- From the Orbit sidebar, click Reports → Pulse. The Pulse report shows you engagement across your whole community. You can use this to quickly see which platforms members are engaging on, and what top activities are being completed.
- Use the Filters button in the top right to filter for your subset of members. Since you used a tag for your member group, just filter by Member tag
- Now you have a report for your member group! If you are good with this report, copy the URL, save it somewhere, and use it to access this report quickly in the future.
If you want to customize this report — remove some charts, choose a different chart order, edit the chart display — you’ll need to create a Custom Dashboard.
Create a custom report
To build a custom dashboard off the of the Pulse report, do the following:
- Find the chart you’d like to copy. Click Expand → Open in Chart Builder.
- If you’d like to modify this chart in any way, now’s your chance (For example: you could use the Filters to only filter for activities in Discord and Twitter). This KB doc will walk you through the different chart building tools. When you are done, press Save Chart.
- Add a name to your chart. Then click Select Dashboard → Create new dashboard. Enter a new dashboard name and choose whether you want the dashboard to be private or shared across your workspace. Then press Save. You should then be brought to your newly created dashboard.
- Repeat steps 1-3 for all other charts that you want to copy into your custom dashboard
- Once you’ve added all the charts you want, you can rearrange the order of the charts by pressing the […] button in the top right corner of a chart and then selecting Move Higher or Move Lower.
- Share your completed report with other teammates by pressing the Share button in the top right corner of your custom report.
Step 2a: Use your engagement report to spark action
If you notice a particularly interesting spike in a chart, you can use the Members icon in the top right corner of that chart to find out who was part of that spike. Just use the filters to narrow down the chart’s timeframe, and press the Members button to view the list. After you get that info, you can then choose who to act on and what to do.
Step 3: Get notified via Slack about your members
If you’d also like a more detailed, active form of monitoring, custom Slack notifications is the way to go. It’s a great way to catch things as they happen and jump into the action. We’ll now walk through how to set that up.
- First, we will connect Orbit with the Slack workspace you want to use to receive Orbit notifications. From your Orbit sidebar, click Settings → Productivity Tools → Connect Slack. Then walk through the Slack integration.
- You’ll then be brought to a page that says “Manage Slack App”. This is where we’ll choose which channel to send Orbit notifications to. Click the checkbox to enable Slack notifications. Press Save.
- Next, we’ll set up your custom notification. Go to sidebar Settings → Slack Notifications → New Notification. We’ll name this Notification “[Member Group Name] Notification”.
- Set up your trigger. Choose “a new activity is added to a member”. To narrow down which members you’ll be notified about, fill in the blank for “Associated Member has these tags” and type in your group’s tag.
- Set up your action. Choose which channel you want to send this notification to.
- When you’re done, press Create Notification.
If you’d only like to be notified about specific activities that this group does (i.e. Discord thread replies), you can do that here as well.
You’re done! To test if it’s working, you can look up your own name in your workspace, add a the group’s tag name to your own profile, and try out an activity that you are tracking. Then check if you receive a Slack notification afterwards.
(Note: Orbit does not track all activities in real-time, go to Settings → Integrations and click on an integration to see what its import frequency is)
Step 3a) Use Slack Notifications to spark action
Each day, you can skim the notifications sent to your Slack channel. If you see something interesting, like a good conversation happening, or someone making a negative comment, you can click directly from inside Slack to learn more about the activity and take action on it.
And that’s it! Now you have the basic pieces in place to monitor groups of members you care about ✅
- Monitor engagement for a group of members
- Introduction
- Step 1: Create your member subset
- Step 2: Create an Engagement Report
- Create a quick report
- Create a custom report
- Step 2a: Use your engagement report to spark action
- Step 3: Get notified via Slack about your members
- Step 3a) Use Slack Notifications to spark action